Re: What's your prediction on the Australian Dollar?
And how many of them [RSPs] will fail to be competitive and go bust,
Probably about as many as have failed to be competitive and gone bust under the current regime, which is structurally similar (in fact worse, due to anti-competitive practices) for most of the smaller players who buy wholesale ADSL access from Telstra.
leaving their customers stranded without telephone or internet?
Seriously? As has been happening for the last 15 years, if a RSP (ISP in non-NBN lingo) goes bust there will be others who want to buy their customers base and continue providing service (especially fire-sale conditions if said RSP has gone bust). And even if that somehow didn't happen, you'd be talking about a couple of days downtime, tops, for those customers to switch to another RSP of their own accord.
The NBN will be used for entertainment, mostly.
You may possibly be right in terms of volume of traffic (I really don't know), but you're completely and utterly wrong in terms of the benefits (economic, social, etc) that will flow out of it.
The NBN isn't being built so people can download movies faster - if you think it is, I'm not surprised that you're against it, but you're also forming that opinion based on incorrect fundamentals. You (genuinely) should go back and educate yourself about the benefits of ubiquitous and fast broadband - both what it delivers now, and what social and economic (and so on) benefits increased availability and speed of internet access have delivered historically. You might change your mind...
Paying for it will be a massive headache
This argument has been done to death, and based on currently known facts and best available estimates is most likely wrong. Even if you ignore
any and all social, economic (etc) benefits beyond pure cost and direct revenue generated, the NBN is an investment which is budgeted to not just pay for itself, but also make an return on the money invested.
I'm sure your natural insta-response will be something along the lines of "but it's going to cost [insert far larger than budgeted figure here] and be a financial disaster". This
could turn out to be true - no one can predict the future. But it's
not the assumption most supported by known facts, reasonable estimates and logic at the present time, which makes it the rational-argument equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "la la la it's going to cost a fortune I can't hear you la la la".
and there's every chance it will be obsolete before it's finished.
And this argument is just 100% flat-out wrong. Incorrect, not supportable, wrongsies. Even the politics-driven (i.e. they can't support it cause it's not their policy) Libs have given up on this one as a reason to object to the NBN.
Fibre-optic cable has been
the way to transmit data at high speed for the better part of 40 years. There is no technology, currently available or even [realistically] proposed, that offers a better alternative. There isn't even anything that comes close. Yes, I guess it's somewhere within the realm of possibility that sometime over the next seven years some entirely new, never before-thought-of better way of transmitting data will be discovered and commercialised, but we're talking about such an incredibly minute chance that it's not even worth considering, and to base policy / infrastructure decisions on that chance would be utter idiocy.
The NBN is the costliest high speed broadband project in the world on a per capita basis by a long way. Now sure Australia is a big country and rollout will be dearer...
You've just pointed out exactly why this is a silly argument. Australia also has one of the most geographically dispersed populations on Earth - many, many orders of magnitude more so than any other country implementing a remotely similar broadband infrastructure project.
Absolutely this makes the NBN more expensive, but if we're going to undertake a project like this in Australia it's also a fact of life, not a failing of industry or government or competition or whatever.
Are you actually critiscising the NBN. Google is rolling their system out faster and at less cost than the NBN.
See above, once again - the economics of rolling out fibre to single, densely populated cities vs 93% of the population of a country the size (and low population density) of Australia are completely and utterly different. Actually, when taking these fundamental differences into account, it really makes Google's fibre look very expensive (or the NBN's very cheap, depending on which way you want to look at it).
Its also interesting that nearly every advanced economy has had its telecommunication industry privatized with many competing private companies risking their own shareholder value in competition with each other and using a variety of different technologies.
Point out just one other country that has a similar geographical size and population density to Australia where privately owned fixed-line telecommunications competition is working on a national scale, and you can make this argument - otherwise it's just a red herring (I'll give you a hint: there aren't any).
Not to mention, we've already tried this path for the last 15 years, and it's completely failed. We don't have the infrastructure-based competition you're suggesting we should have because it's not economically viable here, and what little competition we do have has been eked out only by successive governments - Labor
and Liberal - dragging a kicking and screaming Telstra along against its will. It's been a disaster, and a massive failure of competition policy (an almost universally recognised one, too).
Two questions. Whom do these retailers buy access and capacity from? What other alternative providers will there be?
Unless I am mistaken - they all will have to buy access and bandwidth from the NBN.
You are not mistaken - that's exactly how it will be. And even as a pro-NBN person, I agree that it's not ideal.
But, we simply have no other choice - as per above, fixed-line telecommunications in (most of) Australia is a natural monopoly, as there just isn't the market size or population density to make true infrastructure-based commercial competition economically viable. So one way or another we're going to end up with a monopoly, and in that case a government-owned monopoly is far more palatable option that a privately-owned one.
The last 15 years under Telstra are really the proof-in-point here - it's been an utter failure. Even most anti-NBN pundits, the Liberal party, etc, recognise this, even if they don't agree with the current government's "solution".
Or put it another way. Hypothetical - "the government recently announces a ban on commerical arlines flying from Sydney to Melbourne, only Qantas is allowed to fly this route, but you can buy a ticket SYD-MEL from any travel agent in australia that you want. Whichever you choose you will end up on the exact same Qantas aircraft."
Completely false comparison - partly because commercial competition is economically viable SYD-MEL, and partly because the comparison you've tried to draw is more akin to the current Telstra-monopoly (via market forces rather than government imposition) than the new NBN-monopoly.
It's ironic you've chosen this example, actually, given the situation on very low traffic air routes, where the government actually
does restrict the available carriers and seats to ensure the route is economically viable (and hence gets serviced).
