A post I have just posted regarding the Royal Commission Into Aged Care is probably an appropiate post here as well.
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Oh, my! 
Maybe the title of the thread should be simplified even more. What about:
“Public or Private - where to draw the line”?
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If it were about hospitals. Public gives the best value, and does the heavy lifting for emergency and probably even training. It’s necessary and essential!
Private always costs more, for often arguably the same quality of outcome,
If it were the NBN or Energy or Aged Care perhaps the same analogy applies. Worse case the difference in the outcome of public ownership and management vs private is they can both provide the same result. Only one will always cost less.
Control of public enterprise?
Providing the boards of these are not stacked through favours with directors who cannot do the job?
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Maybe it should just be “where to draw the line” ?
… or perhaps “what is a line?”
maybe even “the government and corporates share too many lines” …
… if only they could use the same mirror to look at themselves …
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They do!
It’s the same one Miss Betty used on Romper Room. 
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For assets in common use and needed by the community.
Is it important to the discussion to note that the benefits and liabilities of ‘Public’, IE Government ownership, can be shared across the whole community?
And for privatised ownership that for the benefits and liabilities, the owner/s or shareholders derive the primary benefit, while the liabilities are by law strictly limited?
Either can deliver necessary public infrastructure and services, to the whole or any part of the community to an equal quality and cost of service or differentialy. Not every house has a sealed and kerbed road for access or a motor way around the corner. Not all properties have town water or reticulated sewage collection. There is evidence of Government (hence community) compromise in so many ways in our every day lives.
Whether the discussion is about the NBN or any other similar enterprise or how it is best delivered and the value in community vs private control, I’m expecting there will always be a compromise. The bucket has limited depth while our politicians have a record with public ownership of using cash to oil the squeaky wheel.
The ABC and creation of SBS may be two two great models for what might be possible in public ownership. This assumes you get the charter right, and provide adequate funding while appointing independent boards for management.
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But probably not for long. The competition (and new technology) will probably send NBN Co out of business.
That is very interesting. What competition do you see going head to head against the NBN? What technology will they use?
Apparently there are at least 2 companies looking at providing ‘better’ service via satellites and/or microwave link.
As I see it competition has 4 aspects: coverage, throughput, reliability and price.
Do you think these two companies have shown enough strength in those areas sufficient to put NBN out of business?
There are niche competitors already, for example you can get a local wireless service in the Sydney CBD (sorry I can’t bring the name to mind) in an NBN dark spot that competes on the first three criteria. I can’t see such a competitor ever having the reach to compete so widely as to replace the NBN.
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‘Technology’ can solve many problems. We’ll see … 
Highly unlikely. Any service that relies on radio frequency transmissions is severely constrained:
A single strand of fibre-optic cable can carry 20,000 times more data than the entire radio frequency spectrum combined.
Microwave and low-orbiting satellites might be able to cherry-pick some limited high-value markets, but they’re unlikely to offer the broad-scale services of the NBN (or even Telstra). To ideologues, any competition is a good thing. To me, the private sector leeching revenue that could benefit the community at large isn’t good.
You know that that article is a little out of date when it refers to 4G as “experimental”.
I would like to see some support for that claim. How has it been calculated? What underlying numbers were used? What assumptions were made?
Also, for a single strand of fibre-optic cable to carry any data at all, it has to exist. 
If it had been left to Telstra, we would all still be using dial-up, or ISDN if we sacrificed a limb or a child.
Loving my 56 kbit/sec.
In general yes but which in this case? Even having such technical superiority (assuming it exists) does not guarantee market dominance, especially when the NBN has a head start in network establishment, available capital and a growing revenue stream.
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‘market dominance’ could be a dying breed.
Yes, NBN Co has a head start. But it is performing so badly that ANY competition will gain a foothold. That can only improve the availability …
This paper by Rodney S. Tucker, Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society, University
of Melbourne, possibly a ‘glass mostly full type’, addresses many of your questions, suggests NBN is not as bad as we think, and ‘goes there’ addressing many things NBN.
No one has to agree with all the premises and conclusions, and some could easily cause eyes to roll, but it remains a thought provoking read. One could conclude he is a mouthpiece for government or an insightful academic or somewhere in between depending on one’s viewpoint. This copy is hosted at Penn State University (USA) so the paper has gotten around.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.175.9261&rep=rep1&type=pdf
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Yes, it’s old. Can you prove that it’s inaccurate?
No mate. You’re the one claiming that wireless can compete. That’s for you to substantiate.
Would we? What would have happened without privatisation, we can never know, but history does give some indications. In Australia, overhead telephone lines were common into the 1950s.
This image is from Sydney in 1912:
By the end of the 1960s, very few remained. They’d gone underground. History shows that things change. Much as some might like to attribute all that’s good to the private sector, much of the progress didn’t happen there.
Should we even need a project to build the NBN? I’m old enough to remember overhead 'phone lines in the Southern Highlands of NSW. A party line that rang in Morse code, to signal which subscriber should pick up. Real, flesh & blood telephone operators at the exchange. In the decades that followed, our telecommunications system advanced rapidly. Underground cables replaced overhead wires, party lines gave way to individual numbers and exchanges were automated. I reckon we’d have optical fibre to most premises by now, if it weren’t for some pretty spectacular blunders. If we’d continued as we were, then the 'phone system would already be what we now refer to as The NBN (or getting there).
http://david.boxall.id.au/201604/
It could well be that privatisation is what’s held us back.
Availability where? The NBN is supposed to provide equitable access, nation wide. The private sector tends to cherry-pick the most profitable markets. If we want multiple choices in limited areas, then the private sector is the way to go. If we want maximum benefit for the nation, then maybe not.
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The use of satellites in a mix does not work very well against Fibre backbones, in most cases (I would like to say all but some places do not yet have fibre backbones in the world). Satellites suffer huge lags/latency (times of transmission) because of where they are located. Technology certainly advances but there at the moment just hurdles they can’t bridge and distance and time are not one of them they can bridge in Satellite tech. Microwave certainly can be super fast (very low lag as well) but requires point to point transmission to achieve this with very small margins of error of measurement of offset from each dish. In a domestic situation this would be extremely difficult to achieve on a economic scale.
All of this in the end still requires the use of fibre to achieve the best throughput at least somewhere in the chain, and who largely owns that backbone…NBN. Who will then set the cost for that use? NBN Co
Certainly in small areas with dense populations the companies could perhaps compete but like most alternate options anything remote or below some density threshold of economic worth they will not compete or even try to offer their alternative options. Let us all not be “fooled” by the gloss and hopefully we all can see the reality underneath the picture they paint.
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The theory hasn’t changed. The actual numbers have.
You may have me confused with someone else. I made no such claim.
I hope it is clear that a) my comment was hyperbole and jocular, and b) neither the comment nor its negation is testable.
I agree. We can’t ever know.
I do remember though how Telstra held Australian broadband back, reportedly in order to protect its high cost / high profit business services.
For a government monopoly to be the provider of telecommunications infrastructure would at minimum require it to be run as a not-for-profit and to be run independently of government with an acceptable charter. No doubt though we would never agree about what should be in that charter e.g. what exactly is the public good that it is to deliver.
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