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Once again the flailing Australian National Broadband Network is in the news with a couple in Melbourne being quoted up to 1.2 million dollars to connect to the NBN. The primary reason for this is the the house in question is seven kilometres of fibre would be needed to connect the property. With the copper network being switched off around Australian, even in places where it is still viable, the only option is to switch to the NBN unless a competing network already exists. The NBN has stated that it can cost $30,000 to run fibre for a "few hundred metres". It is getting to the point where it can be cheaper just to move house if the internet is bad.
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Australian Couple Quoted 1 Million to Connect to the NBN
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Tax reform means "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind
the tree."
-- Russell Long
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @01:57PM (19 children)
Why should the rest of us have to subsidize your rural living?
You are choosing to live out there; if you don't like it, sell your property to someone who does like it.
Also, why must we always look to quasi-governmental agencies to do one particular thing?
Society's like Australia's were built by people banding together to scratch their own itches.
Hint: You don't need 100 Mbps, and it doesn't need to be wired.
Fuck you people. This is why we can't have nice things.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @02:12PM
Because the Australian government passed laws forcing people to use the NBN :(
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @02:22PM
Get a better vpn.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Popeidol on Thursday June 14 2018, @03:35PM (7 children)
Disclaimer: The residents, in this case, are whining dickheads. They're covered by fixed wireless NBN, and complaining about getting 30Mb/s. I'm still a year or two away from NBN in my area and this comment is posted from a 2.5Mb DSL line. If they're regularly dropping to under 10mb/s they either need to talk to their provider about allocated bandwidth or a technician, but I'd love to trade places right now.
Having said that: in the general case it's a good idea to provide services to areas you want people to live. You want people to be able to farm, and you want people to have the option of living out of town. My parents are farmers who aren't far out, only about 200km from the state capital and 6km from the nearest town. I grew up there with dialup. They had a mediocre mix of ISDN/satellite for a while, then for about four years they had an antenna on their roof to catch the edge of 3G coverage. It worked about half the time. A year ago, they got on NBN satellite and it was a game changer. They still want something better (4G should cover them if local towers get upgraded from 3G, and the local council has been trying to lure in WISPs for a few years) but this is orders of magnitude better than before.
Many of my extended family live much further out. Some old friends live three thousand kilometres away - still in the state. I'm completely okay with my money subsidizing things that let them live there. Internet is a requirement today, and it's important people who live out of a city can still function in society. If it was around at the time, the 'why should we support you' argument would have meant the place I grew up would have had no power or phone line.
This is all anecdotal and based off a partial comment so feel free to ignore it. I just felt the argument could use some context.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @06:12PM (3 children)
Is that the simple, albeit still expensive, way of handling this is permanent concrete or geopolymer conduits run along or under the road. They already need access for power lines, plumbing, etc. So why not start working on a permanent set of conduits you can run multiples of these assets in, with permanently excavated areas they can be worked on/maintained? Once these conduits are placed, given sufficient space allocated for future growth/use you will only have to find an available mounting point for the new service, or splice an existing line with fiber repeater/relay/switch and you can provide service to the new location. As a result of this even individual taps being built out will be reusable in the future as the region expands. Depending on where this is, Australia has a lot of open shoulder on its more rural roads, so this shouldn't be possible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @04:40AM (2 children)
Sounds expensive. Who pays?
Around here they would flood.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday June 15 2018, @01:13PM (1 child)
People who eat would pay farmers for food, and farmers would use this money to pay for the conduits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @06:09PM
If domestic groceries double or triple in price, would people still pay, or are they going to buy Chinese stuff full of heavy metals?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @06:54PM (2 children)
You realize how irrelevant that is, right?
What you really mean to say is "I'm completely okay with taking other people's money for subsidizing my family."
That's different. Very different.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Popeidol on Friday June 15 2018, @06:31PM (1 child)
Yep. Thats why I mentioned it was anecdotal and you were free to ignore it.
I'm offering it as a perspective directly relevant to the story at hand, because it might be useful to others. I'm okay with my money subsidizing rural areas, which includes family and friends. I've also lived in a city my whole adult life and understand why some people disagree. Your opinions are your own, but if you want to argue the point, maybe bring an argument?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @12:52PM
What's irrelevant is not your anecdote, but rather the fact that you're talking about how you want to spend your own money!
That's not the issue at all.
The issue is whether you and others should have the right to spend other people's money.
You have an opinion; I have an argument.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Pino P on Thursday June 14 2018, @06:03PM (5 children)
Because rural people's food production subsidizes your urban eating of food.
Because it's criminal trespass for anybody but the government to bring utility lines across nonsubscribers' land.
It has to be high-volume because of the sheer size of the files that farmers use nowadays. In the transcript of episode 6 of Mozilla's IRL podcast [irlpodcast.org], Mark Erickson said:
This means it has to be either wired or high-volume wireless. The way wireless Internet carriers' explanation of the bandwidth caps on their plans make it sound, the laws of physics preclude high-volume wireless Internet service to desktop or laptop computers.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @06:56PM (4 children)
You need more money to pay for your lifestyle? Charge more money for your food.
Are you starting to see materialize here a picture of how society can organize itself strictly through voluntary exchange?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday June 14 2018, @09:39PM (3 children)
Go on, tell us about that violently imposed monopoly again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @04:37AM (2 children)
Aud government passes law starting only the POS they built can be used.
People bypass said POS and build their own GD telecommunications.
Gov fines the naughty purple who dared fight the gov
the free and mighty purple me with awesome cheap net access and horrible auto correct give the gov the bid
the government officiant appointed natty people in blue arrest the aberrants
there is your violence. Peaceful high speed Internet living geeks throw in jail by th Jr wicked nbn baking government
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday June 15 2018, @01:10PM
In your ancap scenario, the government would only be doing the bidding of the non-subscribers over whose land the physical medium for "their own GD telecommunications" was pulled.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday June 16 2018, @06:58AM
This might be an insightful comment - but I haven't got a clue because I don't know what it means. The usual language for debate here is any recognisable dialect of English. This isn't.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Thursday June 14 2018, @07:25PM (2 children)
To whom, and for what purpose would the buyer use it? Now that it has become more common for farmers to upload big files to crop advisers, anyone who would use the land for agriculture would need the same upload capability.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @01:10AM (1 child)
If your business needs an upgrade, then pay for that upgrade.
What could your point possibly be?
Need to pay for that upgrade? Well, you've got 2 choices:
Prove your request is warranted by getting people to pay you voluntarily more money for your product.
Whine and dine the local
gunspoliticians, urging them to steal money from others on your behalf.I know on which choice I want society to be built.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday June 15 2018, @01:16PM
My point is that the finding of unaffordability of an upgrade dramatically reduced the value of two things: the value of this parcel of land to a prospective buyer, and the value of farming experience to the landowners who now have to retrain for an urban job.