NBN Co exempt from FOI

NBN Co exempt from FOI

news.ninemsn.com.au

The federal opposition has criticised the government after reports that the national broadband network (NBN) will be exempt from freedom of information (FOI) laws.

(visit the link for the full news article)

I do not know of 1 ordinary Australian in favour of the National Broadband Network, when we have sufficient coverage already for our small paisley population of 22million but they want to run fibre optics to the 'outback'.

The current disasters in Queensland and NSW and Victoria could do with this money $50billion or 5% of Australia's GDP in 1yr and help re-build the nation and do bring it forward into the next century.

Now being an Incorporated company and being exempt from the FOIA, we Australians want an inquiry into the farcical spending of the money, but the typical govt but setting up this 'company' will not allow any information to be available.

Just ask anyone what $50b can be better spent on !

news.ninemsn.com.au
(visit the link for the full news article)

This does raise some concerning questions on how the conflicts of interest will be addressed as the NBN becomes a new Monopoly in the market amongst the competing supporting ISP's and other providers. Sounds like back room deals and competitive non disclosure are the order of play. Personally I do not agree with it and doubt that this will provide the best deal for the consumers. I am aware there are a lot of business interest at stake, but with the government putting the bill some accountability and transparency to the process is in the public interest. Another win for the corporation over the little guy.

Originally posted by lavenlaarI do not know of 1 ordinary Australian in favour of the National Broadband Network, when we have sufficient coverage already for our small paisley population of 22million but they want to run fibre optics to the 'outback'.

I am all for it. We may have sufficient coverage but we are effectively in the dark ages when it comes to internet speeds, limits and price. As a pretty heavy user of the internet I think we were due for an upgrade.

The price tag is pretty steep though and I think being exempt from FOI is complete BS.

What I am even more concerned about is whether this will extend to the actual network itself - does this mean they will be able to censor/filter it because the network itself is not subject to FOI?? That has been my biggest fear of all of this - first they develop the internet filter which gets shot down partially because it would slow things down. Then they decide to upgrade the infrastructure and I am guessing its so they can slap the filter on it and say "See look its faster than before so what are you complaining about?".

That and for all we know it will be a vast spy network and there's no way we could find out given the title of this thread

Forget fibre optic internet put $50bn into hospitals and education where it really matters. At the end this will only make others rich.

reply to post by q_ball


It could potentially help the Australian economy but I must admit I only want it for faster download speeds, higher limits and cheaper subscriptions.

reply to post by Cecilofs

I agree that the NBN should be public knowledge and potentially the waste of money should go to our flood victims; My thought is give 25 Bil now to those in need but continue with the NBN for the following reasons, it will cause controversy but for eg: NSW selling off the power companies, here's is where the NBN can resolve that issue with clean energy.

Another thought, if they are going to roll out fibre to every houselhold then we can effectively cut down ALL the power poles and reduce electricity consumption etc, by using this same fibre network to each home to convert the incoming light energy into electricity to power our homes using minuture solar panels thereby reducing the environmental impact.

So not only can we save lives by people no longer hitting power poles with their cars, we can replace coal electricity with light as well as transmitting data, Energy Australia did experiments years ago whereby the transmission lines were also effectively used as data lines as well but experienced magnetic/radio cross interference between the power lines but still can talk to the substations anyway.

imagine that every house has solar panels backing up the fibre transmission of light and using converters, this would certainly screw up the need for the crap the Keneally is imposing on us with her illegal sellof of public property.

So we can sell of the coal stations or keep them only as a backup and use the NBN to to give us data, light within our homes and electricity.

The good thing about light manipulation is we can increase the intensity at will using magnifiers as well as focus into LASERS, so theoretically we could use the NBN fibre network to "pipe in" the household lighting.

If we can do this then we potenially never have to worry about EM sunflares or radiation etc.

Unfortunately the PTB's don't want us to have this knowledge just yet, but imagine that already have the current technology to use the NBN to power our houses using just light.

I can see the cons of a lack of FOI, but I can see the pro and agree that maybe this is what they want kept secret, so start buying shares in fibre technology and transmission/conversion of light.

Happy Hunting

HADES

great points all !
the only downside for businesses wanting to utilise the NBN, it's not the download speed that counts. It's the upload. Im in favour of faster upload to do business being a photographer, you can imagine how long it takes me to upload 10-20mb of jpgs each few days and what about VoIP, oh but that doesnt sit with Telstra (who owns the copper network)

With 3/4 of Brisbane already having optic fibre for the ISDN and the NBN being the be all and end all, why did Telstra deploy trucks from Sydney to provide wireless hotspots across Brisbane for Emergency Services due to the power to the fibres being out, still scrathing my head on that one.

reply to post by lavenlaar


When the NBN was first mentioned it was a $30 billion project..
Then it was $40 billion, then $44 billion..
Now it's $50 billion and if normal Government projects are anything to go by, it will end up north of $100 billion..

That's around $5000 for every man woman and child in Australia..
THEN we have to pay to get it..