The NBN was one of the key issues of the recent federal election and ended up swaying two out of three of the independents to give Labor power. Since then, it’s become a somewhat tedious battle of the ridiculous between Conroy and Turnbull. But given that it’s going to be the backbone of our information economy for decades to come, we should be paying attention to what’s happening with its development. So welcome to the new weekly wrap-up of “What happened with the NBN this week?”
Perhaps the biggest NBN story of the week was this Crikey article by Bernard Keane laying the smackdown on The Australian‘s completely made-up story of Korean-Japanese IT billionaire Masayoshi Son criticising the NBN. Instead of claiming the NBN is a “waste” and “stupid”, it turns out the Masayoshi Son was referring to the concept of keeping a copper network in the ground. You can watch the video of the comment here, but make sure you check out the Crikey piece too.
After their click-whoring headline about the NBN costing up to $400 per room to install, Georgina Robinson at the SMH had a great article answering some of the common questions about the NBN. Especially interesting is Conroy’s statement that he can’t ram the filter down our throats at the fibre level – it’s an ISP level thing.
David Braue over at ZDNet had a great article entitled “Abbott ‘no Bill Gates’… but is Turnbull?” arguing against Malcolm Turnbull’s stance that 12Mbps is good enough for most Australians. It’s an insightful and well-argued piece that gets to the crux of the problems with the Liberal solution: “Turnbull is arguing for the status quo: woeful upload speeds that limit home and business users’ participation in emerging online economies”
The CSIRO has developed a new wireless tech that’s capable of bringing 50Mbps speeds to the 4 per cent of Aussies who won’t be able to get fibre with the NBN, according to Stuart Corner at ITWire. With the amount of spectrum it takes to broadcast a single analogue TV channel, they have demonstrated 12Mbps symmetrical throughput, and they claim that with the spectrum offered by four analogue channels they’d be able to offer 50Mbps. Of course, it’s not going to happen until the analogue spectrum is available after the 2013 switch-off, and even then it’s not guaranteed to be used for wireless broadband.
And finally, apparently the NBN is on a hiring spree, with an average of three new jobs hitting their job store every day, according to Hamish Barwick at Computerworld.