Here are a few I have come across the last week or so. Note: Each link is followed by a title and a few paragraphs. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or subscription payment.
General Comment
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An amazing week with a serial fax receiver just letting patients suffer by not telling the sender he (and his wife) were collecting and reading them and Qld Health trying for a gold medal in the IT stuff ups competition!
The NBN also seems to be in a state of flux.
Read on!
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Queensland Health headaches continue as suppliers aren't paid on time
By Lucy Stone
Updated September 19, 2019 — 3.26pmfirst published at 11.22am
Queensland Health Minister Steven Miles has been forced to defend the department’s $135 million ordering software after it was revealed frustrated suppliers were not being paid on time.
In Parliament on Thursday morning Mr Miles confirmed a “dedicated response team” had been established to “rapidly address any issues impacting payment time frames”.
“An Accounts Payable Service Desk was launched on September 17, 2019, to provide a central point of escalation for suppliers across the state, regarding payment of invoices,” he said.
Mr Miles said the new support line had taken 70 calls on its first day.
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Addicts will be stopped from 'doctor shopping' for prescription drugs
By Felicity Caldwell
September 17, 2019 — 9.26pm
Addicts will be blocked from "doctor shopping" to get their hands on deadly prescription drugs under new laws passed this week.
Queensland Health will set up a real-time database, which will monitor the prescribing of dependence-forming medicines, such as sedatives, sleeping tablets and some painkillers, and be searchable by pharmacists and doctors.
The recently released Annual Overdose Report, from the Penington Institute, revealed prescription opioid medications were responsible for more than half of all accidental drug-induced deaths in 2017.
Unintentional drug overdoses killed at least 1612 Australians in 2017, more than the national road toll.
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Real-time script monitoring legislation passes in another state
The system needs to be simple and easy to use, cautions Queensland GP Dr Richard Kidd
19th September 2019
By Kemal Atlay
Thousands more GPs will be able to access real-time prescribing data from next year to help deal with doctor-shoppers.
This week, the Queensland Parliament passed legislation to track both the prescribing and dispensing of opioids, benzodiazepines and products that combine codeine with other medicines, which have all been linked with drug dependence.
Details on how the system will work — including the way GPs will access the information — are yet to be thrashed out.
But it will eventually be made mandatory, with doctors who fail to check the system before prescribing a monitored drug facing fines of up to $2600.
The legislation includes exemptions for doctors who have a “reasonable excuse”, such as treatment of an injury in an emergency, and in circumstances where the patient is unlikely to be doctor-shopping, such as requests for pain relief for end-of-life care.
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Accenture's $915m My Health Record deal prepped for market
Ten-year contract nears expiry.
The Australian Digital Health Agency has taken the first step in its plans to replatform the My Health Record system ahead of the 2020 expiry of its deal with national infrastructure provider Accenture.
The My Health Record system operator issued an advisory late on Friday to inform industry of its intention to conduct a “potential” request for information for the new platform later this year.
The market approach would provide an “opportunity [for industry] to contribute to a conversation about the future of the national infrastructure including My Health Record,” the agency said.
The pre-release notice comes more than a year after the ADHA first said it had begun talks to replatform the e-health record system, which switched from opt-in to opt-out earlier this year.
Accenture has held the lucrative deal for the design, build and integration of the system since 2011, when it was known as the personally controlled electronic health record (PCEHR).
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Current ATM View - RFI DH2298
Pre-release notice - Request for Information about the future of the national infrastructure
Contact Details
NIM Contact
P: 0
ATM ID: RFI DH2298
Agency: Australian Digital Health Agency
Category: 43200000 - Components for information technology or broadcasting or telecommunications
Close Date & Time:
Publish Date: 13-Sep-2019
Location: ACT, NSW, VIC, SA, WA, QLD, NT, TAS
Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Darwin, Hobart
Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Darwin, Hobart
ATM Type: Notice
Description:
This is a pre-release notice intended to provide industry awareness of a potential Request for Information (RFI) opportunity to contribute to a conversation about the future of the national infrastructure, including My Health Record currently operated by the Australian Digital Health Agency. This RFI may seek information from industry about potential future options and themes for products and services, including technology considerations.
The Agency reserves the right to not proceed with the intention to approach the market, clarifications in regard to the RFI will not be provided at this time.
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'Detailed and graphic': Clinic faxes patients' highly sensitive medical histories to wrong number
By Melissa Cunningham
September 18, 2019 — 10.58am
A Melbourne medical clinic has been inadvertently faxing highly sensitive patient details including mental health and family medical histories to a Greenvale man for at least two years.
The man said he has been sporadically faxed at least 10 medical referrals for specialist consultations from the Harding Street Medical Centre in Coburg.
The medical documents include mental health plans for patients diagnosed with severe anxiety, depression and sleep disorders, the bulk of which are women experiencing postnatal depression.
Faxed documents seen by The Age include patients' highly detailed and sensitive medical histories along with the medical backgrounds of their family members, including their children.
The documents also include detailed doctors' notes and medications the patient is taking.
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GP clinic faxes medical records to stranger for two years
He read patients' sensitive information but said nothing because he 'didn't want to alarm them'
19th September 2019
A Melbourne general practice has allegedly been faxing patient medical records to a random stranger for more than two years, The Age reports.
The unnamed man has received records for 10 patients — including medical histories, details of family members, doctors' notes and prescribed medication.
The faxes were specialist referrals for patients with severe anxiety, depression and sleep disorders. Most of the patients were women with postnatal depression.
The man told The Age he had become well-acquainted with one woman’s ongoing battle with postnatal depression, insomnia and a “host of deeply personal circumstances”.
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Vibration dulls pain of injection
US skin cancer clinic study shows it even helps those who catastrophise pain
19th September 2019
A vibratory device can reduce the pain of an anaesthetic injection prior to skin cancer surgery, but it it is not as effective in patients who catastrophise pain, a study shows.
US plastic surgeons studied 87 patients who underwent a total of 101 cutaneous cancer surgeries at a tertiary dermatological surgery clinic, with most surgeries being on the head and neck.
Patients were randomised to receive treatment with a 10cm hand-held 100Hz vibratory anaesthetic device, either switched on or off, available online or over the counter in the US.
Twenty-six patients catastrophised pain, meaning they rated their anticipated pain above four on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the worst possible pain.
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Former Qld Health CIO cleared by corruption watchdog
After conflict of interest allegations.
Queensland’s corruption watchdog has dropped its investigation into former health department chief information officer Richard Ashby after failing to find sufficient evidence for prosecution.
Ashby resigned as Queensland Health CIO, a role that also made him the head of eHealth Queensland, in January over conflict of interest allegations.
The allegations related to an undeclared relationship with a staff member working on the replacement of the state’s Patient Administration System, a project that has now been dumped.
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QLD closes investigation on former eHealth boss
Corruption watchdog clears Dr Richard Ashby of any wrongdoing
Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC) said on Thursday that there was insufficient evidence to commence a criminal prosecution against the state’s former eHealth chief, Dr Richard Ashby.
Dr Ashby resigned as eHealth Queensland’s chief executive in February following allegations of an undeclared relationship involving an individual linked to the replacement of the state’s patient administration system (PAS).
The PAS records and retrieves non-clinical information about patients and is separate to the state’s digital hospital system – the Integrated Electronic Medical Record (ieMR).
In a statement provided to CIO Australia, the CCC said there was insufficient evidence to commence any criminal prosecution and its investigation into these matters has now concluded.
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Corruption watchdog ends investigation into former eHealth boss
By Lucy Stone
September 20, 2019 — 10.16am
The Crime and Corruption Commission has concluded its investigation into allegations levelled against former eHealth Queensland chief executive Richard Ashby.
Former director-general of Queensland Health Michael Walsh referred allegations of an undeclared personal relationship with another staffer to the corruption watchdog in late January this year.
Dr Richard Ashby held the eHealth Queensland chief executive role for several years.
Dr Ashby, who held the eHealth Queensland chief executive role for several years, resigned at the same time for personal reasons.
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Aged care cast study: Digital platforms supporting private healthcare
How can we better link hospital discharge to aged care services and residential aged care facilities?
This Innovating Health discussion in Sydney was hosted by Matiu Bush, Senior Strategist Business Innovation at Bolton Clarke, and Professor Colleen Doyle, Senior Principal Research Fellow at the National Ageing Research Institute (NARI) who are both focused on driving innovation and creativity in the aged and community care sector.
They provided overview and context to a problem statement on understanding the current patient and family journey in a time of high stress and multiple decisions, and how to provide more timely information to support families and patients at this time.
Colleen is a published co-author of the highly regarded Moving into Residential Aged Care – A Practical Guide for Older People and their Families. Matiu is founder of One Good Street, a social initiative enabling local communities to connect and support older people within their neighbourhood, and lead digital and service strategy within Bolton Clarke.
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Could this app predict the likelihood of falls in the elderly?
Siobhan is a reporter with Australian Doctor Group.
17th September 2019
When a trip to ED can so easily turn into a need for full-time care, it’s easy to see why there is a fear of falling among the elderly.
Fall-related injuries account for about 250,000 hospital bed days per year in NSW alone — a figure projected to almost double by 2050, says the Australian and New Zealand Fall Prevention Society.
About 10% of those hospitalised will move into a nursing home for the first time.
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13 September 2019
Google bans ads for unproven treatments
Google has banned the advertising of experimental medical procedures, including unproven stem cell therapies, in a move welcomed by the International Society for Stem Cell Research and Stem Cells Australia (ISSCR).
Policy adviser Adrienne Biddings wrote in a blog post that the new policy would “prohibit ads selling treatments that have no established biomedical or scientific basis. The new policy also includes treatments that are rooted in basic scientific findings and preliminary clinical experience, but currently have insufficient formal clinical testing to justify widespread clinical use”.
Google had seen “a rise in bad actors attempting to take advantage of individuals by offering untested, deceptive treatments. Often times, these treatments can lead to dangerous health outcomes and we feel they have no place on our platforms”.
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September 16 2019 - 1:00PM
Bendigo's Jo Rasmussen named 2019 National Mental Health Advocate of the Year
Emma D'Agostino
HAD someone told Jo Rasmussen she would win a national award for mental health advocacy, back when she needed the system's help most, she likely wouldn't have believed it.
"Had it not been for my case manager recognising I had some skills in advocating for others I probably wouldn't have gone down this path," Ms Rasmussen said.
"I didn't know it existed."
It has been six years since Ms Rasmussen got her first gig in mental health, volunteering as part of a mental health consumer participation group.
Today, she works as a strategic projects coordinator at Murray Primary Health Network.
Momentum is growing around one of the projects Ms Rasmussen has championed, called Stop Stigma.
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Patient care goes digital at 20th NSW Health ICU
17 September 2019
Patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney (SVHS) are the latest to benefit from eHealth NSW's Electronic Record for Intensive Care (eRIC), which is assisting clinicians to make better-quality decisions for the critically ill.
Following deployment at the 20-bed SVHS ICU in late August, eRIC is now live in 20 NSW Health Intensive Care Units.
More than 32,000 patients have been treated using the state-of-the-art clinical information system, which replaces paper charts and forms by electronically capturing patient data every minute from multiple systems and devices.
“eRIC gives us the ability to view and complete parts of the ward round away from the bedside, enabling medical teams to focus completely on patient examination and communication at the bedside, rather than focusing on flowcharts or monitors,” said Dr Priya Nair, ICU Director at SVHS in inner-city Darlinghurst.
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The vicious cycle of tracking periods with apps
Alice Clarke
Journalist
September 20, 2019 — 9.34am
Fun fact: some historians theorise that the 44,000 year old Lebombo Bone, with its 29 notches, was humanity’s first ever recorded period tracker.
Cycle, Apple's new period tracking app, avoids some but not all of the usual pitfalls of the genre.
Given our species' prolonged and understandable interest in menstrual cycles, it’s surprising that we still haven’t come up with an effective, foolproof method for tracking and prediction. (Though, that becomes less surprising when you look into the history of attitudes towards women in medical research.) So for now, millions upon millions of people are turning to apps to track when they might next be taking Carrie to the prom.
After a month of tracker apps being in the news for the wrong reasons, carving notches in a bone can seem like a viable alternative. But, now that Apple is joining the period tracking game in iOS 13 and watchOS 6, it’s worth looking at the issues facing the genre.
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ACT Health Directorate taps TechnologyOne for SaaS health IT services
Nathan Eddy | 20 Sep 2019
The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Health Directorate has selected Software as a Service (SaaS) company TechnologyOne to replace the directorate’s legacy, on-premise inventory management system with an SaaS solution.
The four-year, $3.2 million whole-of-government SaaS contract incorporates technology that will supply supply chain, prosthesis management, business intelligence and analytics.
The Health Directorate is tasked with providing a comprehensive range of health services to the people of the ACT, including setting health policy and planning the delivery of health services.
“We offer a healthcare-specific solution that is capable of seamlessly managing the full supply chain lifecycle of all ACT hospitals,” Stuart MacDonald, TechnologyOne’s chief operating officer, said in a statement.
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Vic driver licences on national database
Victorian driver licence data will be uploaded into an Australian facial recognition database to stop identity theft, as the government vows details are safe.
Christine McGinn
Australian Associated Press September 17, 20198:56am
Every Victorian driver's licence will be uploaded into a national database to prevent identity theft with the government promising details will be secure.
The data will be put into the federal government's National Driver Licence Facial Recognition Solution to make it easier for authorised government agencies to stamp out identity theft and those avoiding demerit points.
Only Victoria Police and VicRoads can use the data at this stage.
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Tuesday, 17 September 2019 10:13
Vic drivers' licence data to be used for facial recognition
Data from drivers' licences issued in Victoria will be uploaded to the Federal Government's National Driver Licence Facial Recognition Solution, following an agreement reached by the Council of Australian Governments.
A statement from the Victorian Government on Tuesday said the data would be used to identify fake licences or multiple IDs issued to a single individual and curb fraud.
It said the data would only be available to other Victorian-based government agencies.
Expanding the use of the date would not be authorised until the government of Victoria was satisfied by the proposed identity-matching Services Bill which is before the Federal Parliament.
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Monday, 16 September 2019 09:36
China behind February Australian parliament breach: claim
Australian intelligence officials have concluded that the breach of the Federal Parliament network in February was carried out by China, but has kept it quiet to avoid any problems in the bilateral trade relationship, a report claims.
Reuters said it had been told by five individuals who had "direct knowledge of the matter" that the Australian Signals Directorate had come to the conclusion in March that the Chinese Ministry of State Security was behind the attack.
The breach was made public on 8 February and the passwords of all users were changed as a precaution. The Liberal, National and Labor party networks were all said to have been infiltrated.
Since then there has been speculation that China was behind the hack, but no leaks have made this claim. Reuters is the first to quote unnamed sources as saying Beijing was the culprit.
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Alcidion signs partnership with Healthscope for data and analytics
Melbourne, Victoria – Alcidion Group Ltd (ASX: ALC) (Alcidion) has signed a three-year agreement with Australian private healthcare provider Healthscope to implement a solution to support its data and analytics strategy. The value of the agreement is $895K over three years.
The objective is for Healthscope and Alcidion to work together to support Healthscope’s vision for using data to drive transformation in the way healthcare is managed and delivered. Using data from Healthscope’s 43 hospitals, Alcidion will develop dashboards to support predictive analytics and long-range planning for Healthscope services.
Alcidion Managing Director Kate Quirke said, “Alcidion is excited to establish this relationship with Healthscope to augment their data and analytics capabilities across the organisation. This is Alcidion’s first implementation of our data analytics capabilities into a private hospital group. It demonstrates how important data is becoming across the healthcare sector. We look forward to sharing our extensive capabilities around health care data management to assist Healthscope to drive better outcomes.”
The objective is for Healthscope and Alcidion to work together to support Healthscope’s vision for using data to drive transformation in the way healthcare is managed and delivered. Using data from Healthscope’s 43 hospitals, Alcidion will develop dashboards to support predictive analytics and long-range planning for Healthscope services.
Alcidion Managing Director Kate Quirke said, “Alcidion is excited to establish this relationship with Healthscope to augment their data and analytics capabilities across the organisation. This is Alcidion’s first implementation of our data analytics capabilities into a private hospital group. It demonstrates how important data is becoming across the healthcare sector. We look forward to sharing our extensive capabilities around health care data management to assist Healthscope to drive better outcomes.”
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Kaspersky: Number of attacked medical devices declines globally, but not in some APAC countries
Sep. 17, 2019, 06:00 PM
MELBOURNE, Australia, Sept. 18, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- More than two years after Wannacry ransomware crippled medical facilities and other organisations worldwide, the healthcare sector seems to be learning its lessons as Kaspersky reveals a decreased number of medical devices attacked in 2019.
Statistics from the global cybersecurity company showed that from 30% of hospital devices infected in 2017, medical organisations have witnessed only 28% of attacks in 2018, almost one-third lesser for the current year at 19%.
Kaspersky warns that the decline in number of attacks against devices in healthcare facilities is not observed everywhere. More than seven-in-10 medical machines in Venezuela (77%), the Philippines (76%), Libya (75%), and Argentina (73%) are still subjected to web attacks based on the company's freshest data.
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Compensation pledge as funds tighten security after data hack claims
By Stephen Miles and Sarah Danckert
September 19, 2019 — 12.00am
Australians who have had their super accounts drained by crime gangs will be fully compensated as some of the country's biggest funds ramp up cyber-security in the wake of an alleged $10 million international identity theft scam.
It was revealed on Wednesday that several of Australia's largest funds had been affected by the alleged fraud when police charged 21-year-old Melbourne woman Jasmine Vella-Arpaci with 53 fraud offences related to the alleged siphoning off of super funds.
REST Super, AustralianSuper, HESTA and Hostplus were named in court documents on Wednesday, with police alleging that their customers were victims of identity theft and that some of the funds had been hacked as part of a complex international criminal operation.
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Thursday, 19 September 2019 08:28
Windows ransomware WannaCry still spreading, but the kick has gone
The infamous ransomware WannaCry, which burst on to the world stage in May 2017, is still very much alive and infecting Windows PCs, but a zipped portion appears to have gotten corrupted, preventing its encryption and ransom note creation components from working.
Noting this, the security firm Sophos said in a detailed paper released on Wednesday that unpatched Windows PCs were still providing a welcome for WannaCry which was crafted using the leaked NSA exploit, EternalBlue.
Sophos researchers Peter Mackenzie, Fraser Howard and Anton Kalinin said that more than 12,000 variants of what is arguably the most famous ransomware had been discovered.
WannaCry was stopped in its tracks when British security researcher Marcus Hutchins registered a domain he had found in its source code; the malware had been programmed to check this domain, and continue spreading if it could not access the domain.
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Millions of Australians' sensitive medical images, data left openly accessible
No code or tools needed.
German security researchers scanning the internet have found hundreds of millions of sensitive medical images being easily accesible on unprotected servers worldwide, including around 2.6 million in Australia.
Security vendor Greenbone looked for internet-connected Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) servers that healthcare organisations use to store radiology images of patients for medical professionals to review.
With the help of scanning systems such as Shodan.io and Censys.io, the researchers found a large amount of completely unprotected PACS servers.
Greenbone discovered 590 internet-accessible PACS servers with 24 million records in 52 countries; on these, 400 million images could be downloaded with no access controls.
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Government's 'robo-debt' recovery scheme facing class action
By Rob Harris
September 17, 2019 — 5.30pm
The federal government is facing a "David and Goliath" class action challenging the legality of its so-called "robo-debt" scheme, which aims to recover tens of millions of dollars from welfare recipients including pensioners.
Melbourne law firm Gordon Legal on Tuesday flagged the action, which could potentially be on behalf of thousands of clients who have had Centrelink benefits clawed back by the Coalition's automated debt recovery program since mid-2016.
Gordon Legal senior partner Peter Gordon said its investigations had revealed between $200 million and $300 million had been "wrongly" taken from people through the scheme, with many hit with an extra 10 per cent penalty. He said the basis for the challenge was that the federal government financially benefited when it took money that legitimately belonged to welfare recipients.
"These people are the least able ... to afford the heavy-handed actions, which are based on a system that used ATO averages that didn't take into account individual circumstances," Mr Gordon said in Canberra on Tuesday. "The unfair and incorrect assumptions had a devastating financial impact on people's lives. The emotional distress for people who have done nothing wrong has been high."
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Govt suggests NBN Co may need competitors
To drive fixed-line tech forward over the next decade.
Communications Minister Paul Fletcher says NBN Co may need some competition over the next decade to reduce the risk of Australia’s fixed-line network falling behind.
Speaking at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) conference in Canberra yesterday, Fletcher suggested that relying on NBN Co alone to deliver fixed-line improvements over the next decade may not guarantee Australia’s future.
Instead, he raised the prospect of reintroducing infrastructure-based competition to Australia’s fixed-line market.
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NBN Co finally commercialises IoT connectivity
After starting traffic light trials back in 2017.
NBN Co has launched a commercial internet of things (IoT) service that will offer fixed-line connectivity for traffic management systems, ATMs and other devices.
The service is called ‘Network Extensions’ and covers things like “traffic signals, traffic cameras, roadside emergency points, rail boom gates, street light controllers, certain types of CCTV, stand-alone automatic teller machines, environmental sensors and public transport infrastructure,” NBN Co said.
Initially it will use fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) connections, but NBN Co said it is exploring the use of other access technologies.
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Govt says NBN Co's Sky Muster inherited an image problem
Blames Labor for it.
Take-up of NBN Co’s Sky Muster satellite service is still impacted by a “hangover” brought about by poor user experiences with the now-retired interim satellite service, Communications Minister Paul Fletcher has claimed.
Fletcher used a CEDA address today to exhume the government’s long-running angle of “Labor mismanagement” of the NBN.
One of Fletcher’s new charges, however, is that Labor is to blame for the lack of activations on Sky Muster, where just one in five users in the footprint has actually connected.
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NBN Co pitches 100Mbps+ users as a capacity management feature
But plan could be 'undercooked' before it can even be actioned.
NBN Co is pitching a new set of 100Mbps-plus plans to internet providers as a way to offset the rising cost to serve all users on the network.
The company hopes internet providers will be incentivised to sell new 100Mbps, 250Mbps and 1Gbps plans if those plans come with excess connectivity virtual circuit (CVC) bandwidth that can be shared among all users in a particular area.
As iTnews has previously discussed, traffic exchanged between the retail service provider (RSP) and NBN Co runs over a single CVC interconnect at each of the 121 points of interconnect (PoIs).
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NBN Co still thinks 100/40Mbps might become 'business-only'
But 'naturally', instead of via formal direction.
NBN Co won’t formally specify 100/40Mbps as ‘business-only’ but expects that may be an end result of bringing a new 110/20Mbps service to market.
The company’s general manager commercial Ken Walliss told iTnews that NBN Co would not specify a particular tiered product as being only for business or residential users.
NBN Co proposed a cut-price 110/20Mbps product from the outset of its wholesale price review in June. It said at the time that 110/20Mbps would be offered alongside existing 100/40Mbps services.
However, as iTnews later revealed, NBN Co actually proposed something different to retail service providers, canvassing their “support [for] the development of a residentially-focused lower cost [100Mbps] AVC ... coupled with re-positioning of the 100/40 AVC as a business-focused service to support high-speed TC-2 and business discount bundles”.
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Tuesday, 17 September 2019 16:46
NBN price cuts for wholesale NBN services good news for ‘budget conscious’ households says Minister
NBN Co’s flagging of proposed lower wholesaler pricing for some broadband network entry level product bundles is good news for “budget conscious households” who are now likely to have better options in terms of connecting to the NBN, according to the Minister for Communications, Paul Fletcher.
The Minister’s comments follow NBN Co’s release on Tuesday of its wholesale pricing review paper in which it says it proposes to introduce significant discounts and extra capacity inclusions across the majority of its wholesale broadband product range.
The proposed changes in the Pricing Review 2019 Consultation Paper 2 follow 12 weeks of extensive consultation by NBN Co with more than 50 Retail Service Providers (RSPs) and industry groups.
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Tuesday, 17 September 2019 18:05
5G ‘unlikely’ significant threat to NBN Co business, privatisation talk 'premature': minister
The minister responsible for delivery of the national broadband network says the introduction of 5G services in Australia is unlikely to pose a significant threat to the NBN Co's business plan – and has swept aside "premature" talk about privatisation of the network.
Commenting on NBN Co’s release of its corporate white paper on Tuesday, Communications Minister Paul Fletcher said the plan assumed about 75% of households would take up the NBN, “so there’s already an assumption that some households will not take up the NBN for a range of reasons and that can potentially include 5G”.
In response to questions, he said it was “premature” to be talking about the privatisation of NBN Co. Asked how many more households he was expecting to sign up to the NBN under the new pricing, Fletcher said, "We believe there are about 500,000 budget conscious households within the existing NBN footprint who right now are not taking the NBN because they don’t think it represents value for money for what they want to do”.
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Govt pitches unlimited 12Mbps as "entry-level" NBN
Suggests retail cost of $60 a month.
The federal government has taken the unusual step of specifying an expected retail price for a 12Mbps entry-level broadband service on the national broadband network.
Communications Minister Paul Fletcher said the end of a punitive fee charged to retail service providers that used NBN Co’s 12Mbps tier for broadband represented “good news for budget conscious households”.
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NBN unveils ultra-fast bundle, tweaks prices
Sep 17, 2019 — 12.00pm
NBN Co has unveiled a new ultra-fast broadband bundle that its says will give consumers access to gigabit per second speeds at a 68 per cent discount on current prices, in a new price plan that includes a number of tweaks to existing bundles.
Under the proposed changes, retailers will be able to sell 1 Gbps bundles for $80 a month. That will include download speeds of 1 Gbps, 20 times faster than NBN's most popular plan, as well as upload speeds of 50 megabits per second, and bandwidth of 5.75 Mbps.
The changes, the outcome of NBN Co's price review, will also include a cheaper 25 Mbps product - though with less bandwidth - and slightly more bandwidth in its most popular 50 Mbps bundle, though no change to the $45 per month price tag.
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NBN Co confirms it won't scrap CVC charges
Or increase the amount included with plans substantially.
NBN Co is set to ignore calls from across the internet industry to dump the connectivity virtual circuit (CVC) charge, meaning it will remain a variable cost for retail providers for the foreseeable future.
The formal position on CVC confirms comments made on a recent results call that the CVC construct would likely be retained.
The network operator is also favouring more conservative increases to the amount of CVC included with each broadband service than what the industry had asked for.
The combined effect, if waved through, would entrench the current structure of NBN pricing through to at least May 2021.
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NBN Co to revive 25Mbps broadband services tier
But offers little respite for entry-level users.
NBN Co is set to revive 25Mbps broadband services on its network as an “intermediate” option for residential users, though it will cost only $8 less wholesale than a 50Mbps plan.
The cost will be reduced by slashing the amount of connectivity virtual circuit (CVC) bandwidth that comes bundled with 25Mbps services, from 2Mbps to 1.25Mbps, under a proposal raised by NBN Co today.
NBN Co virtually eliminated 25Mbps services when it started selling 50Mbps services for the same price at the end of 2017.
Though this was initially a one-year promotion, it later set a flat wholesale charge for 12Mbps, 25Mbps and 50Mbps services, all but ensuring no one would sign up to 25Mbps.
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NBN Co floats "up to" gigabit speeds for $80 a month
With a small uplink to slash costs.
NBN Co is proposing to slash the uplink speeds on its 250Mbps and “up to” 1Gbps services to bring them within the financial reach of fibre and HFC-connected households.
In a consultation paper released to retail service providers (RSPs) today, NBN Co said that a 250Mbps service would cost a minimum $68 wholesale, while an “up to” 1Gbps service would cost a minimum $80 wholesale.
NBN Co said the new products were priced between 32 percent and 68 percent less than current products in those tiers.
The way NBN Co will do this is by axing most of the uplink.
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Enjoy!
David.
