Comments on: Coonan fails broadband history (no surprise)

By: Snarky Platypus

Snarky Platypus — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 06:06:06 +0000

The Raccoonan is better off as a raccoon than a deer – at least deer tastes nice. Mussed up vermin sums her up nicely.

And yes, she really does need to pay a bit more attention to her briefings. Or maybe her staff are deliberately giving her crap? The mind ponders.

By: Stilgherrian

Stilgherrian — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 21:59:13 +0000

@Zhasper: Precisement, mon frère. The Raccoonan is minister for communications. And while I don’t demand that the minister for communications is a network engineer — neither would I insist that the health minister was a doctor or the defence minister a soldier — I do expect them to have a basic understanding of the field. Things like its recent history, basic structure and language.

Would you trust a defence minister who couldn’t tell a tank from a personnel carrier, an agriculture minister who couldn’t tell a tractor from a bulldozer, or a trade minister who confused a “ton of coal” with a “tin of coal”? No. But that’s precisely what’s happening when Coonan confuses megabytes and megabits — and she does it pretty much every time she opens her mouth.

Keating’s “broadband” was ADSL. Well, it was 1995 and the bush could only punch 28kb down shoddy analog phone lines. A clean digital feed of 64kb would have seemed like heaven.

By: Zhasper

Zhasper — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 13:19:21 +0000

Well. Technically, broadband (as compared to baseband/narrowband/wideband etc) has been around for at least a few decades…

I doubt that the ‘broadband’ Keating’s group was talking about in 95 was the same as we’re talking about today (dsl, fttn).

…

But still. Even if what Raccoonan (I still think she looks like a startled deer, but it doesn’t work itself into a nice pun) meant was “no-one had seriously considered an FTTN network”, she’s choosing her words badly (and showing her lack of understanding of the topic).