blog You really have to wonder sometimes whether News Ltd’s Australian newspapers have it in for the Federal Government’s National Broadband Network project. The Daily Telegraph was shown a while back to have been repeatedly wrong in several reports on the NBN, The Australian has often taken a broadly negative viewpoint of the project, and now we have a new dubious piece from The Herald Sun in Melbourne.

If you read the first few lines of columnist Helen McInerney’s tirade (we recommend you click here for the full article), you’d believe that the NBN infrastructure connected to her house was somehow deficient, as it wasn’t delivering the 100Mbps speeds McInerney was promised. But then later on, we find out why, following a conversation she had with Telstra over the issue:

“Telstra, he told me, had slowed my broadband speed due to excessive usage … according to the NBN man at Telstra on one day so much information was uploaded via my account that the speed was reduced as a penalty.”

So wait … McInerney’s residence was selected as one of the few, the very few, Australian homes to be part of the NBN’s early stage rollout program, and she connected to the NBN’s fibre at 100Mbps with Telstra. Subsequently, somehow she burns through her quota, not a surprising thing when she openly admits she doesn’t know the difference between a gigabyte and a megabyte, then uses her high-profile column in a huge newspaper to sledge the NBN as as a result? Riiiight. Someone call the waaambulance, we’ve got a terminal case of first world problems.

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