Murdoch gunning for Australian NBN

clohamon

Rupert Murdoch has switched sides in the Australian election. He has instructed the editors of his newspapers (70% metropolitan market) to monster the Labour Party - here's why.

Murdoch is nothing if not pragmatic and if parties of the left in Britain or Australia can be of benefit to his grand plans, he will back them as he sees fit. Neither Labour nor Labor now backs these plans to his liking.

Although it has been denied, there is little doubt that Labor’s unrolling of the national broadband network – which will deliver a high-speed fibre internet connection to almost all Australian homes if Labor retains power – is seen as a direct threat to Murdoch’s Foxtel cable television company.

If, for instance, the national rugby league and Australian Rules football competitions can stream games directly to televisions through fibre, they can cut out the Foxtel middleman.

This isn’t about one election; it’s about billions of dollars and the future of broadcasting. Murdoch has retorted that the Liberals also have a broadband plan. Indeed they do, but it relies on century-old copper wire technology rather than fibre.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/australian-prime-minister-fights-back-as-murdoch-releases-the-hounds-1.1489698

excollier

Certain media moguls have no political scruples, and far too much influence on politics. It's just not right, but not uncommon - sadly.

clohamon

The Australian, owned by Rupert Murdoch, wants to have a debate about it, but includes the following in its opening argument.

Rapid progress of alternative technologies also should be considered in assessing the long-term value of the NBN. Imminent advances in 802.11ad WiFi will provide a theoretical maximum download speed of 7 gigabits per second. LTE Advanced mobile wireless technology is now available at 1Gbps. Such performances were once seen as improbable.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/editorials/a-highly-debatable-project/story-e6frg71x-1226694518915

We're not much better here. Editors in Independent Newspapers looked the other way while their proprietor was busy plundering our national communications network.

gctest50

http://delimiter.com.au/2012/05/01/worst-of-the-worst-photos-of-australias-copper-network/

watty

Sky of course only wants people here to have good enough connectivity to promote their Pay TV. Sky's Irish Broadband launch is just marketing, not one whit of infrastructure. Now we see that one of the main shareholders of Sky TV would actually deprive people of decent broadband in the hope of a maintaining Pay TV monopoly.

Such lies:
Mobile / LTE delivered Internet can't deliver broadband and those speeds are fantasy except in a Hotel Lobby or small open plan office. WiFi is only a local < 50m access to Broadband delivered by some other method. High speed 250Mbps WiFi won't even cover an entire home at much more than 20Mbps (shared between users, so with 5 users speed drops even more). 7BGbps is < 10m LOS!

Wireless (a shared narrow medium) can only compete with Fibre on 1 to Everyone Broadcast. Simple mathematics and physics dictate it can NEVER deliver 1:1 Unicast speeds even at 1km copper speeds never mind the x10 to x100 faster fibre speeds.

bealtine

even comedians are getting in on this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-6E5yX1E0U

Worth a watch too

bealtine

Found another one :

http://abbottsinternet.com.au/

clohamon

Australia's broadband policy is a flimsy, cynical House of Cards
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/06/australias_broadband_policy_is_a_house_of_cards/

Take that single decision point and multiply it across the number of touchpoints where the Australian economy requires high-speed broadband, and you can now see what’s becoming plain to all except the Prime Minister [former opposition communications spokesman, Malcolm Turnbull] - the failure of the NBN project has a material impact on the Australian economy. It’s not hypothetical, nor does it lie at some point in a distant, starry-eyed future. It’s real and it’s here now.

For years our Prime Minister spruiked mobile broadband as the solution - and Australian’s incredibly fast and pervasive 4G network might be the only positive outcome of the failure of the NBN. Our investment in mobile networks has given Australia one of the very best such networks in the world.

Yet - as could be seen when Telstra recently offered a ‘free day’ of mobile data in penance for another outage - these mobile networks can’t come close to handling the demand for broadband. Australians are also voting with their feet: it turns out that even with 4G pervasive, 98 per cent of downloads are done over the wire. Turns out that was another thoughtless thought bubble from a leader who seems to believe that because he says it, it must be true.