The political football otherwise known as the National Broadband Network got kicked around a fair bit this week. Here’s what happened:
• Last week, we knew that the Telstra NBN shareholder vote wouldn’t meet the July 1 deadline. But that hasn’t swayed NBNCo. After the announcement from Telstra, NBNCo put out its own announcement saying that the delayed vote wouldn’t effect first release NBN sites. Yay for them! [ITWire]
• Everybody thinks the NBN will be all about downloading high definition porn, but the University of Melbourne has other ideas. This week they addressed the House of Reps with their in house IPTV solution, which would allow foreign students to study at Australian universities from the comfort of their own countries. It would also allow lazy or hungover students the same possibilities. Win. [Computerworld]
• The government has tweaked some of those anti-cherry picking laws that were upsetting telcos last week. Now they’ll be able to perform minor upgrades to current fibre networks without penalty. Seems to me that if someone’s already had the guts to rollout fibre, they should be able to do whatever the hell they want with it, but I don’t get to make decisions around here… [ARN]
• Independent senator Nick Xenephon likes to get up in there when it comes to political power plays. This week he’s working for the smaller ISPs fighting potential volume discounts in NBN legislation that would allow bigger players to access the NBN infrastructure at cheaper price to the small fry. Glad someone’s standing up for the little man [ITNews]
• The CSIRO showed of their Ngara wireless technology, and while they say it could be used using the spectrum NBNCo they bought from Austar, apparently it isn’t ideal for the technology. Bugger. [CIO]
• Unlimited plans could be dead before they really take off thanks to the NBN, apparently. The current wholesale prices announced seem to be a little bit too high for retailers to continue to offer unlimited data access. That doesn’t mean we’ll lose high capacity plans though… I guess it’ll be a matter of wait and see on this issue. [Smart Company]