The thought counts, not the gift.

Darren Pauli

Broadband, like the iPod, is an example of when IT gains fame among the general public. For pollies, it's a bridge over the 'digital divide', an idea milked by Senator Conroy and his former bitter rival Helen Coonan in their prodigious plans to save us all from dial-up.

Cut through the rhetoric and its tangible benefits are better business, more efficient essential services and more consumer offerings than you can poke a rusty copper wire at.

As the $8 billion Fibre-to-the-Node (FttN) network inflated to upwards of $20 billion, so the four or so bidders grew to almost a dozen, attracting the country's biggest corporates, entrepreneurs, and overseas investors.

And so it seems the minister's ostentatious speeches about laying fibre cables by Christmas teeter on the edge of foolishness.

If there is a voice in the industry that thinks the deadline will be met, they have yet to speak up. Most have argued from the outset that the RFP tender documents lack substance (bidders likened the acronym to Request for Policy), and Conroy, as predicted, took the first opportunity to delay the deadline.

Don't get me wrong, as a regional Australian who consumes more than his share of bandwidth, I would welcome the deluge of open-access gigabit binary with open arms.

But I can't shake my skepticism that I will be stung $70 for it when I pay the same price for a dribbling connection that struggles to call itself ADSL.

Conroy did well to raise the profile of broadband to the public, and indeed performed superbly for Labor in election time.

I have never worked as a Telstra technician, nor was I up in arms when Telstra was handed Australia's taxpayer-owned copper, but I live and breathe in the 'digital divide' and with that experience I can say Conroy is smashing a nut with a sledgehammer.

We need fibre, our schools need it, businesses need it, but why not focus on delivering dormant ADSL2+? If he wants to give Australians a Christmas present, there is one in almost every town in the country that has yet to be unwrapped.

FttN is no small venture. Our dog's breakfast of a telecommunication industry can't sustain another government cock-up