“Okay, we’ll talk about some stuff today.” They were the opening words of iiNet’s CTO John Lindsay at the CommsDay Congress in Melbourne last week.

So, what sort of stuff? Well, it was largely to do with the NBN – what’s been done wrong and how it can be put right.

You can get a quick snapshot by flicking through his slide presentation on Slideshare, but this interview explains a little more about some of the crazy decisions that have haunted the NBN’s past. Some are the fault of the network company itself – like it’s approach to pricing – but others relate to decisions made by the ACCC. “It’s always a problem when you have lawyers designing networks,” says Lindsay.

Listen in to see the circuitous journey packets make from a home in the bush to the greater Internet. It’s not just a simple hop across the satellite, it involves a couple of return trips across land too.

As you’ll hear, Ziggy Switkowski has a lot of work to do.