In which the pond broods about the NBN, life, pain, drop outs and the whole damn thing ...

That Feiffer is entirely unrelated to anything to follow, but the pond found it while stumbling through the archives in search of other things, and was intrigued to see that even way back on the 1st July 1990, the Donald was a thing in The Los Angeles Times ...

Of course cartoonists get it wrong, just like the pond does every day, and Feiffer certainly did with that yawn, and the rest is a history that continues to shock, astonish and appal ... (though apparently Yanks like to appall).

Doing the research that resulted in the Feiffer turning up like a baked bean tin in the back paddock being discovered by metal detector wasn't without pain for the pond...

You see, at the moment, every so often, on a whim, the pond's NBN connection drops out ...

There's no reason or rhyme to it, just a momentary interruption like the worst days with Optus ...

It comes, it goes, there might be a gap of twenty minutes, there might be a gap of seconds, the browser goes on the blink, and things fall apart ...

Nobody seems to be able to do anything about it, with the ISP blaming the NBN, and the NBN being stoically mute and unapproachable ...

It happened right after the usual connection via the ISP moved over to the NBN. They supplied a truly shitty modem, which downgraded performance, and immediately everything went pear shaped, and has stayed in the shape of a pear impression ever since ...

As a result, work must be saved every nanosecond, but even then work might be lost, uploads interrupted, streaming services broken ...

To work out why involves going back to times almost as ancient as the Feiffer cartoon, when the then Labor federal government stuffed the roll-out of pay TV cable, such that two sets of HFC cables festooned many a major city street.

There's a wiki for early cable television history here,  but suffice to say, a lot of the HFC cabling, and more importantly, the connections, are well over 20 twenty years old. 

Later Optus allowed its network and service to downgrade to the point where the NBN took one look at it, and said forget it.

They would probably have told Telstra to forget about its HFC too, if they'd had a chance, and if Malware hadn't been hired by the onion muncher to ruin the NBN ... which is why the pond simply couldn't  turn to the Terrorists this day for its lunchtime fun ...

What, the idea to fuck the NBN?

Or is knighting a duke  and spreading sirs around the land a better idea?

It takes an enormously stupid arm-breaking man to make the pond think that John Howard helped the nation dodge a bullet, but thanks to the Terrorists, Latham turns up regularly to remind us that he was that bullet ...

No one else will touch such a damaged loon, but the Terrorists will ...

What to do then? Well the reptiles of Oz offered this quaint, piquant juxtaposition of headlines ...

A new coal-fired station? From the people that helped you fuck up the NBN, new old ways to fuck up the planet to make an ideological point?

Sure, whatever ...

Let's see how the reptile idea of fucking up the NBN, to help Foxtel, has worked out for consumers ...

And right there is another NBN lie.

There is compensation on the table if you whine and whinge and moan and complain loudly and long enough, and there is a demonstrable flaw in the delivery system, as there clearly is with the pond's service ...

On the upside, the pond is currently being given free delivery, and will for months to come ...

On the downside, what's the point of free delivery, if what's being delivered is a form of drop-out shitty hell?

Make no mistake. Just as Malware was warned about the dire state of copper connectivity in inner city suburbs, he was warned that the HFC cabling was old, wearing or worn out, and not fit for 21st century purpose. 

And in the inimitable way of arrogant Malwares, he didn't listen ...

And now those chickens of blithe ignorance are coming home to roost ...

It's hard to blame Mitch Fifield. He's just the latest in the long conga line of fudging gooses and dickheads, handed a hospital pass and trying to pretend that white is black and vice versa ...

And it takes a sublime cheek for the reptiles, now wreathed in righteous indignation for the suffering of NBN customers, when the reptiles themselves conducted a relentless campaign through their right wing commentariat, urging on the onion muncher's desire to destroy the NBN, and fibre connectivity ...

As for Optus being unhappy? Fuck them, they fucked their customers for years, and did nothing to fix their failing infrastructure, such that now even the NBN won't touch its wretched cables and boxes ...

Never mind, much better minds than the pond's have written endless stories about the current follies ...

All the pond can say is, 'told ya so'.

Sure the pond has been banging on about it for years, sure the pond has tracked all the reptile recalcitrants that did the idea of fibre down. The pond can remember Akker Dakker moaning about the ugliness of cable up poles ... and now the pond has ugly useless Optus cabling, and ugly useless NBN cabling to contemplate, as it roams the streets in connectivity despair ...

But this will be only the start of it. There'll be fixes and patch-ups and maintenance issues and repairs, ongoing for decades to come, because it was done half-arsed, it wasn't done right, and the only real way to fix it will be a complete overhaul over time ...

All this has been mentioned and noted many times over ... and alternative solutions proposed, and never adopted, as committees argue blindly over the shape of connected camels ... And so the NBN blame games start ...

Is there at least a lesson to be dragged out of the sorry mess?

Sure thing. Bung on a coal station in the Hunter Valley and let's see if we can fuck the planet in as fine a style as the onion muncher, the Liberals, the Nats, Malware and the rest of the cackling geese fucked the NBN ...

We've been fucking infrastructure for decades. Why change now?

And speaking of cackling geese, why not finish with a Rowe, as he relishes his award-winning status with a 'your' here ...