Sorry eagle, I am in the industry and I can tell you everyone knows it is a waste of money. The case for the NBN is far from overwhelming. 100Mb around Australia is simply not needed. However consider this. If you are in the industry and you know the government wants to fork out $40+bill, are you going to complain about it? Of course not.
In the most populated parts of Australia today, most can get speeds of up to 20Mb/sec today. That is pretty damn quick for most user requirements. The thing is most users don't get these speeds due to bottlenecks and contention. Contention will only be improved by faster computers. It's a bit like your office network. Your server might be super fast but it is slowed down by your hard drive being able to only serve so many requests at a time. The network is only as fast as your slowest peripheral. This is a simplified example but you get the picture.
There is no doubt that certain aspects of society could benefit from faster speeds. There are much much cheaper ways to provide solutions for these parts of society.
And you are right I can't bring myself to support this Labor initiative. It is another example of a thoughtless idea that is going to waste billions of dollars, and provide no guarantees that they are going to be able to even achieve this massive infrastructure task. I'd like Labor, if they've given another chance to show they can actually successfully complete some small ideas successfully without waste before embarking on anything of this scale. I also can't fathom the approach they are taking to build the infrastructure and then sell it off to the highest bidder (read Telstra) so that we continue to have a monopolised infrastructure provide for telecommunications and data.
This to me has nothing to do with whether it is a Labor initiative or not. I do not support the expense and waste when there are so many other pressing needs in our society. NBN lightning speeds is a nice to have not a must have.
