Great disappointment but no shocks at the roll-out plan for the NBN high-speed broadband network announced today.
Apart from two new housing estates the Northern Rivers seems to have been declared an NBN-free zone for at least the next three years.
What happened to the promises that most needy areas would be addressed first?
So we crawl along with speeds less than five per cent of other developed countries’.
It’s no wonder we struggle to attract clean green new business to the area. A high-speed network is the first item on their list of requirements. It’s just not good enough to have great beaches, perfect waves and nice people.
I implore our federal representatives to fight on our behalf for a commitment to installation within this term of parliament.
If not, our chances are greatly reduced with the coalition promising to scrap the scheme all together.
Tony Gilding
Tony,
I absolutely agree that the Federal Government has let us down in this region in a big way.
This region were early adopters of the Internet and have been disabled by the government and the telcos dragging the chain at every stage.
Why did the city regions get targeted first? They already had cable and ADSL2+ when the best most people in this region could get was wireless.
As a person whose IT business has operated in this region since 1997, I am appalled that there is NO PLANNED ROLLOUT between Grafton and the Gold Coast. How can I continue to compete with my international competitors when I can’t get even a stable broadband let alone a fast one.
As it is, I have 2 suppliers. I am supposed to have 20/1 gig Bigpond but it rarely gets anything like those speeds…. whereas my supplier on the Gold Coast (ADSL 512k/512k) supplies the speed it advertises every time but the problem is that Telstra want to charge them $50,000 to offer me (being their only Northern NSW customer) ADSL2+.
Add to that the fact that BigPond is noticeably slower due to their filtering, the situation is really terrible.
I have waiting since 1996 to get viable speeds up here… having just left Sydney when the cable was installed where I lived. That’s 16 years…
I’ll be dead before we get the NBN. Steven Conroy and his band of city-based prudes should be forced to live in Corndale for a year… maybe then they would appreciate the handicap we overcome every day just to survive.