NBN is coming. We have heard it over and over again.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Unfortunately, as we wait – and wait – for NBN, we are slipping further and further behind the countries in the technology fast lane.
Broadband? We’d settle for just about any band.
Once upon a time, internet access wasn’t a staple of home life.
Now, it most definitely is.
Many of us are committed to expensive phone plans and even more expensive mobile wifi to work from home (slowly), pay our bills, study and watch our children add “proper internet” to their Christmas lists.
They can’t understand why friends and relatives can download songs, games and movies and they are continually being told not to use up the data. And that is even without the schoolwork that requires an internet connection.
In this day and age of “virtual workstations” we are supposed to be embracing home technology and launching into our own forms of ecommerce.
Instead, we are finding cords that are obselete to the rest of the world which allow us to link our mobile wifi to our laptop to our home computer so we can print out our invoices.
The concept of linking remote regions and making the latest in agricultural technology to farmers is laughable.
NBN’s fixed line technology for 4100 homes in Gunnedah will start to be installed in early 2017. That does not mean anyone will be connected in early 2017.
Connections are still possibly as far as two years away.
“Everyone in Australia will get access with one of our technologies,” is the NBN promise.
“The more regional areas, or areas outside of towns, will get fixed wireless and that may not yet be included in the three-year update.”
In other words, no one can tell us when we might see this technology, but for those outside the initial NBN footprint, it’s unlikely to be in the next three years.
Rural and regional Australia is being left far behind.
Families who have moved here from cities and towns all over the country to work in the mines and associated industries are living in new estates – without ADSL.
Often, their initial advice from Telstra is that ADSL is available, only to find after they have moved there is no port available or they are too far from the exchange.
It is frustrating, embarrassing and, ultimately, damaging for Gunnedah’s future.
We are entitled to be part of the digital age. If we are not, the gap between city and country is likely to become a gaping chasm no fibre-optic cable can fill.