Telecommunication
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Cutting back the NBN
- Spending $43 billion on a high speed broadband network is a waste of tax-payer funds when much higher priorities exist.
- Much of the funding could be re-directed to renewable energy projects & public transport improvements.
- $43 billion divided by 8 million Australian households is $5,000 per household - which may require monthly fees of over $200.
- No cost benefit analysis has been performed.
- Existing technologies such as ADSL2+ offer excellent download speeds sufficient for most purposes.
- Consumers are rapidly switching to wireless, making a fixed NBN useful to less and less people.
- There is no 'productivity' gain from having such a high speed network. Existing broadband is enough if it could be made available to more customers.
Improving the reliability, affordability and coverage
We believe Australia's telecommunication system should have two main components:
- The Network: A seamless and integrated communication backbone to which all consumers could connect. Components of the network may be provided by a wide range of businesses, government agencies and perhaps community organisations.
- The Retailers: Businesses that provide access to the network at competitive prices.
Example: A mobile phone purchased from 'Retailer A' may preference phone towers provided by 'Provider C' but if there was no service available in a particular area to a 'Provider C' tower the phone would roam onto whatever was available. In a national park this might be a national parks phone tower. In some regional areas community organisations may establish phone towers. Billing details would be sorted out in the background by 'Retailer A'.
This type of system provides a high degree of failover in the event of disasters and the maximum amount of coverage.
Regulations would need to ensure that charges for network components were kept within a reasonable range in more remote areas where competition was uneconomic.
Opposing internet censorship
- Censorship is a waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and will not make anyone safer.
- Censorship will do almost nothing to prevent the people who are wilfully making, trading, and accessing child sexual abuse material.
- The filter will not prevent children from accessing inappropriate material.
- The list of material to be banned includes much more than child sexual abuse material.
- Any determined user - including children - could bypass the censorship quickly using an anonymizer service, open proxy, or VPN connection.
- Only illegal material published on web sites could be targeted, completely missing other methods of distribution such as BitTorrent.
(Above text sourced from the No Clean Feed web site.)
No NBN.org
No NBN.org has been established to campaign against the unaffordable NBN proposal.
Wikipedia NBN Page
See the wikipedia NBN page for more details of the NBN proposal.
No Clean Feed
A web site opposed to internet censorship: No Clean Feed.
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