While the community should be excited about the announcement of the NBN finally coming to the Dandenongs (NBN Rollout Listed, Mail, 20 October 2015), the fact is the Federal Government has severely let down the Dandenongs.
They have done this by planning for 19th century technology and expecting it to do a 21st century job.
La Trobe MP Jason Wood, who remained silent on the NBN during the last election campaign, now expects that a copper-based solution will be “good enough”.
Nowhere in the world are governments rolling out copper cables with the intention of providing first-world internet services, but somehow the voters of La Trobe are expected to accept a solution that would not even be considered by a cash-strapped African nation.
Recently my neighbours and myself lost telephone and internet connections for more than two weeks when storms took out the overhead copper cables.
The technician who eventually came to fix the problem lamented that “the Dandenongs is full of copper just rotting in the pits” and yet the current government solution is to replace that copper with even more copper.
While Peter Douglas’s article does mention the possibility of Hybrid Fibre Coaxial networks, very little of this technology was implemented in the Dandenongs due to access and topography, these networks basically terminated in Ferntree Gully and never made it up the hill.
The obvious solution is to rollout fibre to the premise (FTTP) this will give the community first-world speeds and reliability that will never be achieved with the government’s “mix” of outdated technologies.
Mr Wood said he was “proud to be part of the team putting La Trobe on the mark for the NBN rollout” (sic), unfortunately that mark is somewhere in the 1950s.
If Mr Wood truly wants first world technologies for his electorate, he should be advocating for a fibre-based network across the Dandenongs as a priority.
Garry Muratore,
Tecoma.
