AS Scottsdale's NBN roll-out gets underway again, Mayor Barry Jarvis has identified what he considers the major flaw in the previous federal government's strategy.
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Cr Jarvis said that he believed the previous government's biggest mistake was making the system ``opt in'' rather than ``opt out''.
``The opt-in system has meant a lot of messing around - while they were going up the street, they should have just booked everyone up and never have to worry about coming back again,'' he said.
``But it is nice to see that some areas that were undecided before, are going to be connected - that's a good thing.''
Cr Jarvis said that he held out little hope of a fibre to the home roll out in Dorset.
``My understanding is that a mix of technologies is pretty well a fait de compli - there'll be fibre to the node, wireless and some fibre to the home,'' he said
``I'm not sure what they've got designated for Scottsdale and I'm still waiting for the wireless tower that was promised for the Scottsdale Golf Club.
``It's construction still hasn't started, as far as I know - I was promised a couple of months ago that that construction would get underway before the end of the year.''
Scottsdale IT consultant Michael-Brian Courtney runs Courtney Statewide Computers from his home in Scottsdale, and said the NBN had hugely impacted how he could run his business.
‘‘We’ve come leaps and bounds in what our capabilities are in remote desktop support,’’ he said.
‘‘We can receive their data faster than what they can give it to us, basically.
‘‘The area we were in was supported by ADSL2, but the copper was just that old that it didn’t work.’’
Mr Courtney uses a business plan with a download speed of 50Mbps and an upload speed of 20Mbps.
NBN Co has committed to providing all Australians with a download speed of 25Mbps by 2020, mainly through the use of fibre to the node technology, rather than installing the fibre up to houses and businesses.
TasICT chief executive Dean Winter said fibre to the node would be adequate for most Australians, but may not be in the long term.
``In the long term it’s impossible to know what the future of technology will look like, but certainly fibre to the premises has got a higher chance of being adequate in the long term,’’ he said.
‘‘We’re obviously looking at changing technology in the future, and there would be greater reliance or greater demand for higher speeds and bigger downloads.’’
