Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Censorship push defeated in Australia

At great expense, the Leftist Australian government is building a nationwide fibre optic broadband network which nobody seems to want -- as we have a couple of quite good cable networks already. And with fast wireless broadband already starting its rollout, the fibre network will be obsolete even before it is built. Wireless access is what users are moving toward. It's more convenient not to be tied to a fixed point when you want to go on the net.

So to protect its white elephant the government wanted to restrict advertising of wireless services. Thankfully, that was seen as going too far.
NBN Co has been forced to back down on its plans to restrain Telstra from promoting its wireless internet services as a substitute for the $36 billion fibre network for two decades after pressure from the competition watchdog.

The Weekend Australian can reveal that the $11bn deal between Telstra, the government and NBN Co for Telstra to decommission its copper network and shift its customers to the new service will be revised following concerns by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission that the curbs on Telstra's marketing of its wireless services could hinder competition for wireless voice and broadband services.

SOURCE

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Typical government response, the government decides a service is necessary and that they must provide because the free market has not.

They don't question why the free market hasn't provided that service and when the free market continues to ignore the government service they don't stop to examine why, they take steps to force the free market to obey their dictates.

stinky said...

What next? A ban on advertising organic fertilizer on the grounds that it would compete with govt b.s.?

Anonymous said...

I like your comment, Stinky.

Kee Bird said...

Big Brother loses in the land down under, good

Anonymous said...

of course wireless/3G/4G is very nice, until you get your first $500 bill at the end of the month...
'Cause that's what it's going to cost if you're doing much more than occasionally synchronising your email.

And at least here cable is utterly unreliable, and in the hands of a governmnent protected monopoly (the cables are government owned, in each province there's one provider only with a government guaranteed contract for like 25 year intervals).

JR said...

3:28

You must be a Canadian

Because we have two competing cable networks everywhere in Australia they are pretty good -- only about 1% downtime

I pay $60 a month for my cable connection but you can get cheaper