John Linton
One of the problems in reading the communications industry media diligently is that you notice, over the past few years, the drift from useful factual reporting to less factual reporting to simply reporting fantasy and speculation to eventually reporting the fantasy and speculation reported by other 'reporters'. This isn't true of the major communications media in the US or the EU which, for the most part, remains pretty solidly reporting facts and figures and competent pieces on technologies and implementations. I don't make these statements as disparagements of any Australian communications reporter in particular but just as a general observation of my own reading habits which have progressively reduced in terms of the number of Australian media outlets I either subscribe to or book mark on my own personal daily reading list.
To illustrate this view - think back over the past year and try and estimate how many hundreds of thousands of words have been written in the Australian media about the 'NBN2' and then estimate the same for theĀ 'Internet Filter'. Depending on the view you reach you will come up with a number that almost certainly exceeds several hundreds of thousands and may well far exceed that. My own estimate is North of 8,000,000 for the 'NBN2' and far in excess of 5,000,000 for the 'Internet Filter'. Now try and think of any other topic of either Australian or World concern that has had anything like those two subjects media coverage including the totally worthless topics of the shenanigans of trivial 'personalities' apologies for lives that get saturation comment for a day or a week or two .
Get the point? Nothing has changed since the announcement yet so much has been written about......... absolutely nothing.
Neither the 'NBN2' nor the 'Internet filter' have any reality (at least as yet) and there is really nothing to say about either of those topics other than to note them as bad political 'stunts' that, on the one hand (the filter) is demonstrably ridiculous and on the other hand (the 'NBN2') is demonstrably non-viable. As neither concepts can be made to work in my opinion (but by all means assume that as stated by the current government they actually could) you have a de facto reason to report briefly on the topic by stating the known facts and then waiting for something to happen. There is really nothing to say about the amount of money being spent on either stunt. If governments wasting money on useless projects the nonsense of funding the 100s of billions of dollars building 12 "Australian designed" submarines or 24 or whatever the number is F22s or.......but the list is endless. All governments uselessly waste tax payers money to enrich themselves and always have done - it's called democracy where the privileged few get rich by ensuring the overwhelming majority remain poorer than they otherwise would.
It might well be true that this scenario is true for all Australian general media, or even for all 'specialised media' - I wouldn't know because, apart from a few pages of the Financial Review and a sporadic viewing of the on line Business section of the SMH - I seldom if ever read/listen to/watch Australian media and haven't done for several decades - the triviality and inaccuracy coupled with more often than not juvenile reporting associated with those forms of entertainment bores me rigid. It isn't true for the US and EU communications media that I use to provide information on current and new communications technology and its implementations.
Perhaps the multiplicity of Australian communications industry 'outlets' needs to be consolidated in to 2 or 3 competent 'agencies' and a recognition by such agencies that there just isn't any point in endlessly speculating on issues that haven't changed since yesterday's speculations?
Communications technologies just don't change daily.
PS: Our April recurrent billing run showed that, despite the problems in the ADSL2 market places, Exetel's growth hasn't really slowed with a 22% increase in recurrent revenue over April 2009 with a very strong growth in VoIP, mobile and SMS revenues. Our non-recurrent revenue (activation fees and other one off charges) in March was also up 28% compared to 2009. A pleasing start to the month.