• Scott Ludlam says Freo is off the NBN rollout map thanks to the government’s changes.
FREMANTLE has disappeared from the NBN roll-out map when previously it had been slated for super-fast broadband within three years.
Greens senator Scott Ludlam says evidence given to a senate NBN committee, which he’s a member of, makes it clear the port city will be stuck with copper and not receive optic fibre to homes.
“Huge sections of the metro area suffer sub-standard telecommunications and Abbott’s solution is to pull the plug,” he says.
Last year the committee was shown pictures of the degraded copper network with duct tape and plastic bags used in pits to keep water out.
Tech-savvy senator Ludlam says portsiders will “now miss out on a world-class, fast broadband service” because of the government’s abandonment of the fibre-to-the-home NBN rollout. The Coalition admits its version of the NBN is inferior to Labor’s, but says it will be billions of dollars cheaper and is good enough.
“Farmers, regional architects, designers and software developers in WA could have been conducting business with people across the world with fast broadband,” Senator Ludlam says. “There is no reason why WA has to miss out and be subjected to broadband dropouts just because the Abbott government doesn’t have the foresight to install a world class telecommunications network.”
by BRENDAN FOSTER
ADSL2+ is still lightening fast. The Green/Labor former alliance and their vision for the NBN costing $90 Billion was a joke and one of the main reasons they were voted out. People have access to high speed broadband services already in Fremantle and have done for a long time. The coalition implementation will still be a huge increase in speed. Copper or fibre or wireless, does it really matter? I don’t think so.
Ludlum maybe programmed a couple of ordinary websites in his day and maybe a iPhone App. Whoop-de-doo. He is hardly an authority on high speed networking and telecommunications. He has a BA in Design. He’s not qualified in the field and he’s certainly no expert.
We’ve been on ADSL for over 10 years.
“Copper or fibre or wireless, does it really matter? I don’t think so.”
Possibly the most ignorant comment I’ve seen. Of course it matters.
Seriously? What a dic you are making this comment. I am a network network engineer and Ludlam is on the money, our copper network is old and stuffed and needs replacing before it completely crashes. Why shouldn’t we have a would class network?
Peter Parker, yes Fremantle has access to ADSL2+ topHat technology (in some areas) offering 20MB download speeds, but the 1MB upload speeds are so far behind the rest of the world, it does not require any justification. If the Government were to offer Fremantle residents Annex-M technology, or SHDSL based services at a cheaper price, then I suppose i would be happy (as would the rest of the general public).
Fremantle has had Annex M for years, however the upload speed is still only about 200kb/s at best.
I wish I was getting 20mb/s on ADSL. You’ll only get that parked next to the exchange. At the moment I get about 4-6mb/s down and 300 kb/s upload. Plus the service drops out several times a week. As the copper ages the speed decreases. 6 years ago I was getting 8-10mb/s
The NBN greatly improves reliability and bandwidth. For companies needing more than ADSL can provide there is no middle tier service, everything delivering more bandwidth suddenly becomes very expensive and complex. Currently my employer is utilising what is known as copper over ethernet. While it sounds fancy it is little more than 4 ADSL lines stuck together with duct tape. It does provide extra bandwidth but performance is subject to the reliability of 4 copper lines. The net effect is less reliability. We pay for and need a lot of extra support. While the technology makes some effort to scale according to each lines reliability, it is not very graceful. We could have upgraded to fibre ourselves but the cost was exorbitant even for a mid sized corporation plus the contracted timeframes were well outside of what we could accept.