AU National Broadband Network Signs $11 Billion Deal With Telstra 120
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian government has signed an $11 billion deal with the country's largest telco, Telstra, to acquire the telco's physical infrastructure and migrate customers to the National Broadband Network. The NBN is a 100Mbps open access fiber network that will be rolled out to 94% of the Australian population, with wireless and satellite to cover the remainder. The deal marks a large step forward for the new network, as without a deal to bring Telstra's customers onboard, the NBN's viability was in question."
FUD. (Score:5, Interesting)
For anyone truly concerned, they never tested any of their ISP-level filtering shit on the fibre networks, because they know it'll fuck up under that load. If anything, the NBN will make any further censorship proposals go away... for now.
Re:Good ( for the government ) (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah, now they will be fucked by their Government instead. Who do you think has the bigger dick?
This is going to turn out one of two ways.
Best Case: the NBN operates somewhat like AmtTrak in the US, forever receiving subsidies from the national government while getting government-granted monopolies on some kinds of operation.
Worst Case: the Australian government decides that NBN is a really good start on nationalizing all Internet access in their country.
Either way, the people that think this operation will be spun off privately and profitably one day are fools.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:3, Interesting)
Whats the use of an encrypted connection when you're being mass-MITMed by the very lines you're going through?
Avoiding MITM attacks is one of the primary design features of SSL / TLS. Unless the government has control of a root cert authority in your browser they can't MITM you without you getting at least a warning. Of course, I wouldn't put it past them to legislate that all browsers distributed in Austraila must ship an "Australian Government" root cert and then the game will be up ...