Displaying items by tag: Stephen Conroy

Barring a major catastrophe, the Coalition Government will be able to announce within a fortnight or so that it has completed the rollout of the national broadband network and met its target. One can only hope that, at the same time, there will be an announcement about how the network will be upgraded.

When John Howard came to power in 1996, there was no money in the government kitty to fund the strategy which he planned to follow: inducing people to vote for him thereafter by greasing their hip pockets. So he sold off the first tranche of Telstra. And there ended Australia's dreams of having a decent broadband network.

Former Senator and Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, has been appointed to the board of Australian financial technology and infrastructure company, Sargon.

Documents which were seized by the Australian Federal Police during raids last year in a bid to find the source of leaks to stories about the NBN Co will not be available to the police for their investigation.

Documents seized by the AFP from the parliamentary office of Labor MP Jason Clare during a raid on 24 August should be returned, a bipartisan panel has ruled.

The Coalition government may face opposition from one of its own side over Wednesday's AFP raid on parliamentary offices, with right-wing Senator Cory Bernardi saying he may back the Labor move to refer the raid to the parliamentary privileges committee.

The Australian Federal Police has conducted a raid at the Department of Parliamentary Services at Parliament House to try and find out the source of leaks that led to a number of stories about the NBN.

Labor Senator Stephen Conroy wants an immediate end to the investigation by the Australian Federal Police into NBN document leaks and has called for the resignation of NBN Co chairman Ziggy Switkowski over raids on his office.

An employee of NBN Co, who accompanied the Australian Federal Police during the recent raid on Labor Party functionaries, was allowed take 32 pictures of documents seized.

Banished NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has warned that Australia has gone further down the slippery slope of unfettered mass surveillance than even the US. Yesterday Snowden pointed to the recent raids by the Australian Federal Police on the offices of senior ALP parliamentarian Senator Stephen Conroy and a staffer of Opposition communications spokesman Jason Clare to illustrate the potential danger of using retained metadata for nefarious political purposes.

The National Broadband Network is once again mired in election politics after raids on Labor Party offices on Thursday by the Australian Federal Police over leaked documents about the nbn.

Last night in a Senate Estimates hearing, former ALP Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy grilled nbn CEO Bill Morrow about numerous complaints that offices of various MPs had received about the poor performance of users’ FttN NBN services.

COMMENT: At Senate Estimates earlier this week, nbn company CEO Bill Morrow revealed that the broadband wholesaler has ordered 1800 km of copper cable for the FttN rollout. That’s just for the next five months of what will be a five year project. In the same breath, he praised the state of Telstra’s existing copper and said nbn had not needed to replace any yet. Is there a disconnect here?

The nbn company revealed last night in a Senate Estimates hearing that it has ordered $14 million of copper amounting to 1800 kilometres of twisted pair cables for the FttN component of the Coalition Government’s Multi-Technology-Mix (MTM) National Broadband Network.

OPINION (actually, it's fact). They can’t hide it any longer. The lies, the deceit, and the sheer ineptitude of it all were always going to come back and bite the Coalition’s bastard NBN. That time has come.

The Scales report into the original development and planning process for the NBN has been tabled. It is not kind to the former government or to the ACCC.

NBN Co chief Ziggy Switkowski has fired a warning shot at Internet provider TPG, telling a Senate committee that the national broadband network's finances could be "severely impacted" by competition from other fibre-to-the-basement Internet providers.

Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has announced another NBN inquiry – the fifth – on how Labor planned it. What will it achieve?

NBN Co chief executive Ziggy Switkowski has refused to table an unredacted version of last week's NBN Stragic review due to "confidentiality issues and ministerial advice," and says speed guarantees have "lost currency."

NBN Co has released its long awaited Strategic Review. The Coalition’s FTTN model will cost more than we were told and it will take longer to deliver than we were told.