Australian Broadband is looking promising once again.

James, get your facts straight....

Broadband Decision
To: Helen (Senator) Coonan (senator.coonan@aph.gov.au)
Sent: Tuesday, 19 June 2007 9:31:40 AM

Senator Helen Coonan - Minister for Communications

Two years to roll out all of that broadband? That's absolute rubbish and you
know it! You must think that there are a lot of dumb people out here. This
ridiculous estimate will blow out dramatically as soon as the election is
over.

And as for saddling country people with completely untried WiMax wireless
technology - shame on you. You have just abandoned a key constituency - the
entire country population of Australia. Radio transmission is never as good
as fixed line and you know it. Just think of the difference in call quality
between fixed line and mobile. Country people will end up with a
considerably slower second rate service which will be affected by a number
of variables including the weather, while city people will travel first
class on high speed fibre! Why don't you just come out and say that you
don't care about the speed and quality of service for country people? I
guess that honesty simply doesn't serve your political agenda, particularly
with an election coming on, huh?

The Optus proposal will provide broadband to 426 country exchanges whereas
the Telstra plan was going to reach over 1500 exchanges! So how come you
didn't mention that? And as you know, Optus is 100% owned by the Singaporean
government, so you have just them a huge financial leg up.  Duh!

It's hard to see how you could have stuffed this up more even if you tried
and the tragedy is that it took the Govt of which you are a member, 11 years
to do it and then only because the Rudd Federal Opposition forced you to
actually make a decision.

Great work Senator! I hope you enjoy being in Opposition come December.
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