So I’m a relatively young guy who doesn’t really give a damn about politics.

Well rather I didn’t until last year, but then the Liberal/National Party Coalition decided to do make all these promises that it couldn’t fulfil, get in to power and then proceed to start breaking things.

Australia was beginning on a new major infrastructure project to finally replace the long out of date and far substandard network of copper telecommunications lines with a majority of fibre-optic cables.
Yes there were some areas which I disagreed with due to the force bundling of excessive installations of equipment (seriously, the supply of the termination point hardware should remain the province of the service providers) but on the whole it was going to fix the significant problems with the entire network.

The Liberals ran with a platform of a slower but guaranteed 25Mb/s replacement utilising a decent chunk of the copper for the last stretch from street cabinets referred to as nodes.
Sure nowhere near as awesome, but realistically if it supplied me with low consistent latency with no drop-outs due to weather conditions.
I point out that I currently get noticeably under 10Mb/s with latency spikes all over the place and consistently having to power cycle the connection in hot weather (sometimes in cold as well).

Cut to now, we’re not even going to receive the guaranteed speeds, we’re going to be utilising a hodge podge of different network components from VDSL to fiber to HFC to wireless to satellite with a baseline speed where I am not much better than I get currently in favourable conditions.
The guy in charge doesn’t see a need for us to even have 100Mb connections at any point.

So in other words we’re going to end up with something that can not do it’s job, will end up costing way more, and will not support an industry that is guaranteed to function when our non-renewable resources have long expired.

For me I’ll be stuck with terrible latency, the inability to stream media content at 1080p+ levels, and no certainty of an actual network connection at any particular point in time.

All this could have been avoided.

Seriously Australia, you’ve gone and frakked it all up.

This post brought to you by the guy who almost did an Australian Christian Lobby who let their domain expire.