Katy Gallagher wants to give us free Wi-Fi too

Baldy said :

JessP said :

What a waste of money!
If this is the best ACT Labor can do (which is copy the Greens and claim it as their won)….god help us all!

Well said by someone who obviously doesn’t use Wi-Fi a lot and therefore can’t see why anyone else would.

Thanks for your appraisal of my Wi-FI usage. I use a lot thanks, and I pay for my usage! Thanks for making assumptions when you have no idea!

I question the reliability of offering this on bus’s, the drop outs etc. Who is really going to use WI-FI on a packed bus between Belconnen and Civic when you cant get a seat and have to hang on so you dont fall over?

Is the money its going to cost worth it or could $3 m be used on better stuff for the ACT??

Nothing is FREE, we all pay for it through rates, taxes, parking etc.

AlpineViper said :

The benefits of free wifi in city centres (apart from YAY FREE INTERWEBS) is offloading data traffic from the mobile network and onto a wired network, via wireless LAN.

I’m curious how many people you think would be using wifi? If you arrived there, expecting to get on a bus, what would be the minimum amount of time before it arrived that you would bother connecting your tablet/phone to wifi, accepting the T&Cs, then surfing the net?

Baldy said :

JessP said :

What a waste of money!
If this is the best ACT Labor can do (which is copy the Greens and claim it as their won)….god help us all!

Well said by someone who obviously doesn’t use Wi-Fi a lot and therefore can’t see why anyone else would.

Regardless, why should the government pay and not the user? As has been pointed out here and elsewhere, there are plenty of options for providing your own Internet access.

Mysteryman said :

c_c said :

PantsMan said :

Let’s get this right.
* Every household pays $5,000 in taxes so the Commonwealth can pay build the NBN as fibre to the home, but then still have to pay around $100 per month after the coaxial and copper wire is bought, nationalised, and then junked.
Sounds like a plan.

Would be helpful if you actually got it right.

But instead you’ve swallowed the Liberal Party tripe.

It will not cost automatically $100 a month, in fact most ISPs are starting at $49/mth.
A 100GB plan offering 3x the speed I have now with ADSL is $59/mth from iiNet (who own Transact).
The same plan at the maximum speed is $79/mth
http://www.iinet.net.au/nbn/nbn-plan-residential.html

Get your facts straight and stop being a stooge for Tony Abbott.

For the equivalent data allowance I currently get per month, it would be more than $100/month on the NBN. Consider all the variables before you mouth off and accuse someone of being a stooge.

And no one disputes the Government is kicking in $5,000 per household from the get-go.

Baldy said :

JessP said :

What a waste of money!
If this is the best ACT Labor can do (which is copy the Greens and claim it as their won)….god help us all!

Well said by someone who obviously doesn’t use Wi-Fi a lot and therefore can’t see why anyone else would.

Correction, increased the cost 30-fold and THEN claimed it as their own.

JessP said :

What a waste of money!
If this is the best ACT Labor can do (which is copy the Greens and claim it as their won)….god help us all!

Well said by someone who obviously doesn’t use Wi-Fi a lot and therefore can’t see why anyone else would.

Pillz said :

Looks like they’re trying to get the younger generations votes.

That’s how labor won the federal election in ’07. It’s a valid strategy.

c_c said :

PantsMan said :

Let’s get this right.
* Every household pays $5,000 in taxes so the Commonwealth can pay build the NBN as fibre to the home, but then still have to pay around $100 per month after the coaxial and copper wire is bought, nationalised, and then junked.
Sounds like a plan.

Would be helpful if you actually got it right.

But instead you’ve swallowed the Liberal Party tripe.

It will not cost automatically $100 a month, in fact most ISPs are starting at $49/mth.
A 100GB plan offering 3x the speed I have now with ADSL is $59/mth from iiNet (who own Transact).
The same plan at the maximum speed is $79/mth
http://www.iinet.net.au/nbn/nbn-plan-residential.html

Get your facts straight and stop being a stooge for Tony Abbott.

For the equivalent data allowance I currently get per month, it would be more than $100/month on the NBN. Consider all the variables before you mouth off and accuse someone of being a stooge.

What c_c said.

The benefits of free wifi in city centres (apart from YAY FREE INTERWEBS) is offloading data traffic from the mobile network and onto a wired network, via wireless LAN. Offloading is going to become a more important technique that will help prevent the mobile network from becoming so congested as to be completely useless. I read an article a few months ago about the Sydney and Melbourne CDBs already starting to struggle with congestion, which will only get worse as our mobile traffic demands continue to increase exponentially.

That said, I’m not sure how this works on a bus – clearly theres no wired connection from the access point on a bus

What a waste of money!
If this is the best ACT Labor can do (which is copy the Greens and claim it as their won)….god help us all!

lol, if in doubt just cut & paste

PantsMan said :

Let’s get this right.
* Every household pays $5,000 in taxes so the Commonwealth can pay build the NBN as fibre to the home, but then still have to pay around $100 per month after the coaxial and copper wire is bought, nationalised, and then junked.
Sounds like a plan.

Would be helpful if you actually got it right.

But instead you’ve swallowed the Liberal Party tripe.

It will not cost automatically $100 a month, in fact most ISPs are starting at $49/mth.
A 100GB plan offering 3x the speed I have now with ADSL is $59/mth from iiNet (who own Transact).
The same plan at the maximum speed is $79/mth
http://www.iinet.net.au/nbn/nbn-plan-residential.html

Get your facts straight and stop being a stooge for Tony Abbott.

As for the WiFi, this plan actually sounds better than the Greens because they’re talking town centre coverage.
At the moment, one of the big problems in town centres is the density of mobile devices is overloading mobile networks, and that has gotten worse with 3G connections. So this does promise far greater benefit for the price than the tiny trial the Greens were proposing just for busses and interchanges. That said, the budget is in the red and there are far more important things needing investment. We’re also entering an era of 4G which will make this town centre WiFi obsolete in a few years, particularly when the digital dividend frees up 700mhz spectrum.

So I still say this is a silly and quite desperate plan from Labor.

I do wonder though if they’ll announce all the public artworks were really covertly installed hotspots and the Belco Owl is really wired.

Looks like they’re trying to get the younger generations votes.

altkey said :

What a massive, unabashed waste of money! Why free wi-fi is the flavour of the month escapes me – isn’t taxpayer money better spent elsewhere, on any vital service you care to name. Let’s start with health, roads, or policing …

Or getting the buses to run on time!

What a massive, unabashed waste of money! Why free wi-fi is the flavour of the month escapes me – isn’t taxpayer money better spent elsewhere, on any vital service you care to name. Let’s start with health, roads, or policing …

The Greens tail wags the Labor dog.

Let’s get this right.
* ACT Government loses its $40 million investment in TrasACT, who rolled out fibre to the node.
* Every household pays $5,000 in taxes so the Commonwealth can pay build the NBN as fibre to the home, but then still have to pay around $100 per month after the coaxial and copper wire is bought, nationalised, and then junked. The cheaper Wi-Fi options ruled out because they are “not as good”, despite there being no cost benefit analysis.
* Now the ACT pays another $3 million to buy internet from the private sector and unleash it on buses and in town centres, where reception and interference is likely to be horrendous and no-one really wants to use the web anyway (apart from trying to work out why their ACTION Bus is late).
* I continue to pay $40 a month for my Wi Fi dongle.
Sounds like a plan.

free wi-fi in canberra sounds nice… but why is it necessary to give private schools $2.5 million for internet? i understand the argument behind limited subsidies for private schools as they lighten the burden on gov’t schools, but if a private school can’t afford to get hooked up to the internet then there is something fundamentally wrong with their business model. are there really that many schools out there that don’t have broadband? really? and parents still pay to send their kids there?

Everyone living next to major town centres will get free wifi.

Your connections will drop out as you pass another bus or go though a tunnel.

You’ll either have a massive bill or something that many people wont use.

But i’m sure they have no better ideas to spend our money on.