The Federal Government has announced the winner of the National Broadband Network tender process. Nobody wins! Yay! I’m sure you’re thinking WTF? right about now, so lets get into some of the details.

The current tender process has been ended and the Government will create a new private-public owned company to spend $43 billion on fibre to the premises. That’s significantly better than fibre to the node. Kevin Rudd calls it “Nation building”. I call it bloody awesome.

The company structure will be such that the Government is majority shareholder and the company will provide wholesale services only. No more monopoly held by Telstra – that surely has to be a good thing. Well worth $43 billion I’d say.

90% of premises in Australia are to receive this new fibre to the premises service, which offers speeds of up to 100Mbps. That is just amazing to think about, considering most of us can get 1Mbps at the most with current infrastructure. The other 10% of Australia receives broadband through “next generation” wireless and satelite services. Speeds will only be 12 Mbps. Only.

It stinks of Nationalism. I don’t care though. Years of neglect of the country’s broadband networks by the current big players means that I’ll happily have the Government own the new network. They intend to sell down their stake-holding in the company within five years (market conditions may vary this) so I’m not to concerned at all. Just give me good Internet.

The low point of the announcement was having Senator Stephen Conroy drone on about the benefits of the package. It seems Kevin Rudd has sidelined him yet again so that he can take the glory. We didn’t need him here now and we don’t need him to filter the Internet.

I wonder whether this will be a way the Government gets their filter into our homes. If they are the wholesaler, they can say “Hey, we decide what you can access. So here, have our filtered feed. Guaranteed to be free of smut and free speech.” That is one worry, but hopefully they will work out the filter isn’t going to work anyway.

The Government also announced immediate funding to get fibre optic backbones developed into major regional centres, such as Darwin, Broken Hill, Mount Gambier and Mount Isa. This is to be done as soon as possible, so hopefully these regional centres will get some competitive broadband services soon.

Perhaps Senator Conroy could use a fibre optic backbone. Might make backflipping easier for him when it comes time to back down from the filter plan.

More news has come to light on the Great Australian Wall trails which are due to begin. The trials are going to be huge apparently, featuring hundreds and hundreds of non-humans. Yes, no people.

What did you expect? ISPs to deal with complaining customers and have Senator Conroy on stage with egg on his face? Sorry, not a chance.

It has now come to hand that the live trials will be on a “closed network and will not involve actual customers.” The filter list will also only contain around 10,000 sites to be blocked due to concerns of performance issues. Great.

So they can’t get people onto a trail, they think that the small test number of 10,000 sites might be the limit. No wonder Telstra have pulled out.

And you know that when Telstra goes running, it’s a sinking ship.