Craziest NBN quotes?

[Renai LeMayKeymaster]

Hi everyone,

FYI I’m putting together an article for later this week looking at the top ten craziest NBN quotes over the past several years (think Alan Jones’ “lasers” statement, for example).

WIth this in mind, I just wanted to invite people’s submissions — what are the craziest things you can remember people publicly saying about the NBN? I’ve got my own extensive list — and there are some corkers — but I thought I would also punt this to the forum to see if there were some I had forgotten :)

Renai

[quinkParticipant]

I left two in the glossary:

http://delimiter.com.au/forums/topic/nbn-glossary/

I suggest just checking the comments on Andrew Bolt’s blog whenever an NBN post comes up. Enough material there to last you a few good weeks.

[quinkParticipant]

Just random comments from random people, no public figures:

From Malcolm’s Facebook

> My broad band has been going like crap ever since they have started putting NBN in ? Its like its over taking the signals or something . My Net work was fine ! Now its crap ?????

> We don’t want the unnecessary expense of the NBN .

> I know I have gone Wi-Fi & Love it

> Considering Australian politicians only do things to please voters short term to get them through the next election this will Definatly fail… We build a 2 lane road where Japan would build a 4 lane road, we have traffic for hours, they have no traffic, we invest in a system dependent on cables running every where, they invest in wireless… Now we can’t illigally download tv series, and the Japanese have all the anime cartoons on the net in the palm of their hands.

> By the time the NBN is rolled out, it will be outdated. Since the pollies are always comparing us to America, their speeds will still be faster than an NBN. Technology that uses existing TV arials to deliver internet which is available, would be faster than the NBN and cheaper so why won’t any of you do it? In America, you pay a connection fee only with unlimited downloads. Assume everyone has crap internet compared to the rest of the world and go from there.

From Bolt’s blog’s comments:

> I’ll try to make this easy to understand. Kevin07 went to the polls promising national broadband for $4.7billion. Got that ? Note the decimal point. Within a year of being elected Conroy and Rudd jumped on plane to somewhere, and during the trip decided to spend $53 billion (when announced). Notice the difference ? Now some arithmetic : How many times does 4.7 go into 53 ? Answer : 11.27, or in percentage terms a 1027% increase in cost.

> So NBN is about Labor spending 46 billion to destroy a News Limited monopoly? Wow. Should Labor not have to disclose this intension? And isn’t havng a fully taxpayer funded socialist card-carrying ABC not enough to get it’s message across?

> 11 Billion is only 29.73% of 37 Billion. To put it another way, the cost is now 1.297 times budget. It appears that Conroy has done a simple 5/4 roundoff to bring 1.297 back to 1.0. So simple, and back on budget. Sorry Senator Conroy. The voting public is not that dumb. At least we can count – especially when it is our money you are splashing around.

> The NBN is about hard wiring our dwellings and infrastructure so that government can, via smart meters, control our energy use and communications. This is not workable with intrinsically anarchic wireless connections since one would then require wireless smart meters and wireless controlled appliances. Much easier to use the existing wired electrical system to control appliances via a hard wired NBN. It’s described in the internet under Technocracy, Smart Meters etc – all under the umbrella term of sustainable resource usuage. But no one seems to notice because the changes are so incremental and slow – the boiling a frog method that the Fabians are so skilled at.

And this from the AFR:

> saying he has a fully costed policy document ready to go

When he didn’t. Malcolm said that it was an elaboration from Paul Smith on this.

> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXw-JvIvXTo&feature=plcp&t=35s

“it will indeed be a project for our grandchildren except that they’ll enjoy it, most of them, in their very old age”

Everything to do with this, and especially the comments blaming it on the NBN:

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/smart-meters-incompatible-with-national-broadband-network/story-fn7x8me2-1226159605185

> http://www.nbn.gov.au/case-study/connecting-australia-winter-edition/

Parts of this “newspaper”.

> First of all, $43 billion is a ridiculous sum of money to spend on anything. It is even crazier when the country finds itself coming off a $22 billion surplus and staring down the barrel of $100 billion of debt. I don’t think this is at all right now about need, but is entirely about our ability to cover the cost of such a thing. [...] Why not get back into surplus, in 2012 and revisit this whole situation then? [...] This is the exact same mess Labor created with the Insulation Program and the Building the Education Revolution — lots of spend, very poor controls, not enough safeguards and very poor oversight [...] This is simply because the carriers know that the best way to solve the last mile issue is with better wireless technology and that’s where the R&D is going. [...] Digging up trenches and running fibre across telephone poles is a 20th Century method of solving a 21st Century issue.

It’s not stupid or inane and contains some good points. But it’s at least in part probably wrong in the long run.

http://delimiter.com.au/2010/08/10/do-we-even-need-a-fibre-national-broadband-network/

Or this:

> Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey has claimed the National Broadband Network could cost as much as $100 billion to build

Why not $200 billion?

> Yet I’m coming to think it will cost at least 200 billion dollars and it turns out Brisbane has a private broadband network underway which will come in years ahead of the NBN, possibly rendering it redundant. (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/14/3038663.htm)

http://pcpowerplay.com.au/forums/archive/index.php/t-178099.html?s=95a1606cfc180a759b682c98e4224450

Or this tweet from Malcolm from September 24th:

Malcolm Turnbull ‏@TurnbullMalcolm: VDSL in Germany offering better value for money than fibre says DT http://fastnetnews.com/dslprime/42-d/4847-20-million-vectored-dsl-lines-for-germany-first-look …

Which says: $300/home. 100 megabits downstream, “up to 40 upstream” for many. The savings are enormous. $300/home to get to 100 megabits is DT’s estimate for upgrading to Advanced DSL. [VDSL]

When contrasted with this:

http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/blogs/malcolms-blog/sacre-bleu-french-fttp-costs-compared-to-australia/

“Note France Telecom state they are investing $2 billion euro (AU$2.37 billion) to pass 10 million French households by 2015 (available online here). That is the equivalent of $237 per household [for FTTH] and delivered in a timeframe of four years. So compared to France Telecom, the NBN looks even more like a snail.”

Which can only mean one thing. Malcolm Turnbull an unambiguously stated that FTTH can be cheaper than FTTN for incumbent telcos deploying it in two different countries and that they are comparable and sizable enough (ten million/twenty million) to be cited without qualification.

[quinkParticipant]

Also, the entirety of this interview: http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/media/transcripts/transcript-2gb-radio-22-oct-2012/

[quinkParticipant]

Or this thing:

> Why is all this so important? Because for all of Senator Conroy’s rhetoric about eliminating the tyranny of distance, the biggest barrier to Australians taking up broadband is its cost.

http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/blogs/the-true-cost-of-the-nbn/

Where MT was confusing causation with correlation. Apparently $30 a month for Internet (and likely phone before too long, as the UNI-V port is free wholesale) is the biggest barrier for affordability. Even though Newstart is near enough $1000 a month, and he’s saying $30 is too much for people earning less than $40,000, which includes a group of people for whom the NBN would cost less than 1% of their total income.

And then there was Carlos Slim:

> Mr Slim, speaking at the Forbes Global CEO Conference in Sydney today, said: “It’s too much money. “It is not necessary to invest so much money, because technology is changing all the time,” he said. Mr Slim said $7000 a home to connect about six million homes was too expensive. And he criticised the reliance of the project on fibre, emphasising the need for wireless services.

Or this from MT in 2009:

http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/blogs/malcolms-blog/some-thoughts-on-the-smh-and-the-nbn/

> The Herald should not let the Government off the hook here so lightly. The NBN is not a public good, like a school or hospital, provided (essentially) free of charge to the public. It is a commercial business which will charge for its services. The Government has held it out as being so commercial that the private sector will want to invest in it and in due course buy it from the Government at a price that will recoup the Government’s investment.

Ignoring the fact that schools aren’t entirely free, the government funds private schools, and we’re paying for Medicare or private services in public hospitals, paying for ambulances through electricity bills or even paying for private hospitals in part through taxes.

[quinkParticipant]

But my favourite are the statements from Warren Truss that led to these replies:

> Mr Truss told Channel Ten’s Meet The Press program on Sunday that the Prime Minister said “suburbs of large provincial cities like Townsville, Rockhampton and Mackay are now only going to get wireless”.[i]

> “Today, 213 homes and businesses in the Wide Bay electorate are connected to fast, affordable, and reliable broadband through the NBN Interim Satellite Service.”

Or this one:

> The Coalition would approach broadband in a smart, businesslike manner which would use a mix of technologies and encourage competition back into the communications market. [...] This approach will cost about half of what the government is currently borrowing to fund the NBN.

http://nolamarino.com.au/better-broadband-sooner-for-the-south-west-under-the-coalition/

Which amounts to about a billion for Malcolm Turnbull’s plan.

Anyway, I’m done, I think I’ve posted enough now.

[Hubert CumberdaleParticipant]

Love those conspiracy theory ones from Bolt’s blog.

For me I dont think anything will top the “lazer beams” from Alan Jones though, it epitomizes just how ill-informed those opposing the NBN can be.

[Hubert CumberdaleParticipant]

I think we have a new winner:

The National Broadband Network is not up and running. They have connected six and a half thousand households in three years under the National Broadband Network, and not one household or school has been connected at 100 megabits per second

:-)

[quinkParticipant]

Robert Kenny and Charles Kenny:

http://www.ict-industry-reports.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/2010-Overselling-Fibre-Robert-Kenny-US-Centre-Global-Devt-Nov-2010.pdf

Much of it, but these stand out:

> Across the world as a whole, there is a weak negative relationship between fixed broadband rollout in 2001 and GDP growth 2001-2006 – a result that holds using 2003 rollout and 2003-2008 growth.

> Of course, high-definition TV and the ability to stream multiple programs to the household at once might add to the case for fiber, but even here there are limits. Firstly, the bandwidth of the human eye is only 9 Mbps.

> Worrying about where you rank in the league tables [of broadband] only matters if it is a good thing to be at the top.

> I don’t benefit from your (little-exercised) ability to watch the Olympics in high-def while the kids are streaming Toy Story III in the basement.

[quinkParticipant]

Oh, look, The Australian published a letter from a reader as an article. It’s not so much crazy as it’s just a report on the state of where we are. Who needs journalism when you can just print opinion, then have confirmation bias come back the next day from one of your readers:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/nbn-is-no-joke/story-fn558imw-1226507800446

> [It] is trying to sell a product nobody wants or needs.

> We deserve to know that the billions of our money being spent on the NBN are not going down the gurgler.

I’d link to more crazy ones, but they’re getting repetitive. Best I can advise in terms of getting the best return for time spent, as I already have, is to just visit Bolt’s blog.

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