Gary McLaren blog posts

I have been asked by iTWire to provide my thoughts on where the NBN should go from here as the rollout of the network is announced as completed. The article appeared on 20 July 2020 and can be read here. My full answers to the questions submitted are as follows : I...

While NBN Co may have declared  “Mission Accomplished” on the rollout of the NBN, where does that leave up to 250,000 premises who cannot receive the minimum download speed of 25 Mbps. 1 NBN Co’s riding instructions from government, the...

The Minister for Communications, Mr Paul Fletcher, has made it clear that the government will not provide any further equity or debt funding to NBN Co now that the rollout of the network is largely complete – see AFR ($$$). A total of $49 billion has been...

A joint media release from NBN Co’s shareholder ministers (Paul Fletcher and Mathias Cormann) on May 12 announced that NBN Co had secured extra funding of $6.1 billion in loans from Australian and international banks. This is $4.1 billion more than the $2.0...

It was “Too early to tell” according to the misunderstood reply from Zhou Enlai (China’s Prime Minister from 1949 to 1976) to Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s on the question of what he thought about the French Revolution.  The same can be...

The Australian government has announced plans to make a Covid-19 contact tracing app available to all Australians. The privacy and security concerns that inevitably accompany such initiatives are now being debated as the government moves into ‘sales pitch’...