Diver dan; your comment about the copper wire is also a furphy. A lot of the copper wire in this country is reaching the end of its life. The farmer you are concerned about would be getting very poor internet connection that far from the exchange. An example of copper wire letting the consumer down can be found on this link. http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s3012933.htm This is happening in the middle of Sydney, not only the bush,

A poor article.

You don't understand your subject Mirko.

High speed data transfer is more than just "browsing the internet"... it can/will revolutionise many aspects of business, health & education.

If you don't understand this you really shouldn't be writing articles like this.

Poor form

Ozandy,Niarbe and Snake

Trends for employment are away from IT technology not towards it. Trends for rural infrastructure investment are diminishing, not increasing, as evidenced by increasing truck transport and closed rail circuits. Trends also apply to family farm ownership rolling over to big business enterprises and corporations.

Closure of rural Hospitals compensated with emergency air transport, and a continual desperation for the maintenance of student numbers to prevent the further downgrading and the threat of closure to local public schools. Long ago the telecoms shrank from Rural Australia under the guise of new technology as the door slammed on jobs and quality of service.

With few exceptions, country towns have become wasting backwaters of desperation where long ago population drift to cities became a stampede as the charge led by local youth diminished populations to a core of old people and a remnant struggling service sector.

Amalgamations of councils further nailed down the coffin lid of rural communities as contraction to regional centres attracted what little political power once thriving local rural communities possessed.

Now the same regional centres are becoming, in their turn, more desperate for investment as youth unemployment escalates and hospital facilities evaporate to large coastal cities such as Newcastle in NSW and Brisbane in QLD. Centres where 90% of the population live within 30klm of the coast and where, measured with the yardstick of equity, these services should be.

In view of the facts of life for rural Australia, the argument becomes absurd, if not obscene, for the proposed NBN to draw away resources from populated areas of Australia to the questionable benefit of a very minor and increasingly insignificant portion of the population in rural Australia.

The investment of the NBN into country Australia defies all economic logic of market forces. It is inequitable to the major population areas of this great country Australia, and will simply fail from lack of interest and available resources for its high maintenance requirements in the future

diver dan So does providing roads if we use your argument.

Diver dan, you are right about the inequitable distribution in Oz, you just have it all wrong.

Our disgusting city conglomerates are of no use, & produce nothing but consumption.

Equity demands that our wealth be spent in the areas where it is produced, & that is not in the centers of government.

You are right about dying population, but that is because farming is private enterprise, not public. If governments ran farms we would have a couple of dozen "workers" on each square mile property. After all it used to take 8 people to run that 640 acre farm in the old days. Government now employs 10 people for each job to be done, that would now require 80 on that farm.

Today we find the area farmed has gone up to around 1500 acres per worker, ten times what it was. Just as well government had nothing to do with it.

I would be well pleased for you to keep your NBN in your rotten city, provided you caught & stored your own water, & generated your own electricity, with in your city. We don't need your transferred pollution, or your dams or pipelines.

WE also see no reason for the wealth generated by our exports to find it's way into your NBN

While I disagree with Mirko about the benefits of broadband, I do agree that there are many other things the government could spend our money on that would deliver greater benefits.

NBN is also redistributing costs and benefits in a way that will probably make the community as a whole worse off.

If it costs, say, $20,000 to supply fast broadband by fibreoptic cable to a remote farm, but the service is worth only $10,000 to the farmer, then we do not improve efficiency by forcing the taxpayer to stump up the additional $10,000 (or indeed the full $20,000).

The same is true in the city. If people and businesses want fast broadband enough, they’ll pay for it. If enough people are willing to pay, someone will supply it. If customers don’t want it enough to cover its costs, we’re better off without it.