This afternoon Delimiter posted an article from Exetel's CEO about Ageing Australia not being interested in seeing broadband speeds of up to 1Gbps.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

During the election campaign, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy revealed the NBN would support speeds of up to 1Gbps, instead of the 100Mbps initially planned — after NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley informed him the upgrade would cost no extra.

But in a blog post published today, Linton — who leads one of the few ISPs to provide broadband in Tasmania over the fledgling NBN network in the state — said it was “the unthinking and just plain stupid” who were excited about the additional speeds.

“Pretty much along the same lines as the stone age cargo cult dwellers in the jungles of New Guinea are excited about the next ‘goods drop’ from the strange coloured bird,” he wrote.

Linton added Australia’s ageing population — who he said didn’t “play online computer games or get a surrogate sex life from pornography” had no interest in terabyte broadband plans (such as have been recently released by some of Exetel’s competitors on ADSL) and speeds that could never made a difference to the internet applications they used.

“They are going to be the ever growing percentage of Australians who are going to drive the percentage of residences that don’t have any sort of wire line connection to their home,” he said.
Linton has been a long-time critic of the NBN and a supporter of the incoming generation of 3G mobile broadband and wireless solutions as an alternative.

Click here to read the full article.

When EFA posted the link, Twitter became very active about Linton's comments:

• @diskincluded: Why on Earth would we want to be able to compete with the rest of the world? There's none of the pressure when you're last.
• @nightkhaos: He's right in that 1Gbps is "too much" now but to presume to know what the market will be like in 10 yrs? Foolish and shortsighted.
• @masterhearts: who gives a toss about the oldies. i want speedy internet dammit.
• @prkaye: Isn't Linton known for his lack of clue? Does anyone think much of most of his 'Industry' comments?
• @cindyleigh: Older generation has little patience for slow technology, they got better things to do with their time than slow net
• @Martin_Eddy: My elderly neighbors are happy paying $5/month for dial up.

So what do you think?  Is Linton right or wrong? We would particularly like to hear from those that feel they identify themselves as one of Linton's Ageing Aussies.

Please leave a comment below

This election, online issues finally got the attention they deserve. And the situation is here to stay.

I'm not talking about which party had the most Facebook followers or made the most gaffes on Twitter (Julia Gillard and Family First, respectively). Serious issues around internet governance and our internet future came into play, and by all accounts will continue to be significant as the situation plays out this week.

The first issue that affected the election was Labor's mandatory internet censorship policy, 3 years old and counting. Throughout that time, I believe the accepted wisdom amongst the scheme's proponents - the most notable being of course Senator Conroy - was that it would be unpopular with a handful of geeks but would appeal to the wider audience of mums and dads in the electorate.

If this was indeed the strategy, I think it backfired. Although it's based on mainly anecdotal evidence, I believe many internet users had their political consciousness awoken by this attempt to slap censorship on the country's net connections. When this issue was important to people, it didn't just put them slightly off-side, but made them hopping mad, if not lifelong skeptics of the ALP. Over time I have spoken to MPs and parliamentary staffers of all stripes, and I'm pleased to report that many people did indeed contact their elected representatives and let the opinions be known. For some MPs, this amounted to a veritable flood, and the issue was absolutely on their radar.

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This week is good news for Australian internet users. Both the cyber-safety (covered yesterday) and broadband issues have had their moment on the election stage. We now know the details of all the major parties' broadband policies and can do a side-by-side comparison. Which one will deliver the best outcome for Australia's future?

Refreshingly, the Labor and Liberal broadband policies differ greatly, and represent a very different vision for Australia's competitiveness in the 21st century.

The Government is betting big on the importance of telecommunications in Australia's future, with up to $43 billion committed to the National Broadband Network in what amounts to the largest ever infrastructure project in Australia's history. To recap: The plan involves laying fibre optic cable to 93% of Australian homes, with minimum speeds of 100mbps (upload and download). And just yesterday, NBN Co, the government-owned corporation managing the rollout, upped the ante by promising connections of up to 1 gigabit . Those living in areas where the fibre cannot reach will be provided with either wireless or satellite service at a minimum of 12mbps.

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Internet issues appear to have finally gotten some oxygen in this election. The National Broadband Network and the Coalition's alternative broadband plan have gotten a lot of coverage in recent days. We'll have a breakdown of the two policies for you in our next update.

Let's turn, instead, to the issue of "cyber-safety", the banner under which the Government has been pushing its mandatory ISP filtering policy. If you follow the news, you might have heard that the Government first delayed the plan for a year in order to conduct a review of the "Refused Classification" rating. Since then, the Coalition have come forward and stated they will not support mandatory censorship and would vote against it even if they remain in opposition after the election. This means that the filter is very unlikely to pass through the Senate without some drastic modifications.

It's still Government policy, however, and they are sticking by it. See "Is the filter truly dead?" for some more information.

The Coalition's cyber-safety policy is now available. They are promising $100.4m over four years for a variety of initiatives aimed at protecting children online.

The Liberal party has a pretty shoddy track record when it comes to online civil liberties. One of EFA's biggest battles to date was against an onerous censorship plan pursued by the Howard Government, that - fortunately - was technically unrealisable. What we ended up with is the current system, whereby R-rated web pages can't be hosted in Australia but for the risk of a hefty daily fine and ACMA prepares a secret blacklist of "prohibited" pages. Fortunately, neither this restriction nor the blacklist have much affect on our daily use of the net to communicate, and so amount to little more than nagging affront to common sense and a considerable waste of money.

By knocking back Labor's filter, and proposing a policy focussed on options within the home, the Coalition appear to have turned over a new leaf. The key planks of their proposal are:

• $60m for home PC filters
• $30m for Cyber-safety outreach
• $10.5m to educate and "empower" principals
• A Ministerial advisory committee on social networking

Although it's hard to get too excited about this use of taxpayers' money, it appears the Coalition have abandoned the heavy-handed censorship approach of the past.

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The Ausvotes 2010: Party Policy Guide is now available for download.

The guide is available here.