Where to now for long term investors of Telstra, page-1278

Its needed by society at large, we rank terribly for fixed line Internet compared to equivalent countries.

Sometimes doing the right thing for the majority means doing the wrong thing for an individual, and keep in mind, its not about individual people, its about premises. An individual renting a house might not need fast Internet, but the next person might. It was originally built with a long term outlook, decades.

The Internet as a whole becomes more valuable if other people have similar resources to you, i.e. the 'network effect', eg. if only one business has a fax machine it would be useless, if every business has one all of a sudden its very useful (to use an old analogy). There are likely un-thought of applications that similarly could be viable if everyone had that fast network access.

Not that i want to drag politics into it, but there is a fundamental political divide between left and right that underlay the debate, the right is more about the individual, the left is more about the group. Thats how we got into this mess in the first place, with Telstra being privatised based on 'user pays' privatisation bandwagon. When Labor started the NBN it was about benefiting all of society. When Libs got back in, they tried to undo it.