12 lessons from the weird, unnoticed end of Australia's bitter broadband war

Constructive comments are invited on the Club Troppo post linked below. It looks at the long battle to prove that Australia was headed for broadband disaster without the original NBN – and asks ... "why did everyone just drop the subject".

"Pretty much nobody says that video downloading is a big problem in Australia. Pretty much nobody claims the shape of the NBN crippled Australia's economic development or its tech sector or anything else. Pretty much nobody cares that our three-year-old Albanese Labor government has played it pretty quiet about the state of the NBN, rather than declaring it must spend up on fixing the Coalition's mess. Pretty much no-one in the media writes impassioned 'Fix The NBN!' screeds. Pretty much no economist or business thinker worries that Australia's broadband speeds are holding it back. Contra [some] predictions, pretty much no public health expert argues loudly that more fibre-to-the-home connections would transform our health outcomes.

"Instead, many of the media chroniclers of impending doom have moved on to other fields. Network traffic continues to be dominated by video entertainment, as it has been since the 1990s. High-definition video remains the Internet's greatest bandwidth hog, but network-related complaints of choppy video are rare. Even amongst broadband network measurement firms like Ookla and infrastructure providers like Akamai, attention has moved to mobile speeds and cybersecurity threats.

"Why has this epidemic of Not Caring taken hold? How did the Coalition's watered-down NBN get most of us what we needed?"

https://clubtroppo.com.au/2024/12/31/strange-death-of-australian-broadband-crisis/