Such “humour” tends to distract and mislead. In a work crew, decisions on where to dig are rarely left to the machine operator. When the operator does their own thing, the consequences commonly end up as news reports.
Apologies, if you don’t see any humour.
How would any of us assign and manage labour for a task as hazardous, as difficult and complex as working on and around public roadways and access? For those who have experience of that work it’s a long reply. If not, wisdom assigns it to someone who has the knowledge and experience, and they employ the resources required. I doubt it makes that much difference if it is a Labour, Liberal or other flavour of government. Their approach has been the same in recent political history.
The notion that the problems with the FTTN are easily fixed by
Resourcing labour is not a concern, given how much has already been spent on the NBN to date. There are a large number of Ex NBN contractors with experience of in ground work and cabling. Most are now out of work, or about to be. As are many from the traditional construction industries who are familiar with the task.
What might be more important,
- An acceptance by the Federal Govt not all have been delivered equal outcomes.
- A commitment by Govt to remedy.
- Agreement on the remedy.
- Prioritisation of what gets fixed and by when.
- An implementation plan and time line.
- A funding commitment.
The detailed planning and execution, physical doing offers less of a challenge.
P.S.
My two pennies worth. NBN upgrades would provide the greatest immediate benefit if commenced with regional and rural Australia. IE Those with the worst outcomes. In doing so moving as many customers as reasonable off FW and Satellite. In effect freeing and decongesting the FW and Satellite services to serve those more difficult and expensive to upgrade. Even the original NBN design recognised up to 5% would need to be served by Satellite and FW.
The debacle of the FTTN has many difficulties working around services clogged streets. It deserves a proper assessment to determine the best replacement strategy. It may be most effective to directly turn every FTTN service off, one node at a time, rip out the old copper, upgrade the pits etc as needed and install the fibre as new using the existing network of conduits. No need to dig up streets, lay new conduit, bore under roads or erect redundant nodes? The price, for those to benefit, living off a mobile for a while.
When I started with the public service in 2002 I was advised that it was a government requirement for all residents across Australia to receive the same quality of services, especially from my agency. The result was the services had to be designed to suit the lowest denominator of infrastructure for delivery (internet, points of presence, etc) across the land. An unintended outcome of that mandate was that our web site was severely handicapped as it had to serve those with basic dial up to the same level as those having ADSL, so everything had to work with minimum bandwidth.
Fast forward about a decade +/- and government abandoned the concept all have to be served equally. The web site and product delivery went into high gear and from then to now improvements have been dramatic. Depending on how you can connect (dialup?, 3G/4G app or browser on a little bitty screen, PC style with 50 or 100 mbps services and unlimited downloads) your experience is now different.
Thus government is not interested accepting not all have equal outcomes because equal outcomes is not one of their goals.
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The question is whether the “humour” furthers discussion or detracts from it.
Any project involves a range of skill levels. In that, there are opportunities.
It’s also not the issue. As I said above, it’s about addressing the coming depression. Employing people, while building infrastructure that the nation desperately needs. Much as was done during the Great Depression, though in those days it was more conventional infrastructure like roads that were built.
We can whine about the difficulties or exploit the opportunities. Our choice.
Status Quo 
Although I’m still not sure about addressing this “coming depression”. It seems a very different discussion.
How so? It explains why the NBN is what it is and is not going to be ‘fixed’ - the topic essentially being ’ doing it right’. When there is no interest in equal for all the rest is an exercise in what ifs. Is it not?
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A lack of belief government goals can change. Although that might be challenged given recent events. Yes, what if’s.
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Note:
Might that be a benefit? Read the title of this topic.
In context, the connection is obvious.
Hypothetically - We have yet to even arrive at a depression. We may have one, we may not.
Planning not to have one would seem best.
Being prepared for worse, prudent.
It’s a moving target. It can take just one medication that offers reliable treatment for all to reset the world on a moments notice.
It’s not the only infrastructure that might be the target of any post Covid-19 economic responses. The NBN is only one of many possible targets.
If one sees the prospect of a depression and national infrastructure building a response, it is a broader discussion than just the NBN.
One that needs to put forward all the likely suspects, (pumped storage projects, solar panel manufacture, Hydrogen production facilities, mine closure and rehabilitation, etc) their benefits and employment opportunities. My apologies if that was not obvious.
The extent any program may be subject to skills shortages, is all speculative. The starting assumption is those unemployed with the required skills will be first employed. The depth of skills in the community is substantial, if I relate to those I’ve worked with who are now on their second or third lifetime occupations. Perhaps for those without skills or stranded occupations, the opportunity might need to be forced on employers. IE to take up and train a percentage of their workforce, if that was the intent,
Hi folks,
Some friendly suggestions for keeping this discussion meaningful. The role of employment and resources could be considered to be connected to this issue in context. However, macroeconomic theory is getting outside of the scope of the forum. Broad comments on politics are also outside of scope of this forum, CHOICE is non-partisan and focused on specific issues not wide-ranging political comment.
If you need any guidance on what constitutes a consumer-related or CHOICE issue, let me know, I’m happy to chat.
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Indeed, but the NBN is the subject of this topic.
[edit]
The others would be off-topic.
Is that how it was done before? I’ll be interested to see your substantiation.
But you’re right, training is part of the opportunity. There’s work in training workers. There’s work in training the trainers.
As mentioned elsewhere:
Telecommunications infrastructure is, as you point out, one opportunity. There are real benefits there. Some may recoil in terror of the complexity, but we’ve done complicated things before. Are they now beyond us?
My guess is that we’re in for a long period of recession, if not depression. It may well be that Capitalism is past it best-before date. Either way, we’ll need long-term projects to tide us over while the new order (whatever that proves to be) establishes and stabilises. FttP is one such project (bearing in mind the multi-generational service life).
For those considering an upgrade to full fat fibre, it can be rather expensive. In the following instance the original estimate of $300k has more than doubled to $630k.
Not so good news for the customer?
In this instance the Australian Govt (aka tax payer) is helping out funding $520k of the total cost!
How may other Aussies would put up 20% of the cost of a fibre upgrade to their NBN service? Given the opportunity!
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We could probably make a good guess if we had access to an authoritative donor list as well as local voting issues
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(depending on the price).
Remember to keep an eye on the list of sites that are eligible for free upgrades in the next couple of years. Probably not you if you are in a safe seat.
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Safe Labor seat here… NBNCo tech is due Monday morning to install the boxes. However its going to cost me $20/m more, for 12 months, than my previous because you have to take 100/20 as a minimum if you are currently on FTTN. Those on FTTC and HFC have to pay for one of the super fast plans.
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Can you take the faster option then downgrade a few months later?
If so that might lessen the financial impact over the 12 months. I didn’t see in the NBN Co blurb on the upgrades if the speed tier was fixed forever. It may just be the requirement in the first place to justify the upgrade process.
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You must commit to 12 months at the higher rate. After that you can downgrade, which is my intention. I wasn’t looking for speed, but rather stability.
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Cheap upgrade IMHO, SueW. You won’t regret it…
I had ADSL 2+, which was dodgy, due to the old wire lines. When I got the option of converting to FTTN, with an 18 month take-up window before they turned off the ADSL, I took it up at the earliest opportunity.
What a horror story. When it rained, the internet became intermittent, then stopped. At the best of times, it was marginally faster for downloads than ADSL, and slower on uploads - or worse - time-outs to the point of wasting hours.
Fortunately, they had to run fibre past my house to serve an estate to the rear, and kindly decided to connect all the properties they passed with FTTP. Since I already had “NBN”, it was unbelievably difficult to actually connect the last 4 inches between FTTP box on my house wall, and modem point inside.
It has run like a dream ever since…
I’m a technology person, and I knew full well how much better fibre is compared to the convoluted technology soup that the Abbott government polluted our telecommunications strategy with.
Cost of maintenance? Wide area network energy consumption? Peace of mind as a consumer? No comparison. Chalk and cheese.
Fibre still runs on contention, and a heavily shared fibre line or network device can still slow the feed speed, but there are options. Most of the performance issues can be resolved by upgrading the equipment at each end, unless the line is physically damaged. The upper limit per line is currently around 180 Gb/sec for dedicated transmission. It wouldn’t be economic in most cases, but that’s what a strand of fibre is capable of carrying.
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Sadly, there was a problem which meant the fibre could not be pulled through… tree roots. “Someone” will be attempting to fix it, and then I should get my service. In the meantime I am finding my connection (FTTN100/20) more stable than it was on FTTN 50/20. Perhaps I will tolerate the cost for longer. If the issue cannot be fixed (don’t know why that would be so) they will let me know. Sighhhhhh
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