Waveguide propagation theory aside.
I wasn't trying to start a serious discussion about the speed of light. I guess I see a lot of people that don't see that radio waves etc are also light, and get hung up on fibre optics being faster because they are light, which is as you know, totally irrelevant to the speed and reliability argument anyway. Hence my comment.
The current system doesn't work because Telstra have ownership of most of the infrastructure, copper, exchanges, towers, pits. I believe the new system will be better as 'the people' own the infrastructure and it is up to the ISP or providers to provide a service and compete with each other. I am quite happy as a tax payer to pay for maintenance of this system much the way my parents did with Telecom/Telstra infrastructure when it was gov owned.
They should have followed the Kiwis lead and broken Telstra in half when it was sold. Retail arm to the share holders and infrastructure owned by the tax payers.
I know what you mean about Telstra - absolute bullies. However, we were just starting to reach a situation where there were a number of players investing serious money on infrastructure in competition to Telstra, which would have given some serious competition across the entire vertical structure of the industry. That has now been destroyed, and we won't see it again for a minimum of 20 years.
The problem with the kiwi/us model is you still have a monopoly at the wholesale level, which means inefficiencies, higher prices, and poorer service at the wholesale level. No real impetus to upgrade the backbone, keep it online etc. You don't lose customers if you offer crap service. You don't work harder to reduce costs, because there is no payoff for it. Doesn't really matter if it's a government monopoly or commercial monopoly, same result. You'll end up with a highly unionised, bureaucratic, wasteful organisation (and I say that as a public service long term union member myself). Look at how efficiently the government has been spending money on indigenous housing.
The BER money spent in my town here left our local builders still out of work while the big boys came in from out of town. I have friends screwed over by the surprise policy changes in pink batts installation and green loans. I don't look forward to more of my taxes going down down the drain again.
I've probably said my piece more than enough. I respect that people have different opinions on this, but I have been involved in planning and design of city and state wide networks, both the technology and the finance. The desired outcomes of the NBN could be achieved so much more cheaply, in more complex ways, that would leave large buckets of money of schools, hospitals, roads etc, and still give people and businesses the opportunity to have high speed fibre broadband should they wish, probably at a cheaper price.
Cheerio all,
) trying to organise just this very thing. I don't know how much success they had.
