Regional Australia suffers from lack of broadband: Conroy

First it is 98%, then 97%, then 95%, and now it is 90%.

This is how regional Australia gets screwed ... gradually and consistently.

Why is Australia the most urbanised country in the world? Because everyone knows that regional Australia gets screwed so bad.

A lot more then 90% of houses are connected via copper..How did we ever afford to do that?? The most logical solution is to replace the copper with fibre with WiMAX and if need be satellite for the rest..

As for the idea of nextg. Obviously thought up by a person who does not rely on it for an internet connection...it is rubbish and getting worse as more and more people use it..No mobile phone network can be used for the NBN, all these networks run on limited spectrum of which there is no more available and phone calls have priority over data use.

Also the announcement was 12mbps to the last 10%, not 1mbps..1mbps is hardly even broadband these days...

"... not all properties are

"... not all properties are connected to the electricity grid even after 100 years... ." this may be the case, but there are many areas on the main electricity grid which have limited or no broadband availability. -These are NOT just in the 'middle of nowhere'.

While I was not expecting fibre to properties 100's of km's from anywhere. 90% is only what Telstra's (rejected) FTTN proposal was expected to serve, this will not even cover many towns with 5 000, or maybe even 10 000, people.

I now fail to see what's in it for the remaining 10%.
If all these areas are only to be served by wireless, then the government's rejection of OPEL, which would have brought ADSL2 to many of those areas looks like a complete joke, and this current proposal is a waste of 10's of Billions of dollars.

It is a pity Conroy does act as he speaks. I have written many letters to him over the last 2 years, urging him to act on releasing spectrum, Which he hasn't. There are ISP's ready and willing to deploy solutions, however Conroy and his merry bunch of control freaks will not release the necessary spectrum to enable such deployments to go ahead. If they ever do then the government will charge $2000 per year for the spectrum per site, and guess what that will do in some areas, answer make it unviable.

We also lodged an ABG application and stated that we planned on offering FTTH where we could, Wimax wireless where FTTH could not be rolled out, and satellite as a last resort. We also put a clause in the application that we reserved the right to upgrade any services to either Wimax or FTTH where customers were in agreement. All rollouts were to be deployed where customer demand required them. The minister was advised that this was rejected by DBCDE, because we did not provide the streets the cable would go down or the hills where new Wimax transmitters would be located. It is very difficult to specify such specific information when the ABG application timeline was in excess of 6 months and DBCDE changed the rules regarding the Optus 3G so called coverage areas, that DBCDE would not supply.

The minister new all this and failed to act, so I can only assume he doesn't want the best solutions to be deployed but rather is convinced that satellite is the way to go. In fact I had a meeting with him in June and he told me he was going to solve the problems in rural and regional Australia with his new generation satellites that he was going to deploy. He didn't mention it would take 5 years or more to deploy them and he didn't understand the latency issues at all.

We have all been mislead. The government is not interested in providing solutions, they just want to renationalise the telecommunications network. IN 10 or so years everybody will be screeming out for NBNco to have some competition like they did in the 1980's. Talk about back to the future.