High-speed InterNOT
The OPEL has been given the government ‘fling out the back door‘, finally. So instead of the Australian public throwing nearly $1 billion at a company which kicks our collective asses with high broadband prices, instead we are now dedicated to throwing $4.7 billion of our hard-earned cash to a national broadband solution that is still full of conjecture and political promises. It could be a public FTTN (fibre to the node) network that invites competition and low prices, or it could be a national smoke-signal network since Telstra won’t sell us back the network the government decided, in its infinite wisdom, to flog off.
Now I’m not backing up OPEL (the Optus-Elders consortium) on this, since they received an extra $940-something million dollars from ‘crazy lady’ ex-Minister Helen Coonan, only a couple of months before the Liberals got given the public ‘fuck off’ call, and have given hardly any evidence that they deserve it. One of the stipulations of the grant was that the Optus-Elders consortium provide 90% coverage to highly-unserviced areas (a la, everywhere located outside an Australian capital city) and our new Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, has claimed that OPEL could only cough up around 78% coverage. I don’t know what school of business management the CEOs of those 2 companies went to, but shit, if someone threw nearly $1 billion of the taxpayers dosh at me and told me what needed to be done, I’d bloody well do it to the letter. Not for fear of what the government would do, but fear of what the public would do. To stuff up an endevour like this is like having a medicine ball thrown at your nuts. Your ego would be bruised forever.
So, our only alternative now is to wait and see what happens with the Labor Government’s $4.7 billion pledge to faster and more available broadband. Optus has a second chance, aligning with other Internet Service Providers like Internode and iiNet, arguably two very big players in the ISP community, but obviously, the main player hasn’t played ball with the rest of them, and that is Telstra. Saying ‘no’ to Optus for the first pledge is almost a tentative ‘yes’ to Telstra, but these next few months will be very interesting to say the least. If it’s Telstra selected, may God have mercy on us all.
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