The Australian national broadband network’s state-owned operator said it can change its A$37.9 billion (US$40 billion) project should Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s Labor government lose power.
“It’s always possible to change direction, it’s possible to stop things as they are running today,” NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley said in an interview shown on Australian Broadcasting Corp television yesterday. “Our job is to provide as much commercial flexibility as we can [for the company’s owner].”
NATIONAL ELECTIONS
Tony Abbott’s Liberal-National coalition, on track to win elections that must be held by November next year, is vowing to cut the project’s costs, which Gillard’s government last week said had risen 3.9 percent, or about A$3 billion. Labor intends to roll out the mainly fiber-optic network, or NBN, to 93 percent of Australia’s population during the next decade, with the rest served by wireless and satellite.
The opposition’s policy would save “upward of A$20 billion,” Shadow Communications and Broadband Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in an interview broadcast on Sky Television on Saturday.
While Labor’s plan is for broadband fiber to be connected to every home, the coalition wants to install a fiber-to-the-node model, in which broadband fiber is installed as much as a kilometer from houses that are then connected to the network by copper wire.
“We are not going to dismantle the NBN,” Turnbull said. “We are going to complete the job of updating everybody’s broadband to very fast speeds, but we’ll do so predominantly using fiber-to-the-node, a much, much cheaper and faster-to-deploy technology [than the government’s],” he said.
A Liberal-National government would also privatize NBN Co, Turnbull said, while ruling out a sale to a retail telecommunications provider, such as Telstra Corp. Australia’s biggest phone company is getting A$11 billion from the government after agreeing to give up control of its copper wires to make way for the new system.
“The sooner you could privatize it, the better,” Turnbull said.
TELSTRA PROFITS
Telstra posted second-half profit on Aug. 9 that missed analysts’ estimates as the telecoms firms spent more to add mobile phone customers while winding down its former monopoly fixed-line business.
NBN Co is on course to begin or complete work on connecting 758,000 premises by the end of this year, Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said on Wednesday last week as he released the network’s corporate plan for the next three years.
“This plan demonstrates the government is delivering on its commitment to provide all Australians with fast, reliable, affordable broadband,” he said.
MAJOR INVESTMENT
The network will eventually generate a 7 percent return for taxpayers, Conroy said. Capital costs now stand at A$37.9 billion, 3.9 percent higher than a revised estimate, he said. The original cost forecast, announced in April 2009, was A$43 billion.
“We are one year into a 10-year build on a 30-year project,” Quigley said in the interview. “Overall the project is running as well as you could expect.”
Beyond 2021, NBN Co could “generate very large gross margins because it’s a very big up-front capital investment, but the operating costs of the company are relatively low,” he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day