Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, doesn’t always get things right — sometimes he misspeaks. Whether it’s the “spams and scams coming through the portal” or talking about how the Queensland Police have “cracked peer to peer”, Conroy sometimes messses things up.
And whenever he does, the press gives him a fair serve.
However, you have to feel for Conroy recently when he did get something completely right — and then somebody else tried to tell him he was wrong anyway.
The occasion was — unsurprisingly — talkback radio. Conroy had apparently explained to a Melbourne presenter that a number of internet service providers were already providing cheap deals on “25 megs” and “100 megs” plans on the National Broadband Network in Tasmania.
Now on this occasion Conroy was completely right. There are ISPs like Internode, Primus and iiNet offering 25Mbps, 50Mbps and 100Mbps plans on the NBN in Tasmania — those are the three speeds being offered on a wholesale basis by NBN Co.
But that wasn’t good enough for Herald Sun commentator, Terry McCrann, who tried to take Conroy to task for what he saw as his mistake about the NBN, which McCrann described as the Government’s continuing “multi-billion dollar disaster”.
“Whether he meant to say megabits or megabytes, either way he was, well, wrong. He should have said “gigs”, as in: gigabytes. That’s 20/100 GBs,” wrote McCrann, in an article which went up late last month, but has only just come to our attention.
“Megabits – mbps – is the measure of the speed of the download. Gigabytes – GBs – is the measure of the volume of what you download,” McCrann blithely continued.
Oh, dear. We bet Conroy had a chuckle at that one.
