Watching the 7:30 report. Helen Coonan (aka the startled deer) is being interviewed about the Govt's plan for FTTN, WiMax etc. The poor woman talked about broadband connections with "One Gigabit of power".

*sigh*

Good to see that, as per usual, our coalition government has given us an IT&T minister who knows nothing at all about their portfolio.

Update 19/06/07 - Transcript of the interview is available; search for "gigabyte" to find the quote. I heard gigabit, they heard gigabyte... but we both heard power.

Favorite line from the interview:

KERRY O'BRIEN: And it's only taken you 11 years to get to this. You must cringe a little today as you try to sell the Government's credentials...

There's video on the site too, and if you're on Internode (as I am), such things on the ABC site don't count toward download quotas, so feel free to watch.

Oh, and J.Ho isn't much better. There was one point on an earlier story when he was being shown a broadband device, and asked "Is it fast enough to download movies over?". I'm curious about JHo's p2p network of choice.

There's also this gem:

MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: ... a system called WiMAX.

BROADBAND EXPERT: It uses 5.8 GHz.

JOHN HOWARD: That's an… Optus?

BROADBAND EXPERT: It's a class license spectrum. So everyone is free to use that. Plenty of spectrum to play in, that's the good part about it.

JOHN HOWARD: Ohhh. That is good.

Again, check the video for some classic shots of JHo peering inquisitively at this WiMax thing, stroking his chin, and asking if this thing is an Optus - it's all around 1:50-2:00.

Updated again: Stilgherrian has a much more insightful comments about the 11 years remarks:

So how come back in 1995, Australia was third in the world in terms of Internet bandwidth and computing power per head of population, while today after a decade of Howard at the helm we don’t even make the top 10?