Below is a WIN News report which opens with a quote saying "potential radiation levels [of an NBN wireless tower] are life threatening(!) and... the technology is not needed as most of the area has satellite coverage."

The piece talks about the case of Wendy McClelland of Dereel (143km West of Melbourne) and her attempt to stop the installation of an NBN Fixed Wireless tower in her town. She says,

"Now they want to build a tower near my property which will just about kill me."

The piece then moves on to say how McClelland must wear protective clothing in the vicinity of radiation and shows her actually wearing a protective hood, which commenters have been quick to equate to the legendary "tin foil hat" as worn by people afraid of secret alien brain scans and 'harmful' invisible radio waves.

At no point does the report remind viewers that radiation comes from the sun, the earth, mobile phone signals, microwave ovens, all electronic devices, erm, bananas and that there is no scientific basis for saying wireless towers are harmful.

Nonetheless, this is hardly the first time that rural Australian towns have rejected having wireless towers placed in dominant locations on their landscape. Usually the complaint is due to aesthetics and revolves around an understandable reluctance of having raw natural beauty sullied by a grotesque, technological phallus.

However, the benefits of having such towers, and the services they will provide i.e. good ADSL-level broadband speeds in areas which previously had none, rarely get a look in. Fast broadband theoretically offers all manner of opportunities which benefit rural communities more so than anyone else - improved healthcare, education, teleworking and business opportunities to name but a few.

Numbers

Fixed Wireless NBN initially offers speeds of 12Mb/s downstream and 1Mb/s upstream - equivalent to a half-decent wired ADSL2+ connection. As the rollout progresses this will increase to 25Mb/s downstream and 5Mb/s upstream which potentially offers the ability for High Definition video conferencing - the backbone of many of the most important future broadband applications. However, it is not nearly as reliable as wired/cable-based connections and the latencies involved in wireless transmission also hamper some high-end applications. It's ultimately a second-rate NBN connection compared to fibre. Satellite NBN exaggerates all of these failings and makes Fixed Wireless NBN looks like a dream by comparison. But it also carries with it the enormous benefit of providing broadband to areas that have never received wired or wireless coverage before.

Rural Australia recap

The greatest failing of Australia's Fibre to the Premises NBN policy is that not everyone will get it and the people who are not - rural dwellers - are those who would make the best use of it.

The reason for this is that the tome-like NBN Implementation Study addresses the roll-out as a pure business concern with no eye on social benefits or the massive cost savings and efficiency boosts to other industries and infrastructures. It also makes no mention of the significant boost to GDP that will be delivered. Nonetheless, it describes a rollout which won't just pay for itself but make a seven per cent return on investment.

However, in order to do this, the Implementation Study cannot justify rolling out fibre to rural Australia - even though these areas managed to receive copper connections almost a century ago! The price per connection of rural premises is exponentially higher than that of metropolitan premises and metropolitan subscribers are already subsidising the high cost of connecting rural Australia with wireless technologies. To connect rural Australia with fibre would cost so much that metropolitan subscription costs would have to rise to non-viable levels.

This could possibly have all been avoided with a Cost Benefit Analysis. The cost of providing healthcare to rural Australia is also exponentially higher than it is for urban dwellers and cost savings made through fibre-based NBN telehealth have already racked up many tens of millions of dollars in savings in many localised Australian situations. The ability for the elderly and infirm plus those in urgent need of triage, to have a reliable, Full High Definition conversation with a doctor who may be thousands of kilometres away, just by turning on one's television, is just one enormous cost-saving benefit with a hefty social benefit on the side. Especially for rural Australia. We'll be looking at this more closesly over the coming months.

As it is, the cost of providing rural Australia with Fixed Wireless and Satellite connections comes in at $3bn in total - a figure that surprises many who thought the 'exponential per person rural connection figure' would make up a far larger proportion of the overall $38bn NBN figure. It begs the question, just how much would it cost, in total, to connect rural Australia to fibre?

Back to the studio

McClelland claiming that Fixed Wireless is not needed because Satellite NBN covers the town suggests ignorance of the applications of the NBN. However, this may not be the case. Last November she was quoted in The Australian calling for a wired connection instead.

That article says:

"Wendy McClelland moved to Dereel 12 years ago after suffering health problems which she attributes to microwave radiation."

However unlikely this sounds, without more information we can only speculate on McClelland's actual ill-health causes. But she also tells us that she's been on a government disability pension for ten years due to over exposure to radiation - so there must be some truth to her claims. How representative she is of the broader Australian populace is debatable - as is the extent to which one individual's highly-unusual condition should affect the development of an entire town.

What's disturbing is that the NBN, especially fibre-based NBN, will help people with difficult health problems just like this. But yet again this does not seem to be lost on her - back to The Australian:

She has written to NBN Co chief Mike Quigley asking for fibre cable to be rolled out, saying health risks posed by the planned tower have not been addressed.

"We feel like we're being classed as second-class citizens," she said. "We thought the whole idea of the NBN was about cables running out because that's faster than wireless anyway and it's safe.

"Just bring the cables out an extra few kilometres, that will solve the problem."

However, she is also asking NBN Co to build their tower elsewhere in the town, which contradicts the opening gambit of the WIN report which says Satellite is fine.

Ultimately, the mix of hysterical claims and ignorance broadcast by WIN will do little to inform anyone of the realities of NBN, especially when the next person quoted - apparently a friend, or neighbour - appears on screen saying,

"I'm not opposed to progress, but I am... when it's at the cost of human life"

That's a new low for anti-NBN accusations regardless of the intentions behind the claim.

Reportage

How angry can one be at the media report? The online community, Reddit, for one, isn't happy. Does one seriously expect local WIN News to be looking at every angle to uncover the truth and deliver a balanced verdict? Or is it a reasonable and entertaining piece that fairly reports what people said?

The problem is that hugely-negative NBN stories like this keep giving the public the impression that the NBN is a bad thing - "I saw on the news..." conversations are the public's birth right. Claims like these, appearing on the news unchallenged in this way, go some way to validate those same claims because the news doesn't show why they're so enormously wrong. By presenting a "he said, she said" counter argument the public is put in the position of choosing who it wishes to believe - regardless of merit.

Blame

But who does one really blame for the situation? I looked into this a year ago in an epic article titled The Great NBN Fail. There I blamed NBN Co and the Government for utterly failing to inform the people what the point of the infrastructure was. NBN Co came back and said that they'd get crucified for spending public money advertising their project, and sure enough they did - immediately afterwards with a very minor campaign.

The Government meanwhile has also been trying to advertise the NBN but frankly the ads are so benign, vague and terrible that one wonders whether the Government itself, or the ad agency responsible, have a clue what the NBN is about either!

NBN Co's own "Bringing broadband to life" is another catchphrase that does nothing to help people understand what it's for.

Politics

With it being election year, there is a great deal to be done in informing the public about the current NBN policy and the consequences of ditching it in favour of a Coalition Alternative. Last time round the Coalition released its plans just ten days before the election. Doing so again shouldn't matter too much this time round as we have quite a bit of information to go on plus many leads to follow, with regards to the details of the policy, despite the absence of any fully-formed plan.

At least a politician hasn't yet jumped on the claims that the NBN is bad for your health and so far no serious media outlet as lowered itself to repeat the claims unchallenged. But with the trend being for appalling mainstream reporting on the NBN plus the near-total ignorance among the general populace, political echelons and mainstream media as to its benefits, one wonders how long it will be before we hear more on this subject.

[Update: Scott Weston, who posted the WIN News item on YouTube, is a resident of Dereel and runs dereel.com.au. He complains that the majority of Dereel residents are for the NBN as communications are already severely limited - there is no mobile phone service - and this is troubling considering the town is High Risk of being destroyed by bush fire. However, he claims the "five objectors" are getting a disproportionate amount of news coverage. See his website for more information]

Thanks to Redditors me_and_batman and talentlessclown plus YouTuber Scott Weston for their efforts in bringing this issue to light.