Fiber lives on! How broadband decided Australia's election (1 Viewer)

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D.O.A.

We are Kings
Fiber lives on! How broadband decided Australia's election

Australia's plan to run fiber-optic cable to 93 percent of the country's homes and provide minimum 100Mbps speeds (the rest of the country will get 12Mbps, delivered by wireless and next-generation satellite) was always ambitious, but even its most enthusiastic backers never expected that a national broadband plan would actually determine the country's next prime minister. But that's exactly what just happened.

Australia has broken a two-and-a-half week deadlock resulting from its August 21 national elections. No party won an outright majority, and forming a coalition government proved tricky. Numerous issues were on the table, but one of the key differentiators between the parties was the future of the government-backed NBN Company—the entity that oversees construction and operation of the national broadband network.

The Labor Party and the Greens both saw broadband—specifically fiber optic broadband—as key to the country's future, and both pledged to support the AU$43 billion decade-long project. The center-right Liberal Party wanted to gut the entire project, cutting NBN and instead offering some cash to make DSL available to more people. With the hung parliament resulting from Australia's election, it became clear that the winning coalition would determine the future of the country's broadband network.

The deadlock was eventually broken by three independents. One broke for the Liberals. Another cast his vote with Labor. The third, Tony Windsor, is a rural MP who believes that broadband is the key issue in the election.

At a news conference today, Windsor said, "There’s an enormous opportunity for regional Australians to engage with the infrastructure of this century and to pass up that opportunity and miss the opportunity for millions of country Australians, I thought, was too good an opportunity to miss." His advisors have told him that "you do [broadband] once, you do it right, and you do it with fibre."

Because of that decision, Windsor threw his lot in with Labor yesterday, giving the party and its coalition partners a 76-74 majority in parliament and the power to form a new government.

The move means that the government will proceed with its plan to pay incumbent telephone company Telstra AU$11 billion to hand over most of its infrastructure and to dismantle its legacy copper network as fiber goes online. When the project is complete, NBN will not become an ISP; instead, it will administer a basic GPON-based, layer 2 bitstream service that will be wholesaled out to competitive ISPs. The (hoped-for) end result: numerous ISPs competing on price and services, all offering fiber speeds.

NBN, which has already begun work on its initial deployments, has been forced to pause some of its work in the post-election confusion. Today the company issued a statement welcoming "the clarity that today’s announcements provides in relation to the future of the NBN."

In Australia, fiber now goes forward, and in a big way.

Fiber lives on! How broadband decided Australia's election
 

D.O.A.

We are Kings
It will be interesting to see how they fuck this up, this is the labor party we're talking about after all, and it's good to see we (the taxpayers) are kicking 11 billion dollars over to a telecommunications company monopoly the previous opposition government privatized from a profitable state owned business. Sell the old one, build a new one. Give the old one more money so we can build the new one. Interesting concept much.

Thank fuck the mad monk never got in anyway or no one would be downloading porn here.

All of the people who are using their BlackBerries or their iPhones, Facebook, all of the people who are sitting in cafes and hotels rooms doing their work, they're all using wireless technology and we shouldn't assume that the only way of the future is high speed cable."

The future of australian internet is facebook status updates from a blackberry. awesome. And obviously this clown has never tried getting a wireless signal outside of a metropolitan area anywhere in australia.
 
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