And yes, I realize the change.org site has more details. But once again, the whole top of that page has no actual info in the title except a bunch of acronyms.
So if I were to offer you $25 or $1000 which
would you take?
That's not a great analogy.
For much of the life of the internet, we had the experience where everything was slow and awkward. Modems sucked. But now, people have things they want to do online and they find it's fine - they can access their email, and websites, and youtube, and play games.
There was a similar transition with computers. All computers used to be slow, and they used to suck. Then during the Windows XP era, the slowness and suckiness of a computer started to decline, and people didn't think about it any more. They stopped buying new desktops and wanting OS upgrades.
You can point out things that would be possible with faster computers or bandwidth - fine. Regardless, for the things that people are doing now, people tend to be content about things where ten years ago they were unhappy, often very unhappy.
The opposition case to the NBN claim that the government was forcing taxpayers into a vast, unbudgeted public works scheme, and that it wouldn't even be delivering something that was strongly needed by the people. The opinion of the man in the street about their current internet is a reasonable metric in estimating the value of the NBN.
Maybe the reason that Australians only have the speed that they currently have is because there isn't a pressing need for more speed. Imagine that. Billions of dollars saved with no effort.
From a cursory scan of the comments, it seems like there's a time element: $25 'soon' or $1000 'later'. I suppose which you'd take depends on how quickly you need the money, and whether you trust the $1000 plan to actually get finished.
For reference, I'm in the UK and have a 6Mbps connection, which I could upgrade if I thought it was worth paying more.
It's what can you do with a 40 mbps upload speed that you can't do with 1mbps?
Which is, you know - a lot. In the age of user created content, telecommuting and cloud services being unable to upload faster then 128 kilobytes per second is a killer.
If you're dealing with any type of multimedia content you can be needing to move 10-20 megabytes per cycle between a few people with ease - that time adds up, and it constrains how you work.
Mobile devices have been used as misdirection throughout the NBN debate, because very few people are uploading large YouTube videos from their smartphones over 3G and for anything that's got some level of production to it they'll be working on it on laptops and desktops at home and the like.
So the future of Australia's economy, and the reason that an entire continent should be wired with FTTH, hinges on citizens being to efficiently upload to YouTube from their homes?
Yes. Clearly no value of any sort has ever been created from the digital economy, and the richest companies in the world definitely produce nothing to do with content creation and distribution over the internet.
But this "raging" is over the fact that your passenger jet can only do Mach 0.75, not Mach 0.85? In the big picture, a hell of a lot can be done with 25 mbit and at this point in history you're hitting diminishing returns by jumping another order of magnitude.
Maybe in the future we'll all need 1 gbit backbones, but not today.
But we can't do 25mbit. 25mbit today is the extreme upper end that you never achieve. My household connection can do about 12mbit. I can't buy a faster service even if I want to, I'd have to literally buy a commercial building in the CBD to get that type of access. And the upload speeds on that will never exceed 1mbit a second.
If we were talking about enabling everyone to buy say, 10/10 or 20/20 symmetric service then I would not particularly care - in fact a lot of people advocating for FTTH would be placated. But it is not possible to do that with current infrastructure because current infrastructure sucks. Symmetric DSL tops out at 2/2 for about $600 a month.
That's grossly and utterly wrong. I'll bet if I interviewed 100 people on the street, maybe 10 would have any idea what this page was about.
This is an important lesson for ANY sort of activism or public outreach (or marketing): people know a LOT less about your area of concern than you think they do.
