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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Crossy who wrote (31392)	9/17/2009 8:25:10 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 46821

There is certainly an infrastructure, public space, and commons bunch of issues to sort out, I agree. How to do it? <As a shareholder of a would-be competitor, I guess you are not amused by a Public-private partnership to take care about "FTTH on the cheap" > On the contrary, the cheaper the better. If people had fibre all over the place and really cheap, Zenbu could cover the whole country with Wi-Fi, WiMAX, LTE and what have you. I like cheap fibre. But if I thought there was huge profit to be made I'd buy Vector shares [oooops, tried that - government got in the way and stopped investment in fibre and things], or Telecom [ooops, government has been attacking their "monopoly" for a long time and they are going nowhere fast along with their share price], etc. Having stopped Vector investing, [although Vector is a logical investor in things such as fibre to the home and everywhere else where electricity goes], the government will now have to reinvent the wheel and duplicate Vector which is set up to do just what is required. Zenbu's objective is to deliver cheap wireless internet to people. Backhaul is expensive so the more of it there is, and the cheaper it is, and the faster, the better. Then more people would find Zenbu worth installing. Zenbu would benefit more than anyone I can think of [other than subscribers and the places with Zenbu] by having taxpayer-funded fibre all over the place. If the electorate wants to transfer their money to me via free fibre, that's okay by me, but it seems silly of them. I'd rather get the taxpayer largess than have it go elsewhere. Vector, CityLink and Velocity want to charge more than the market will bear. Perhaps the new, all-singing and dancing PPP Fibre will be different. The government can certainly make laws to do anything they like, whether it drives New Zealand further into the economic mire or not. So they could simply write out a cheque for $5 billion in fibre and installation of it and declare it to be free. I'd rather they do that than waste the money in much greater quantities than that on completely useless and even counterproductive things. Yes, the internet isn't running at capacity now, but when things are free, and valuable and inherently scarce, they do fill up. It's best to plan ahead to avoid the problem rather than wait until there is a problem then try to fix a broken o-ring during launch. The traditional process is have something obvious go wrong, there's a huge disaster, there is then a committee of inquiry to find and what happened and make sure it never happens again. It's better to avoid obvious problems in the first place. To avoid 911 attacks all that was needed was to lock the cockpit doors. It was obvious that there was a security hole a mile wide. I sat behind some pilots a couple of years before thinking that it was ridiculous that all I had to do was stand up, take a couple of steps and be in charge of the cockpit [I didn't say anything about it to the cabin crew because they are notoriously stupid and would probably arrest me for threatening them or something]. What's needed to avoid netileptic paralysis is to price packets properly, same as avoiding traffic jams and other rationing problems - price works wonders. There is fibre in downtown, business and some residential areas of NZ. I don't know exactly where it is. Or how much of has sold and how profitable it is: <"Vector, CityLink, Velocity and others already have fiber..." Is this just some metro fiber or do they have fiber connections to the building of the subscriber or even more to the premises ? > Apparently not profitable or there wouldn't be all the effort for taxpayer funded fibre. It's all very interesting. Mqurice