Invite to Forum on Labor’s Excuse for a Broadband Plan

Today in the mail I received an invite to a forum conducted by the Labor party, faking an interest in Central Coast broadband services.

They state that the new network would be 40 times faster than current speeds.. So, 40 times faster than 8Mbit (my current speed) is 320Mbit.

Sweet. Got my vote!

Not.

The real story is the definition of 40 times faster than current speeds is at least 12Mbit. That is very misleading. Essentially the gain in Labor spending taxpayer dollars on a network to reach 90% of the population is ‘at least a 4Mbit’ increase.

Wow. 4Mbit. Umm… I’m not a scientist in purchasing decisions but isn’t that a big waste of money, considering current infrastructure is already capable of speeds at up to 24Mbit, but Telstra are just being greedy and shaping it ?

Or.. how about the Generally Available speeds to everyone who can get ADSL2/2+ is in the ballpark of 10 – 15Mbit anyway?

For those interested (I was gonna go, but its at Erina, and its at 10am on a Thursday), the details are:
Thursday August 30, 10.00am at The Erina Room, Erina Fair (The Hive).

I did instead shoot them off an email stating how I would never want to see Conroy in Coonan’s job, he is about as informed on critical issues affecting telecommunications as we Australians are informed about Telstra’s good value backhaul prices (they don’t exist).

Whilst I would love to go and get some idea of what everyone else thinks of the Labor party’s attempt at getting broadband services right, I got better things to do.

Labor’s plan is to create a monopoly again to 98% of the population compares to the Howard government’s plan to duplicate a network with WiMAX and therefore promote competition in the backhaul arena, at the same time as opening up a new broadband delivery method and creating an entirely new layer for competitive services.

That’s the only real reason I am favouring Coonan over Labor, aside from the other fact that Conroy tried to pass off that ADSL2+ would be required to deliver 6Mbps, when in reality, many metro homes get at least 8 – 24Mbps (and therefore Conroy would be wasting money).

The Labor party did very little in the way of research on their plan, very little in the way of how it should be funded, very little remains known about how a competitive framework would be developed to deliver competition and therefore competitive prices to consumers.

There’s no point in having a government half owned infrastructure item if you have a ton of greedy pigs on the other side of it hungry for returns and the government conflicted again between getting those returns and delivering cheaper services.

Best do what you can to help investment in investment lacking areas, and do what you can to ensure where investment is going to occur that it is done correctly for the good of the industry as a whole, and not for the good of greedy pigs only. Every business needs to make a return, but of course every business can control the rate of return in favour of a healthier industry, or at the least, to protect their reputation from going the way of being recognised not as an Australian icon, but to the way of being recognised as a monopolistic pig, Telstra did that themselves.

The other thing with the Labor party proposal is I can’t be too sure how dirty they are getting with Telstra, if they are getting real close to them, I don’t wanna see it come to fruition, as I would much rather see Coonan’s plan go forth and see a regulated monopoly go forth.

Enjoy!