Australia to build new national broadband network

[zapionics<alt>]

A NEW government-created company will build and operate the (Australian) National Broadband Network, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced today...
Mr Rudd described the announcement as "historic", describing broadband as the core of 21st century infrastructure...

Read the story here

The background to this is that there are many areas (especially rural) that still dont have acces to broadband and the government here couldnt find a suitable vendor to build and implement the new network so now they've announced they will do it themselves...

[fischbitz]

Now lets just hope that senator Conroys "Porn Filter" is dead and buried by the time this comes to fruition, in fact well before then.

Cheers

[zapionics<alt>]

Originally Posted by fischbitz

Now lets just hope that senator Conroys "Porn Filter" is dead and buried ...

Wishful thinking... I'm sure it will keep coming up as an issue, even more so that the government is driving it...

I'd prefer to see the browsers fitted out with some easier to use built in filtering features... so parents could easily set it up on an account by account basis. Wouldnt be too hard; simply need to tick a "child" profile box in the user account settings with some flags such as "no adult content"... then the browser could just scan the html pages incoming for keywords or check with a MS server for the domain name or something... not perfect but good enough... I know there are 3rd party products out there, but it needs to be built in and integrated with the profile setup IMO.

Last thing we want is some pollies deciding what we can and cant read!...

(I should add that the Parental controls feature of Vista seems hard to use and buried in the system...) [edit oh well, I just looked at it and its not too bad... just needs to be more visible...]

[FragTamer]

I've looked into Naked ADSL in S.E. Queensland Australia in order to ditch Telstra telco line rental and use node phones through alternative provider. If this tech were to roll out, how damaging to Australia's biggest pubic owned telco would it really be? Is this the biggest backward step for public shareholders of Telstra and government rip-off ever? They would suffer so much in the competition of cheap call rates and VOIP telephones?

I'm not holding my breath where I live, we've had to put our home on the market because laggy ISDN and no mobile reception was the best we could get and the town was a futile place to live. That stands true today.

My new 'N' series VOIP router comes soon, but I'm still forced to use exsisting 1500Kb/s internet for it along with line rentals i cannot avoid right now.

Furthermore, economic distress is haunting many countries and Australia is plummeting into major debt because of overspending and economic stimulous. For years, Telsra has been scimping on tech staff and hardware costs over profit and the company mostly sold off to by our government to public shares. Australia started to fall into 3rd world style communications systems any many areas and this is too little too late in our current times.

I think we'll see huge delays and problems, if anything at all. It needs to pass parliment despite Mr Rudd's aspirations. My 2c.

[zapionics<alt>]

The Australian Christian Lobby has accused the Federal Government of breaking its election promise to censor the internet after the policy was softened in the face of relentless criticism...

Story here

Lofty ideals, but I just cant see how this will be inforced and how it will operate without impacting free speech. Reminds me of China's firewall policy... alternative links are always available.