Ask any senior citizen about the Australian telephone system after the end of the second world war and you will probably get a tirade of very unhappy memories. At that time the only option was a fixed line cable connecting your home to the nearest telephone exchange and all this was totally in the hands of the Postmaster General's Department.- a government department.
Inertia and gobbledegook wrapped in an impenetrable cocoon of bureaucracy. The wait for a new phone connection could go on for months - if you were lucky - and in many cases it involved wiring new suburbs and constructing exchanges and that would be years into the future. It was often compared with telephone services in Canada which was in private enterprise hands - and phone connections happened in just hours.
Today those fixed line connections are fast being replaced by the miracle of the Smartphone and our computers are being connected to what are advertised as incredible data speeds through the National Broadband Network. This NBN was a national project that was deemed essential to achieving a modern Australia - and the projected cost was in billions of dollars.
It would be fair to say that the NBN has so far been a national disappointment. Vastly over budget and miles behind schedule and those with fibre connection in place report abysmal data speeds. The NBN Ombudsman's complaint line is simply choked with irate users reporting poor service and lack of information.
When the NBN was first proposed many industry insiders had doubts. It involved laying fibre cable to make all connections and some people envisaged wireless services making this cable redundant. Perhaps that fear is now becoming reality. The NBN is protesting loudly that it will need protection from the coming 5G phone technology if it is ever going to return a profit. Even the present 4G is milking business away from the NBN.
That magic word " subsidy " is being invoked as the answer. At present the NBN collects about $43 a month from the service providers who sell the product to individual households. In order to recover costs and make a profit it would need to raise this to $52 - and obviously that means bigger bills for NBN users.
The danger waiting in the wings is the fact that the government owns the NBN and it has been constructed with oodles of public money, and governments have the ability to protect their investments by way of legislation. One way to do that would be to place restrictions on the coming 5G network to ensure that it does not compete unfavourably with the NBN.
We would then have the worst of both worlds. A clunky, shambolic NBN that was delivering less than an optimum service and charging a premium because it was protected from viable competition, and restrictions on the technology that the new generation of Smartphones are able to deliver because of advances in world improvements banned in Australia.
Communication is at the apex of todays business world. The only answer is a hands off approach to let efficiency and innovation decide the outcome.
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