Hi Mr O,

In January 2008, Optus was offering a mobile broadband deal of 400mb per month for $24-99. Currently you can get over sixty times the data with rollover, plus free calls and texts, for the same cost. In addition the service is faster and more reliable. I doubt that many would have foreseen such a change.

I hope you can find something satisfactory.

Cheers

Fester,

Thanks for that information.

We belong to the G20 and have an NBN that puts us on a level with the Third World.

In PNG you pay just over 185 AUD for 13GB/30days. That is data only, no calls. Not making excuses, but we are well above a third world standard, at least in the built up areas.

Cheers

SR,

I admire the selective amnesia of the left whingers. The constantly moving schedules and cost estimates. I remember when Labor had spent $27bn of the $47 original budget yet had only connected <5% of houses and comrade Conjob was making promises that were broken months later.

I also remember the huge wake up call that labor got when they realised the vast cost of replacing the last 40m of line to the houses as they dug through asbestos etc, that this final stretch would cost 10s of $bns more than they had estimated.

The FTTN option was the only option available that would enable the project to come in anywhere near the budget and timeline.

With respect to the payback, the assumption was that the majority of connections would be the higher speed connections however as predicted in a earlier OLO article the vast majority of people were perfectly happy with the slowest and cheapest 25Mb/s option.

Labor in one stroke had banned competition and built a monopoly that would keep Australia's data prices higher than just about every country in the OECD, the fact that wireless was rapidly gaining market share in the US and other countries should have been a wake up call to the moronic Labor dinosaurs.

New Zealand and other countries have better fibre penetrations mostly due to private companies doing it at a fraction of the cost that public companies could.

And before I start dredging up data that you can easily find yourself, perhaps you would justify your vacuous verbiage.

NBN stands for 'No Bloody Network'

Wow, Shadow, that's some pretty impressive spin you're engaged in there!

But you seem to have forgotten that a lot of the money spent was on things other than connections. These included planning and purchasing Telstra infrastructure. And yes, there were more problems with that Telstra infrastructure than anticipated (asbestos is indeed costly to deal with). So they delayed the massive expansion of the rollout until deciding how best to keep costs down.

As we've seen, the FTTN option did NOT allow the project to come in anywhere near the original budget or timeline. But hypothetically, even if it had achieved both, it would still have been incredibly stupid to waste so much money on building third rate infrastructure!

As for competition: building lots of parallel infrastructure is inefficient. The NBN was designed to have competition between contractors and between ISPs, but there is no great advantage in having competition between sets of cables. It was political sabotage, not lack of competition, that made us compare unfavourably with NZ.