The Kevin Rudd-led Australian government has put forward a Fiber-To-The-Home, or as the Australians call it, “Fibre-to-the-Home” initiative, including an open-access network which supposedly will provider 100Mbps connections to 90% of Australian homes and businesses.  This is presumably in order to diversify the Claudia Black based-economy, which, sometime in the 1990s, became Australia’s primary export.

One of the decisions for the network, which is a public-private partnership, is that it would only provide physical and data link layer – network layers would have to be provided by companies that wished to use the network (presumably for resale,) and Cisco Australia/NZ CTO Kevin Bloch criticized this choice, because there were only one or two companies that could afford to roll out their own Layer 3 services – cutting out smaller network providers from the new network completely. 

"So we are absolutely going back to the future and making a deeper incumbency than we've ever seen before if we don't open this up and really look at what happens in the points of interconnect that's where it's going to hurt. Everybody seems to be skirting over the issue."
While Cisco stood to gain more by selling additional networking equipment to access seekers, Mr. Bloch said it was not in the national interest to choose the path NBN Co had chosen.

Later, however, Cisco’s Australia/NZ Vice President Les Williamson, said that Bloch didn’t speak for the entire Cisco company with his remarks; that while the remarks were made “in good faith,” they didn’t take into account the industry consultation process – specifically, Cisco’s role in the Communications Alliance, which promoted the “Layer 2” strategy. 

In a statement to iTWire, Williamson clearly sought to mend its relationship with both the Government and the NBN Company.
"Cisco supports the federal government’s NBN vision and strategy as well as the process it has created in order to realise this critical initiative," he said.

Australia’s broadband initiative is one of the Rudd Government’s largest initiatves, and a promotional video for the NBN created by Alcatel-Lucent include claims that the NBN program “is not just about faster Internet,” but that “The NBN is the foundation on which we will build an entirely new way of life.”

To make the point, the promotional video whacks a stick-figure upside the head with a stop sign, presumably a punishment for his NBN-related ignorance, and explains that Bob, a sheep farmer, will be able to throw sheep into his computer monitor and have them appear on the other end of the network connection.