Pilot program in poorer towns was always going to fail THE lack of take-up of the NBN in its pilot sites in Tasmania is no surprise. Two of the three sites - Smithton in the northwest and Scottsdale in the northeast - are small towns with low incomes, high unemployment and tragically low levels of educational attainment. The third site, Midway Point - an outer suburb of Hobart also not known for its high disposable incomes or thriving business centre - was also a bizarre choice. If you were setting up a high-speed internet system to fail, these were excellent choices. As many in the business and broader Tasmanian community were saying at the time, the logical choice for first-mover on the NBN in this state were the centres of the key cities: Hobart, Launceston, Burnie and Devonport. Business in those centres would have embraced it much more quickly and shown the rest of the state - and the nation - what a super-fast internet could do. Instead, federal Labor introduced the NBN in relatively remote and socially and economically disadvantaged locations. Did Labor and NBN Co really expect the magic of fibre optic to transform struggling communities into some fibre optic nirvana? Or perhaps it was about winning votes in key then-Labor seats (Scottsdale in Bass, Smithton in Braddon and Midway Point in Lyons). It was an act of spectacular incompetence, misguided social engineering or misdirected pork-barrelling. Or all three.