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    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.



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