Alan Jones Confuses Laser Beams With Fibre (UPDATED With Audio)

Alan Jones Confuses Laser Beams With Fibre (UPDATED With Audio)

Radio talkback king Alan Jones has always had a fairly liberal view of the world, but he clearly doesn’t have a clue about technology. Andrew Ramadge over at News has picked up that the opinionated personality jumped on the story of German researchers breaking the data transmission record as a way to trash the NBN, despite the fact they use the same technology.

Just to sum up briefly – German researchers transferred 26 Terabits of data a second over 50km using a single piece of optic fibre by transferring data over 325 separate colours (or wavelengths). Current fibre technology only transmits data over a handful of wavelengths, but in both cases, the actual fibre is exactly the same.

Alan Jones, however, picked up on the story and used it to claim that the NBN will be outdated before it’s even completed:

“Canberra wants us to believe that the technology we’re spending anything up to $60 billion on won’t be outdated by the time it’s rolled out.”

“Of course, they’re kidding. But it is government these days in Canberra, and they’re always kidding.”

While we’re still years away from seeing Terabit per second speeds over the NBN, the simple fact is that for it to happen, it will only require an upgrade at either end of the cable. The cable itself – which is the bulk of the expense of the NBN – is future proofed to be able to support the faster speeds.

But of course, that little fact is unlikely to sway Alan Jones’ opinion on the network…

UPDATE: Here’s the audio:

[News.com.au]


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