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March 26, 2007
What will be the Howard Government's response to the ALP's broadbanding the nation plan? There needs to be one as the Coalition have failed to deliver on fast broadband across the nation, and they need to counter the political momentum that Labor gained from its Future Fund announcement.
Bruce Petty
Using some of the Government's leftover Telstra shares to build a broadband network that is likely to boost productivity makes sense. A national broadband network is useful infrastructure and hardly economic vandalism.
Cutting a deal with Telstra is the Coalition's most obvious option. That would mean rolling back the regulatory regime and cutting back on competition. You can't say that a good regulatory regime that ensures competition is high on the Coalition's economic priorities can you? So what do they plan to do with regulation? Same question for for the ALP, as it says it will relax regulation. What does that mean?
Will either force Telstra to separate its infrastructure from its retail business? Will either be strong enough to do this? Telstra's track record indicates that it will fight to remain a monopoly.
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Of course with software radio coming along to destroy radio spectrum real estate laws and its attendant legalopolies (radio and tv stations) the question of broadband is no big deal except for the backbone links.
triangulation and meshnets do away with old style govvie networks sold off as Union of Equities to superannuants
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/12/18/gnu_radio/
http://comsec.com/software-radio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_radio
http://comsec.com/wiki?GnuRadioFaq
the debate reeks of a lack of a practical understanding of technology change, in which the actually deficit is caused by a lack of vision
used to be 'practicality' was the opposite of 'vision' but technology changes so fast now this is no longer true
by chasing the broadband issue, the labour party is simply reflecting day-to-day consumer interests
but as I am unemployable, what the hell do I know