It is becoming increasingly apparent that the "business plan" of the NBN is based on very optimistic assumptions. Last week it became apparent that the 70% take up of the NBN packages on which it based its revenue stream was unlikely, and now there is serious doubt on its estimate of the cost of building the network as the price of labour is almost certain to rise.

"NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley said recent natural disasters and the low unemployment rate posed a threat to the NBN Co business plan to build the wholesale network for $35.9 billion.......we will obviously go back to the shareholder -- the government -- and say this is what the position is, how would you like us to proceed."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/nbn-raises-labour-concerns/story-fn59niix-1226010402211

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/nbn-raises-labour-concerns/story-fn59niix-1226010402211

Too early to rejoice, Shadow Minister.

They have the police on their side, and so the easy alternative business-plan: to force us to buy into the NBN at gun-point.

5 10 15? How many such threads , the price has been as high as 45 billion in some, even the Australian say 36 billion.
I will be pilloried again SM,you will infer I do have understanding .
You will claim understanding and balance you do not have.
You,while completely unable to find fault with your team will say I am biased to the point of bigotry.
I leave you to it, this thread is about propaganda not debate.
About point scoring not investigating.
Go for it, Sir tell my why I am wrong.
Regards

So belly, how much will you be paying for your NBN?

What options, plans etc, will be available to you?

What contract terms will be available to you?

Will you have to upgrade your computer to take advantage of the NBN?

I don't think this is about 'point scoring' at all.

It's about whether or not we should take the gamble to spend another 35 to 40 billion$ THAT WE DON'T HAVE.

The question that most ordinary Australians have, myself included, is, what's in it for me.

How much will I have to pay to have NBN at my house?

Will I have to pay this 'unknown amount' on top of what I already pay for my Internet services?

I say, look at the Clem 7 tunnel.

Clem 7 is a dud!

It cost billions, turned investors dollars in to cents all because the people refuse to pay a toll simply to use roads that should have been funded by the billions that QLD was GIFTED from mining royalties during the huge boom.

Now I ask you, did the government adopt similar consultancy practices as clem 7 to determine the viability of the NBN?

I have never been asked whether or not I want NBN. If I was, the first question I would ask is, how much will it cost?

Well, guess what, NOBODY KNOWS!

You see, politicians have no concept of what money buys. They don't pay phone bills, I doubt they would even know what plans are out there.

To them, it's just another 20 bucks a week. Well guess what, an increasing number of Aussies simply don't have another 20 bucks a week.

The NBN is a unknown quantity which makes it a huge gamble and one that we simply can't afford.

I am not saying no to the NBN, I am simply saying that we need a lot more info before we can go commiting that amount of money onto our overdraft account.

Dear Belly,

What Rehctub wrote is only half the story.
It is not only about money.

Of course nobody likes to pay for something they do not want to have, but the NBN is bad even if it was free, or even if we somehow received money for it instead of having to pay for it. It is social-engineering at its worst and it leads us in the wrong direction, away from the simple real-life further into virtual-land.

As I mentioned in other 5 10 15 threads (and you never replied to this offer), because you live out there in the bush and have a very poor phone and internet connection, I am happy for my tax-money to fund you a super-duper-deluxe-first-class connection, so long as you spare us, who live in cities and suburbs (that is 91% of Australians) and already have all that we need in terms of communication, that pain of losing our existing connections that we are happy with and having to be connected to the fibre-monster.

Belly,

Your sad, old bleating of the same message is getting tired.

The NBN business plan (the sanitized version that has been released) offers a 7% return by 2025 predicated on:

1) - 70% customer uptake to generate the required revenue,
2) - Installation costs based on real costs over a number of years adjusted for inflation.

What is clear from recent publications is that the uptake is very likely not to reach 70% and thus the revenues will be lower than projected, and that the huge labour requirement is likely to raise costs higher than expected.

In summary, you have a huge project with a starting low rate of return that is likely to have reduced income and higher costs.

Even blind Freddy can see that this project has the same chance of success as the Clem 7, the Lane Cove tunnel, and the Cross city tunnel, which were all bankrupt within a year.

The cost for broadband in Australia is high mainly because of the distances between population centres. I saw one report that had the phone system remained in government hands we would have had optic fibre nearly everywhere by now.

We can continue to lag behind countries like Korea if enough people make a fuss but remember, Korea is now progressing towards offering every citizen a download rate of 1GB per second.

I am close enough to an exchange to have ADSL-2 but I would love something faster than an average download rate of about 300KB.

Foyle said;
The cost for broadband in Australia is high mainly because of the distances between population centres.

Sorry Foyle you are wrong. It is an assumption many people make because
they have not thought out the detail of the installation.
There is already fibre running all over the country, to towns and cities.
One fibre, plus a backup in some cases.
The cause of the cost is the installation of the fibre from the
exchange in each town up and down every street and into every house,
into every shop, into every office,into every factory into every
hospital everywhere in that town, and repeat in every town and every
village and do it all again in every street in every city.
I think $43 billion would be a bargain.

The minister for the NBN said the other day regarding wireless, arggh.
Lets begin with a definition wireless is the system used for internet
around your house etc.

Radio is what they will use to get to farms etc and what Telstra will
install probably using vacated analogue TV channels.
Unwired has a Wimax system like that.
Range can be to the horizon plus a bit, perhaps 100km.

The minister for the NBN said that radio gets slower the further you
are from the base station.
I had to stop and think about that.
I have come to the conclusion he does not have a clue what he is talking about.
At 300,000 km per second (light speed) the difference if you double
the distance you would need an oscilloscope to see it.

I send data daily to and from the UK by radio and at 30,000 km
I have to increase the wait for a packet acknowledgement from 0.5 sec
to 1.0 second approx.
Signals travel on fibre perhaps a little slower than the speed of
light, I am not sure of that. If it is so, the minister's argument
against radio should really be used against fibre.

Beware the B artists, especially if they are politicians.

Foyle said;
I am close enough to an exchange to have ADSL-2 but I would love
something faster than an average download rate of about 300KB.

Well I am also on ADSL+2 and my peak speed from the exchange 2 kms
away is 10 Mbits.
You may be confusing what you see when you download from a web site
somewhere with what your speed is between you and the exchange.
No site I can connect to will get data to me faster than 10 Mbits.
Many sites are very busy, or have slow computers and a slow service to
the internet and to make matters even worse they may be overseas
somewhere.
By the time you trundle though all those servers along the
way all those points add their little delays into what you see.

There are a number of speed checking sites around, but where are
they ? They might be several network switches away from you.
Try downloading something from your ISP's server.
Try different things as they might have several servers running.

A lot of people will be disappointed with the NBN because they will
not get the 100Mbit or 12 Mbit speeds we plebs expect.
They don't let on that will be the speed to the NBN's server.
The speed to your ISP may be something else.

Foyle;
I should have asked for you not to confuse bit rate with data speed.
You are probably getting about 10 Mbit per second rate but data does
not arrive at that sort of speed because delays occur in flow all along
thae way. So it arrives in bursts of 10 Mbit packets of data with a
varying delay between packets.

Hope all that helps as I had to make the assumption you are an
average internet user. If not it might help someone else.
Appologies if it was an incorrect assumption.

This is looking like another promise that Juliar will have to back flip on.

"This is looking like another promise that Juliar will have to back flip on"

Certainly so, but perhaps we should wait for the next natural disaster in order to allow her to save face. I have no interest in shaming anyone, only in getting that dreadful NBN off our backs.

fiber optic is used for doing remote operations here. If you don't want it in QLD, why don't you say so. Qld is 20 years behind the rest of AU as it is.

Fibre is already in Qld. Been there for yonks.
It is Telstra fibre though, so I suppose it will be torn out.

I reckon that Juliar will try and keep the fantasy going until the next election promising a system a decade in the future that she knows is impossible.

Given her back flip on just about every promise, and her handling of the BER she is the Bernard Madoff of the political world.