I think roads are a good metaphor for the national broadband network.

I travel mostly by public transport yet of course my taxes pay for roads that are part of the community’s general infrastructure. When I do drive, I don’t need a freeway that allows me to go above 100 kph and I certainly don’t need a road that can carry vehicles above 5 tons and 5 meters high. But if we are going to have roads it is much more efficient to have 1 road system that handles all traffic even if it is over engineered for my needs. Sure, I’m paying a bit more for it, but it would be crazy to build a separate road system for Porsches and trucks.

On the “natural monopoly” point, I do note that Conroy indicated the government sees the NBN as infrastructure” not business, and therefore doesn’t necessarily expect to see a direct financial return on investment. We don’t have competing roads between cities. We have have highway, and then people develop competing services on that road — buses, freight, private cars — all of whom have equal and open access.

@ Sausage Maker: You’ve hit upon one of the things that annoys me: People who don’t have a need for a high-speed data network themselves failing to imagine that others might have such a need. Or, to extend the point, that there are uses which might emerge once the network is in place and everyone’s had a chance to play with it.

Correction: The business name of the smaller ISP quoted should be “Information Service Providers”. “Independent Service Providers” is their old name.

I’ve did contracting for a small company and used VPN to connect to their offices but had to be careful of much data I was using so as not to go over their puny download limit even though my usage was very small. Its things like this that hurt and hamper businesses of all sorts in this country and that pain is passed onto consumers.

The drooling masses think the internet is 256/64 Kbit connections and using crap like twitter (replace the tw with sh) or watching stupid videos of of babies biting fingers on youtube. But for those of us who use the internet for work Australia’s internet is pathetic. A few ISP’s have put their own DSLAM’s into a few large, select exchanges while the cost of Telstra’s ADSL2+ products are obscene. And for those us whose local exchange does not have a non-Telstra DSLAM in it (ie 98% of the country) we’re screwed. $90 on average for 25GB download per month? Ridiculous. Of course there is always cable. Oh, wait. That is Telstra too.

But I must be misunderstanding something. Isn’t wireless growing apace and mightn’t wireless compete with cable - whether copper or optic - with further technological innovation and a few cycles of Moore’s law? Or is the national broadband network a combination of wireless and the optical fibre that is commonly mentioned? I fear I may need a Crikey clarifier on this.

@Phillip Musumeci: James Packer is also well cashed up to counter any moves by Kerry Stokes. That said, Packer does seem more interested in casinos and other investments than the media. Telstra may or may not negotiate a deal good enough — that is, sufficiently acceptable to the government — for them to retain Foxtel. If Foxtel comes into play, well… game on!

@ westral: I’m with Bernard Keane on this one. That Telstra might one day be forced to split is hardly a secret. People buy shares in a company and play the investment game, for better or for worse. Yes, Telstra shares dropped yesterday but today they’ve recovered somewhat as people get their heads around this thing. What happens a year or three down the track when Telstra is finally restructured is anyone’s guess.

Management at Telstra has stubbornly resisted anything that may have undermined its monopoly, while doing everything possible to entrench that monopoly and defy the regulators.

They have reaped what they have sown.

And why is this c0mment not the big news this morning? At least it would force a clarification from Conroy’s office.