Opinion: Information highway to hell

But recent claims by their CEO that this is "the biggest and most complex engineering project this country has ever seen" can't go without challenge.

Yeah sure, it's a lot of cable.

But it's not as if we don't know how to lay fibre optic cable already.

Telstra has been doing it for years.

So what if they have to lay more of it, and go further than they have before – this is no longer rocket science. Nobody is venturing into the "unknown".

Contrast that with building the first railroads, which nobody had ever done before, or the Snowy Mountains Scheme which nobody had done before an nobody has done since.

Or even building the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House – both were engineering feats with a very high risk of failure.

But digging a trench and dropping a roll of fibre optic cable into the hole? Okay, so you need to take care, but longer bits of fibre have already been dropped into trenches across entire oceans.

So yeah, it's a pretty impressive bit of engineering, but is it "the biggest and most complex engineering project this country has ever seen"?

Don't think so.

And even if this claim was correct, why does this mean Telstra should be allowed to charge whatever it likes to users of the shiny new fibre? It's not as if they're going to be using all their own money to build the sucker.

There's a giant wad of taxpayers' money going into the NBN so there's no point complaining about the government wanting a say in how it is used and how much it costs to use.

If Telstra wants to charge whatever it likes, the option is already there – just sod off and lay the cable without waiting for a government contribution. Then again, there's nothing stopping the non-Telstra crowd from doing the same.

If this thing is going to generate an extra $200m per month, as is widely claimed, the ROI should be easy to calculate.

But who was it that predicted these financial benefits?

Hope it wasn't the same guys who told us the stockmarket would never ever retreat to 1987 levels.

If we're relying on figures from a bunch of discredited bean counters, then we could be building an information super-highway when there's nobody left with enough money to pay the tolls.