Here's Why Australia Stopped a Private Company From Providing a Better Internet Service

This is Australia, a land of unfortunately poor internet. As someone whose career has taken a turn to be entirely based off said internet, let me tell you this is a very frustrating reality, and that frustration has been felt by more and more of my fellow Australians as working from home becomes the new normal. Now the reason Australia has such poor internet is because it is very big, with a very small population, which means any internet company that wants to provide this service needs to pay a lot for infrastructure while only accessing a tiny pool of customers. Compare this with any European nation or even the United States and you will see that you get much more people per mile of internet cable that you lay and therefore more return on your investment. However recently there has been a private company here in Australia that was willing to take the chance and offer to provide high-speed internet to Australians, but the government told they couldn't. Sad, but why? Well you see the Australian government had recognised this internet problem, and it also knew that if its advanced economy was going to have a chance of remaining competitive in the 21st century it probably needed something better than dial up connections to its businesses and homes. So they rolled out the NBN, or national broadband network. Now this in and of itself was a fine piece of infrastructure in theory, it would connect the whole nation via modern fibre optic and give people download and upload speeds in line with their western contemporaries. The problem was, it was a large public infrastructure project and inevitably politics got involved and ruined everything. What Australia ended up with was a system that was only passably better than the internet infrastructure it had before after costing a cool 56 billion dollars. Anyway, the private sector saw an opportunity to deliver a better experience at a comparable price and were told no because it would ruin the premise of the whole NBN system. You see, in terms of internet, Australia has some very clearly profitable and unprofitable zones to do business in. The major cities filled with lots of rich businesses and densely packed housing, very profitable. The outback, where you have to lay a million dollary-doos worth of cable to get to one shack, not so profitable. The government figured that it could address this inherent imbalance by providing infrastructure everywhere and compensating for the losses in the country with profits in the cities. The private companies that were planning to provide a better service were of course only looking to do so in the profitable cities, which would cut off the government's scheme from its profit centres and ruin the whole neutral cost model they had going for them. This decision to effectively block fair competition has caused a lot of outrage, especially amongst those in the cities who were not happy with their subpar internet, but there is always going to be a loser in this scenario. If these companies were allowed to compete, the government-run NBN would become unprofitable and require ongoing support from taxpayers to fund a non-financially viable venture. If companies aren't allowed to compete then the Australian public is ultimately at the mercy of the government to make sure their internet infrastructure is competitive in the modern world. A government that has shown themselves to not exactly be super competent at sticking to the plans drawn out by experts we might add. And of course, if the government doesn't get involved at all, we have a situation where people in the country won't have access at all, and even people in the city run the risk of being left behind by complacent corporations that don't want to make the large and risky investment into technical infrastructure. So given the options, what would you pick? Or maybe you can help us by fixing our little conundrum here. Now if this whole video sounds like a bit of a rant, it is. I hope one day I will be able to upload a video in less than an hour, but in the meantime at least it's an case study into the dynamic between private and public services. And if you want to see an interesting dynamic between two warring nations, go and watch our video on why hawaii once had its very own special currency. Thanks guys, bye.