ONE of Japan‘s richest men has labelled Australia‘s $43bn National Broadband Network “a stupid waste of taxpayers‘ money.”


Masayoshi Son, who heads Japanese internet and mobile giant Softbank and counts Apple‘s Steve Jobs and Microsoft‘s Bill Gates among his friends, attacked the Gillard government‘s signature project on Friday.

Quizzed about the NBN by The Weekend Australian after delivering a speech in Tokyo, Son said it was completely unnecessary to spend so much taxpayers‘ money.


”It‘s a waste; it‘s a stupid solution,” he said. ”Without using taxpayers‘ money you can get 21st-century infrastructure.”


Son had just finished delivering his own vision of how to deliver fibre-to-the-home connections throughout Japan without any taxpayer contribution.


He claimed that his solution, recently put to Prime Minister Naoto Kan and several members of his cabinet, would deliver basic fibre connections for just 1150 yen ($15) a month, far cheaper than what is envisaged under the NBN.


Son‘s proposal involves splitting the part-government-owned NTT into telco services and fibre network businesses and rolling out cable to all homes within five years.


Softbank and fellow carrier KDDI will fold their fibre cable infrastructure into the merged network business, which will then be 40 per cent owned by the government and 60 per cent by NTT, Softbank and KDDI.


Son said that a one-time rollout of fibre similar to the NBN proposal would cost just one-third as much as cabling individual homes on an on-demand basis.


”My advice is forget about the demand basis installation, just do it with a plan. Replace whole cities: this month Hiroshima City, next month another city, and so on,” he said.

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Posted: at 1-11-2010 11:09 AM (13 years ago) | Gistmaniac

Carry this ur Japanese thing away from here joo

Posted: at 1-11-2010 05:25 PM (13 years ago) | Gistmaniac

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