John Linton
I have said that one of my main concerns about the ridiculous "NBN2' (and the NBN1 before it) is that it has killed off investment in current and new communications infrastructures. This has very definitely affected Exetel in that our two major ADSL2 carriers (Optus and AAPT) continue to run out of ports in their current DSLAMs and has brought to a screeching halt their investment in new DSLAMs - quite understandably but nevertheless it is very annoying to receive a growing number of ADSL2 applications that are rejected because of no capacity at the growing number of exchanges.
However it could be worse, and for some categories of small ISPs it undoubtedly is as evidenced in this brief article:
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/28207/127/1/1/
Now you may well make the case that these sorts of small companies only exist because of gigantic, and largely misguided, previous Federal Government subsidies via HIBIS and TBG but nevertheless Federal Governments have encouraged these companies to start up businesses to supply services in regional and rural Australia with some expectation that they would last longer than the initial handout - not be wiped out at a stroke of the pen making some arbitrary decision to use a different government funded hand out to use a different technology.
I am not any sort of fan of government handouts to create false 'economies' in the supply of any goods or services and I regard the billion or so dollars expended on these rural support schemes as among the worst ever dreamed up by an ACT bureaucracy. However the situation now becomes an even bigger subsidy to wipe out the previous subsidies except this subsidy will be in the hands of either a Labor bureaucracy or a Federal Government/Telstra kluge which makes it an even worse waste of money than previously. However it does starkly exemplify the hiatus in investment across a wide spectrum of activity in providing data services generally and to rural/regional Australia in particular.
For those of you who remember Krudd's initial lies about the NBN1, and apparently the majority of the Australian electorate has the memory capacity of a mentally retarded guppy suffering from Alzheimer's, you would remember that the lying swine promised that NBN1 should have already been delivered with the first users activated by December 2008! However, it appears that no-one remembers that and the collective idiocy that comprises the Australian electorate has 'moved on' and is now, or at least 70% of those demented sheep, are now content that a mythical Australia wide network (yet to be costed or even roughly described) will be available some time/many years in the future.
OK - lying politicians making every minute of their working day a personal crusade to try and ensure their snout firmly remains in the public trough for as long as possible is all that an Australian electorate deserves in this post-democracy era in which we now live so there is nothing that can be done. I wonder whether these same sheep who give Krudd a 70% approval rating will continue to do so as the NBN2 continually drifts in to an ever further away future and the ports for ADSL2 run out in all but Telstra exchanges and all of the small/tiny ISPs in rural and regional Australia cease operating? Of course no Labor politician gives a damn about rural Australia (they are never going to win a seat there) and the crazier elements of the National and Liberal parties (read Wilson Tuckey and Barnaby Joyce) are going to ensure that there is no cohesive and coherent voicing of reasoned opposition to the Krudd version of 21st century National Socialism.
So, the current 'NBN2' situation is slowly crippling small ISPs across the country and that situation will only get worse. Exetel is already being affected by at least one of our ADSL2 suppliers 'rationing' ADSL2 ports by reserving ports for its retail operations in a more and more obvious way which is very costly to Exetel (and we assume other small ISPs like us) - we go to all the expense of generating an application which is rejected but is subsequently fulfilled by the retail operation of the carrier - this is not going to produce a positive result for Exetel. The cited article shows how one segment of the ISP industry will be effectively wiped out before the metaphorical 'spade hits the top soil' to begin the delivery of the 'NBN2' illusion.
If you vote in self serving lying swine to 'run the country' (assuming that you actually believe that a bunch of uneducated union hacks and fellow travelers even have the intellectual capacity to spell "democracy") then the results are totally predictable - the destruction, once again, of all of the good things that made Australia such a pleasant place to live.
Krudd - the new Whitlam; but without even Whitlam's pretention to believe in making Australia a better place.