Hi Denis, I’m fully aware of the points you make and I’m disappointed you’d accuse me of being dishonest and imply there’s some sort of political agenda behind what I’m writing.

The point of the post is that people aren’t taking up fibre connection and I try to figure out why.

I agree with you about the overland telegraph and the historic resistance to infrastructure investment by Australian conservative governments which lasts to this day.

What I think disappoints me with the NBN debate in this country is how it has become completely politicised and even the mildest of observations that run against the ideologies of the pro or anti camps will get one labelled as being ‘dishonest’ and somehow aligned with one side or the other of politics.

I’m a big supporter of the National Broadband Network however I think there are valid criticisms of the costings and of the underwhelming performance to date of NBNCo.

Thanks for the comment, just keep the name calling down in future.

Isn’t it in the NBN/xx Corp agreement that when the time comes, they cut across ALL their client base to Fibre? So the argument about the take-up rate is a moot one.

Also directly comparing Australia’s Fibre take-up rate to that of regional US is slightly dishonest because most people do not realise that the US Telecomms/Broadband market is more than slightly different to ours, for many reasons. If the author does not know this he isn’t being honest with himself. If he does know this and is still pursuing the “similar” line of argument he is being dishonest with his Readers.

What I do find interesting is that prior to Federation all major advances were objected to by the same sections of Society. The Overland Telegraph in the 1870s which cut communications times from London to Melbourne and Sydney from 3 months to 6 hours was built in Australia despite tremendous opposition. Yet it was the same technology that greatly assisted the Federation of Australia.

Since Federation most major projects that move Australia forward have been initiated by Labor and massively opposed by either the then Conservative or since WWII the Liberal/Country/National Party group.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

I’ll check with Telstra PR and see what they say.