The Australian has been caught out misrepresenting the views of the richest man in Japan, Korean-Japanese IT billionaire Masayoshi Son, as part of its campaign against the National Broadband Network. Over the weekend, the newspaper ran a story headed “NBN a waste of money, says Japan IT mogul”.
A Crikey reader decided to check Son’s actual comments, made at his launch of a new broadband network on Friday.
The relevant section of the video is at 36.40 when The Australian’s Tokyo correspondent Rick Wallace rises to ask a question. Wallace’s question itself is interesting — including the Freudian slip at the start where he confuses News Ltd and Australia, his description of the NBN as “unfortunate”, and his mistake in saying it will cost “$42 billion of taxpayers’ money” when the maximum government contribution will be ~$26 billion. Implicit in Wallace’s question, too, is the assumption that rolling out a fibre network in Japan, which has a population density of 336 people per square kilometre, is comparable to rolling out a network in Australia, where the population density is three people per square kilometre.
And Son does indeed say “it’s a waste” and “stupid”, but then goes on to describe the “waste”: maintaining a copper network while putting in a new fibre network. Maintaining an old copper network is expensive, Son says. Copper networks more than 20 years old should be “taken away” and “100% replaced” with a new fibre network. Son’s comments about the need to remove copper were mentioned only in passing near the end of Wallace’s piece.
Replacing a copper network with a fibre network is precisely the NBN plan via its agreement with Telstra to move its copper network customers over to the the NBN and remove Telstra’s ancient and costly copper network from service. While saying a fibre network can be rolled out without taxpayer funding — possible perhaps in Japan but not even the Coalition believes that about Australia — Son seems to endorse NBN’s strategy of dumping the copper network.
The Australian has persistently run the line advanced by many NBN critics, that the copper network can be a viable high-speed broadband carrier, despite its high and rising maintenance cost, its speed limitations and the asymmetric nature of the broadband service available via ADSL. The newspaper has also run a scare campaign about people being “forced off” the copper network (while ignoring the complaints of people who are forced to use the copper network for “broadband”). And last week there were media reports that Malcolm Turnbull had convinced shadow cabinet to adopt a policy in the copper network would play an important role in providing a minimum 12 Mbps broadband speed.
Son’s comments appear at odds with both.
I read the article twice and remain confused. He clearly said that he believes in tackling Japanese cities-at-a-time, and I inferred the ‘waste’ was about how they planned the rollout to the bush first, because since he said he believes in fibre-to-the-entire-city model, I can’t see how he’s saying the NBN as a whole is a waste.
I also find comments about relative deployment cost in Japan being comparable absolutely laughable. Population density per sq kilometre is completely different in their urban centres. The entire population of greater tokyo is larger than Australia as a whole.
They also have spaghetti on steroids in the back-lanes, the powerpoles carry hundreds of wires. The Japanese deployment would simply not work in this economy, because we don’t tolerate the effects on the streetscape they consider quite routine.
An observation from Korea is that entire le-corbusier style blocks of residences were enabled for ADSL at a time, no choice, no questions. Perhaps the mistake we made was in pretending this was optional.
-G
It was pretty obvious even from the story as reported that it was News Ltd beat-up. Son san was actually saying that an NBN was a very good commercial proposition and so there was no need for the government to get involved. Whether that is as true in Australia as Japan is debatable but in the event he is correct when NBN Co is sold off in 9 years the Govt should make a good return on their $26bn investment. If you add in the non-commercial benefits the NBN is even more attractive. Bad luck Mr Murdoch. You’re still the only billionaire backing copper.
It’s not only The Australian going after the NBN. Fairfax is running the headline “NBN upgrade could cost up to $400 a room.” But when you actually read the article, it quotes IT experts who say that most people will already have the gear they need so the upgrade costs will be minimal. I am curious as to why media moguls are seeing this as a threat rather than an opportunity and therefore feel the need to Frontline every story about it.
I remember when I thought the Australian used to have credibility, and actually bought it. Whether I was naive then, or whether it has deteriorated like a badly maintained copper network, I’m not sure.
When we all switched from dial-up to bb a few years ago all the little whiners and scare mongers said dial-up was perfectly good enough.
My neighbours 10 km from a dedicated exchange cannot get bb at decent speeds even though they are trying to run a tree propagation business so they lose money.
What a nation of weenie wagging sooks we have become.
I will do the sums again – taxpayers cost of NBN will be about $26 billion over 8 years during which time the tax intake will be over $320 billion per annum or $2.65 trillion.
So the NBN is less than 1% of taxes taken over those years.
Now if we want to talk about a waste of $25 billion, let’s talk about the money wasted on so-called anti-terror that has seen nothing more than paranoic kops and judges sending people to prison for talking.