Graeme Wood, Peter Martin, and that old abacus meme lives again with copper wire ...

(Above: the abacus meme begins).

When you conduct a war, you need to follow the Galaxy Quest injunction: Never give up, never surrender. Throw in a By Grabtharr's Hammer every now and then and perhaps offer up Buzz Lightyear with To infinity and beyond!

Which is why the header to Natasha Bita and Samantha Maiden's piece was so satisfying.

Web guru Graeme Wood joins attack on NBN and the piece that followed left no room for doubt.

Graeme Wood thought the NBN just a very expensive - $43 billion - hi-tech babysitter scheme. And then there was a panoply of other names: Andrew 'drop the NBN off a twig" Forrest, and Michael Malone and Dick Smith, and who the bloody hell is Marius Kloppers and why is he demanding a price on carbon.

It was such a splendidly skewed and spinning piece - not to mention the plaintive note from Andrew Robb about how the coalition had failed to sell its wonderful alternative scheme - that as a column it immediately entered the pantheon, emblematic of all that The Australian could offer in the way of biased coverage.

But soft, lo and behold what's this in today's rag? Why it's Graeme Wood, scribbling Staged approach better than a blanket NBN rollout ...

Here's the pitch:

Our appetite for broadband capacity appears insatiable; build a bigger pipe and we will find ways to fill it up.

Here's the opener:

In 2020 we will look back and wonder how we ever survived on a mere 100 megabits per second.

In 2020 we may also look back and criticise our political and business leaders of the class of 2010 for their indecisiveness and lack of boldness in positioning Australia as a key player in the global digital economy.

And here's the guru recanting his war:

This newspaper recently had me "joining the attack on the NBN" following a speech delivered at the World Computer Conference in Brisbane on September 20. Not quite!

It turns out that Wood wants the NBN after all. He just wants the NBN delivered first to universities, incubators, technology businesses and research hubs, and not offered up to the hoi polloi, and especially not rural dingbats so they can check the weather, and such like frivolous baby sitter uses, and certainly not the weather in 3D.

The second stage would see a rollout to the broader business community and to support improved health and educational services, but presumably there's no reason to include the hoi polloi and rural dingbats in the quest for better education and better health. Let them come to the city to live or let them wither on the vine. After all, the heavy lifting will be done by inner city elites, and they deserve the best first ...

Oh and it turns out that Wood is happy to be bought by government.

Sorry, that's wrong, let me rephrase that, he wants to put a hand into the taxpayer's pocket so that taxation incentives can be used to kick start new industries ...

You know, in the way that pissing money against the wall on the film industry via 10B and 10BA led to a tremendously successful and commercial film industry ... such that it's still heavily reliant on Australian taxpayer dollar subsidy (only these days instead of a 50-50 mix of government and private sector, most feature film budgets soak up 70% or so of taxpayer subsidy, and now they even offer P and A support for distributors to avoid any risk).

All Wood is after is a billion or so:

If investment in digital innovation became more attractive than, say, negative gearing on investment property, we might find investors scouring the country for the next Bill Gates or taking an interest in commercialising technology research projects. If we tossed maybe $1 billion out of the $43bn planned for the NBN into inspiring a step change in digital entrepreneurship, could we repay that investment many times?

Uh huh. Not content with copping $43 billion, Wood wants more subsidy. So much for the web guru declaring war on government ...

By the way, can we have a subsidy to fight the war?

Wood rounds it out with a plea for the internet - the fundamental platform on which most digital innovation is now based, accusing Australia of drifting into digital mediocrity. For this he blames Telstra, a lack of vitality in computer industry organisations, and political fumbling over the NBN.

I suppose it would have been impolite, seeing as how they've given him space, to wonder about the role of The Australian in spreading the FUD ...

The report card for the business and political class of 2010 will be a while coming but the effect on the Australian economy by 2020 will be profound.

Yes but what about a report card for The Australian, which managed to dish out its standard spin, and then bumped David Burchell's column so that Wood could be given a right of reply and clarification?

David Burchell? You mean there's no David Burchell in today's rag?

Oh no, now we have to wait a full day to learn what insights Herodotus can offer when approaching the complexities of the NBN ...

Meanwhile, the comedy capers continue.

Here's Peter Martin making a strenuous plea for copper, as he wonders why people suggest copper has had its day:

Fighting words, which would have seemed true 20 years ago, would have seemed true 10 years ago, would have seemed true 5 years ago. And people like Possum accuse people like me of lacking imagination. All the while we have kept coming up with new and better ways to use copper. It is indeed doing things it was never designed for, over and over again. It's an unexpectedly versatile material. It'll do even faster speeds soon, and it is already laid. Sure it costs money to maintain, but how much? Surely we wouldn't be planning to chuck it out without knowing how much?

Such gormless stupidity in the cause of economic rationalism. I suppose it's just picky pedantry to note that in the inner suburbs of Sydney, where the rain plays havoc with copper connections and Telstra realised long ago that the cost of effective maintenance came too high, we'd still be on dial up if Mr. Martin had his way.

A devotee of copper. Who could have imagined? He's such a rarity someone should put him in a copper lined display case and put him in a museum, possibly under a copper dome.

You can find him here in all his coppery glory.

It seems clear now that the NBN has become part of a religious war, and the arguments have little to do with an actual understanding of the technology to hand. You see it costs $300 million a year for maintenance of the CAN network, not to mention operational expenditure, and the c$550 million required to maintain regional communications under the so-called universal services obligation. (here).

And while looking around, I stumbled on this gem of a media release from the long lost Senator the Hon Richard Alston. Remember him? The good old days of the rabid ABC baiting ...

'Telstra plans to almost double its annual spending on capital equipment, from about $400 million to about $700 million. This should allow Telstra to upgrade those parts of its network which are badly degraded and are therefore subject to poor quality of service.

'Telstra acknowledges that the fault rate on its copper network is more than twice the international standard, and blames a past failure to invest sufficient funds in network maintenance and upgrade. (here)

That was in 1999. Yep, the copper network was stuffed years ago, and Peter Martin thinks it's the bees knees and the way forward in the world of the intertubes. A billion or so a year to keep it up to speed, or get it back up to speed, or just get the arthritic joints to work, and still still a half assed, half baked service. Talk about visionary ...

Well here at the pond, we're maintaining the rage and demanding that the country switch back to the abacus for its mathematical needs, and to hell with all this pretentious talk of fancy computers with their show pony calculating tricks ...

If you can stand it, Bernard Keane also scribbled a piece for Crikey last Friday headed Admit it: people don't get the NBN, wherein he tries to sound reasonable and balanced.

But dammit, there's real suffering here. David Burchell held over for a day, when we could all be getting along fine on copper and a good dose of Tacitus or perhaps Thucydides ...

(Below: and now to continue the abacus meme. Yep, there's lots of nerds out there who can't get enough of abacus jokes. Google abacus cartoon in images and frolic. But remember only do it with ADSL and copper. Don't get bandwidth greedy for your babysitting or workplace bludging requirements).