$quoted_author = "Joe Greco" ;
That's approximately correct. The true answer to the thought experiment is "address those problems, don't continue to blindly pay those costs and complain about how unique your problems are." Because the problems are neither unique nor new - merely ingrained. People have solved them before.
"Address those problems" sounds quite a bit like an old Sam Kinnison routine, paraphrased as "move to where the broadband is! You live in a %*^&* expensive place." Sorry, but your statement comes across as arrogant, at least to me.
It's arrogant to fix brokenness? Because I'm certainly there. In my experience, if you don't bother to address problems, they're very likely to remain, especially when money is involved on the opposite side.
it's arrogant to use throwaway lines like "address those problems" when the reality is a complex political and corporate stoush over a former government entity with a monopoly on the local loop.
AU should be at a stage where the next generation network (FTTx, for some values of x hopefully approaching H) will be built by a new, neutral entity owned by a consortium of telcos/ISPs with wholesale charges set on a cost recovery basis. if either political party realises how important this is for AUs future and stares down telstra in their game of ACCC chicken, that may even become a reality.
So, in other words, it is arrogant for me to not have a detailed game plan to deal with another continent's networking political problems, and instead to summarize it as "address those problems." Okay, then. Well, I certainly apologize. My assumption was that the membership of this mailing list was: 1) Not stupid, 2) Actually fairly experienced in these sorts of issues, meaning that they are capable of filling in the large blanks themselves, and 3) Probably not interested in a detailed game plan for something outside of the North American continent anyways, given the "NA" in NANOG. Certainly the general plan you suggest sounds like a good one. We kind of screwed that up here in the US. Despite having screwed it up, we've still got cheap broadband. I'd actually like to see something very much more like what you suggest for AU here in the US. But there was more than one problem listed. The other major factor seems to be transit bandwidth. I believe I already mentioned that there are others who are actually working to "address those problems," so I am guessing that my terse suggestion was actually spot on. Otherwise they wouldn't be working on a new fiber from Australia to Guam. The only thing that seems to be particularly new or unique about this situation is that it was a momentary flash here in the US, when broadband was first deployed, and providers were terrified of high volume users. That passed fairly rapidly, and we're now on "unlimited" plans. I would, however, caution the folks in AU to carefully examine the path that things took here in the US - and avoid the mistakes. We started out with a plan to have a next generation neutral network, and it looks like it would have kept the US in the lead of the Internet revolution. The first mistake, in my opinion, was not creating a truly neutral entity to do that network, and instead allowing Ma Bell to create it for us. But it's late and I'm guessing most of the interested folks here have already got a good idea of how it all went wrong. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.