Sunday 19 June 2011

Malcolm Bligh Turnbull gets caught out by The Register


Here’s Richard Chirgwin (and that’s a sound Cornish-Australian name if I’m not mistaken) on the 16th June 2011 in The Register:
“The opposition spokesperson for communications in Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, has delivered a damning blow to the government’s plans for a National Broadband Network (NBN), citing international data to show declining demand for services at 100 Mbps.Since the NBN’s business plan assumes a fairly strong takeup of 100 Mbps services, a lack of demand at that speed pots the network’s underlying assumptions into the corner pocket……Yep, data like that is a real problem.
Because it’s incomplete – and its incompleteness is its downfall. Because I’m a data geek – in another orbit, I’m an analyst specializing in telecoms – something didn’t ring true, so I decided to go looking.
South Korea doesn’t just have one fixed broadband carrier; it has three. KT, whose data Turnbull cites, along with LG U+ and SK Broadband. LG U+ offers 100 Mbps both on its hybrid fibre-coax (HFC) network and under the “optical LAN” brand, while SK Broadband identifies its services as “Fibre LAN” in its financial reports.
You can tell what’s coming, can’t you? The 100 Mbps market in South Korea isn’t declining: it’s booming. A country that also offers a fair number of wireless broadband services is still adding new fast fixed broadband users at an impressive rate.”

Now Chiggers attributes Turnbull’s error to an honest mistake. I think he’s being overgenerous.


Rest of the article at Well, that about wraps it up for the NBN: Stop looking at South Korea, says Turnbull

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cherry picking as usual.

chugs said...

Chirgwin is from Penzance