NBN chief blames the gamers for poor service

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By Leith van Onselen

NBN chief, Bill Morrow, has jumped the shark, blaming online gamers for poor service. From The ABC:

Online gamers have been called out by the head of the National Broadband Network as a major cause of congestion on the fixed wireless network.

NBN Co is “evaluating” slowing down or limiting downloads for users during peak times in order to overcome these fixed wireless congestion problems.

At a parliamentary hearing in Sydney this afternoon, NBN Co chief executive Bill Morrow said that the heavy users likely targeted by a fair use policy were “gamers predominantly”.

“While people are gaming it is a high bandwidth requirement that is a steady streaming process,” Mr Morrow told the committee.

“This is where you can do things, to where you can traffic shape — where you say, ‘no, no, no, we can only offer you service when you’re not impacting somebody else'”…

If online gamers are the problem, then so too are streamers of online video content like Netflix, which uses far more data.

This is blame the victim stuff from NBN Co. Using the same logic, we might as well blame overcrowding on Australia’s trains, roads, schools and hospitals on too many people wanting to use them.

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Some of the responses on Twitter to Bill Morrow’s comments are amusing and highlight the idiocy of his comment:

Clearly, Bill Morrow’s hefty $3.6 million salary is money well spent. Not!

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About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.