ATUG hangs up after 30 years
Veteran lobby organisation the Australian Telecommunications User Group (ATUG) is set to wind up after over 30 years of representing telecommunications customers.
Veteran lobby organisation the Australian Telecommunications User Group (ATUG) is set to wind up after over 30 years of representing telecommunications customers.
A number of Australia's most senior business and economics commentators have opened fire on Labor's flagship National Broadband Network (NBN) project, claiming that the NBN Co's corporate plan released on Monday was based on flawed assumptions and demonstrated the project would wind back competition in the telecommunications sector.
As Labor's fiscal policy comes to resemble the hatchet job long promised by the Coalition, is it right to leave the NBN untouched?
The launch of NBN's second satellite, which will provide the Australian population living in regional and remote areas with high-speed broadband, has been delayed due to poor weather.
Assuming that the NBN progresses as planned, ISPs need to plan their copper-loop investment strategies as they wind down their ADSL2+ services and shift to the NBN over the next decade. Yet, as a group of providers buys more DSLAMs and then clamours to be reimbursed for benefiting from the competitive market of the past 14 years, it's clear that the reign and importance of ADSL2+ is still not over.
We're spending over $1 billion per year just to convince hundreds of thousands of Australians to have unprotected sex — then spending several times as much to deal with the consequences. Tony Abbott considers this perfectly acceptable but won't allocate enough to give Australia a proper NBN. As they say in the classics, perhaps someone should ask him to Please Explain.
Malcolm Turnbull would have been quietly relieved to preside over the unveiling of Australia's first FttN NBN customers. But the launch did nothing to clarify questions around the government's relationship with Telstra, the competitive stance of the Coalition's NBN, and the nagging suspicion that Turnbull is digging himself into a deep, deep hole.
NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley this afternoon denied his revelation today that National Broadband Network speeds would go up to 1Gbps had anything to do with supporting Labor's election chances, in the face of a Coalition policy that would see his fledgling broadband company shut down.
The satellite connectivity issue was caused by a software upgrade, with NBN also certain that it will 'never' see capacity constrain speed across its service thanks to beam-management technology.
The Coalition has slammed Labor's credibility at every opportunity, arguing that it doesn't have the chops to build a project as large and complex as the NBN. But in this proud, selective, revisionist history, Tony Abbott seems to have forgotten one tiny little thing: his party already proved unable to manage telecoms, time and again, for 11 years. His promise to unshackle Telstra shows that the Coalition still hasn't learned.