Liberal’s hammered over broadband by their businesses constituency
During the debate between Minister Stephen Conroy, Tony Smith, the Opposition spokesperson, and Scott Ludham, the Greens Senator – and again later that same night, in the interview with Opposition Leader Tony Abbott – it became clear that the Liberal Party has a very poor understanding of the economic and social importance of broadband; of the technologies involved; and of the policies and regulations needed to make this happen.
This was further highlighted by the press release from its Coalition partner, the National Party, in which they spoke of a ‘high speed telephone service’.
Even the generally staunch Liberal supporters, Australian businesses, are up in arms about the Liberal Party’s broadband policies:
- on the day of the announcement the Australian Information Industry Association even put an advertisement in the Australian Financial Review
- the Small Businesses of Australia are in an uproar – a lack of affordable high-speed broadband will severely hamper their businesses
- · the healthcare industry has expressed grave concerns – the Opposition will kill not only the NBN, but also the e-health policy that just saw two large healthcare organisations in Australia (the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners and the Aged Care Association) launching large-scale e-health projects based on the government’s e-health identifier and NBN policies
- the government’s NBN plan is supported by Telstra, all other ISPs, telcos in Australia (except the failed AAPT), the IT industry, electricity companies in Australia, the content industry (including broadcasters), and the Business Council of Australia
I find it astonishing that the Liberals claim that they can build this network for one-seventh of the cost. If that were the case other countries who are building FttH (Fibre to the Home) networks would all be wasting their money. These countries include Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, France, Switzerland, the USA, and others.
How on earth can $750 million be sufficient to bring high-speed broadband (12Mb/s) to 97% of Australians?
Their claim of up to 100Mb/s is deceptive also. This could mean 1 or 2Mb/s – and if they are talking about a mass deployment of wireless technologies then speeds could easily go as low as that.
Furthermore, as several commentators have asked the Opposition, if so much reliance is being placed on wireless, where does the spectrum that is needed for such a plan come from? Both Tony Smith and Tony Abbott have failed to answer that question. Fixed-wireless broadband deployment for large-scale broadband deployment has been rejected by basically every other country in the world, and some basic research would have revealed this to the Opposition.
Either the Opposition is completely incompetent on issues like broadband (Tony Abbott excused himself along these lines on the ABC’s 7.30 Report), or they are totally naïve on the issue and, as such, are sending us back to the Dark Ages – or are they deliberately trying to deceive the Australian people simply for political gain?
Their scaremongering might win them some votes, but a political party should campaign on the basis of superior leadership, not by generating FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).
While we can argue about cost, and the politics associated with that, the Opposition will not find one single respected telecoms expert who can confirm that their plan will be able to deliver the outcome they claim.
The most worrying element, as I mentioned yesterday, continues to be that the Coalition completely lacks the vision and understanding of broadband as an essential ingredient in delivering the urgently needed government innovations in healthcare, transport, energy, environment and education. This has nothing to do with the telephone network. As Andy Hope commented on yesterday’s blog: ‘The Libs do not seem to realise that the NBN Co is just that – a big business in itself, not a government department’.
The Coalition has also completely lost sight of one of the main benefits of optical fibre in this country, which is not greater speeds, but rather the ability to cover longer distances before attenuation becomes significant. This makes it possible to drive fibre deeper into the country and therefore give more Australians access to true high-speed broadband.
It is also interesting to see that this was actually an issue that Greens’ Senator Scott Ludham highlighted in the debate. As I have been trying to establish in my discussions with the National Party, this should be a key policy issue for them. Under the Coalition policy regional Australia will get a second-rate broadband service. The question is whether regional Australia, when it becomes aware of this, will then be able to get politicians to come up with a second NBN for them – ripping up the inadequate system that the Opposition will have installed to the tune of $6 billion and replacing it with a proper fibre-based network?
That is what I would call waste.
As was established during the discussions in the early 00s, under the previous government, 12Mb/s DSL speeds can only be guaranteed to a distance of 1.5km of copper line. Without a widespread FttH (Fibre to the Home) rollout everybody more than 1.5 km from their local exchange will not be guaranteed 12Mb/s or more. This implies that the Coalition is indeed going back to the past and is looking to propose an FttN (Fibre to the Node) network. This was the network that Telstra said it would roll out to 50% of the population (metropolitan), for which it would charge between $85 and $95 a month per household for a speed of 0.5Mb/s (yes, half a megabit).
That proposal was rejected by the then Liberal Minister for Communications, Helen Coonan.
It puzzles me that they are now bringing that proposal back.
As a further indication of the Opposition’s lack of understanding of the technological implications of their policy, with an FttN network a large amount of fibre is also needed in the rollout – a fact that they appear not to appreciate when talking about using existing technologies. As Telstra indicated at the time, that would mean the deployment of some 20,000 street cabinets and the nature of such an architecture is that there is no room whatsoever for competition. Who is going to put competitive investments in these cabinets? And, even if that was the case, are the people in those streets going to accept large street cabinets to host all of those competing services?
We had this discussion five years ago and it was rejected then, and by a Liberal government. Why are they revisiting this totally flawed proposition?
While we know that the Opposition rejects the structural separation of Telstra we do not know what their alternative policy will be. The rest of the world is moving to open systems, but there is absolutely no commitment to ‘open access’ in the access network from the Opposition. This will turn their network into a non-competitive nightmare of locked-in lack of choice for customers, a private monopoly with high retail prices, and a huge business in access seeker/access provider disputes for lawyers.
Any discussions on this topic will drag on for years. Do we want that? Do we want to revisit the extremely damaging period when Telstra sued Ministers and delayed regulations, in some cases for up to ten years. That period saw Australia dropping to the bottom rung of the international broadband ladder and resulted in Australians paying some of the highest broadband prices in the world.
Would Telstra want to go back to this?
There might be some short-term gains for Telstra, as it will not be forced to structurally separate itself. However I believe that, long-term, this will only delay the problems Telstra is facing around declining traditional revenues.
Telstra also has made a philosophical decision to look to the future. But the Opposition’s policy will create more uncertainty, as it will be a year or possibly many years before these policies crystallise, and the Coalition will encounter significant opposition from both Labor and the Greens.
I can’t see that as a positive for Telstra. Also, the onus will now be back on Telstra. Will they invest in an FttN now that they understand the future will look more like an open network, the benefits of which will not necessarily be gained by Telstra? If, however, Telstra fails to invest then politics and regulations will return with a vengeance and it will start all over again.
Will that be good for Telstra? I don’t think so.
There can only be one conclusion. The Opposition has delivered a shockingly bad policy, with no cohesive strategy to bring the various elements of it together, and with absolutely no vision for the country in relation to the transforming aspects that a broadband network will have to offer the economy.
All of this is thoroughly understood by the business world in Australia and it is astonishing that a Liberal Party has such a shocking lack of understanding of the effect that their ‘kill the NBN’ policy will have on the Australian economy.
The positive economic impact of broadband infrastructure is also recognised by the two leading global economic institutions, the OECD and the World Bank; it has also been recognised by the UN, which supports the Broadband Commission for Digital Development, an activity that was largely inspired by the Australian NBN.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the initiator of these international developments were to abandon the plan that is held up by the rest of the world as a positive example?
Paul Budde
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Changing the media model
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Competition and Regulations
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Critical Considerations
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Deployment Strategies
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Early Projects
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Government’s Trans-Sector Conference
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Industry at crossroads
- Australia – National Broadband Network – NBN Co and Infrastructure
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Overview & Analysis
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Telstra
- Australia – National Broadband Network based on Trans-sector model
- Australia – National Broadband Network Trans-sector projects
Tagged in: Australia, Broadband, National Broadband Network, NBN
August 11th, 2010 at 10:23 am
Yeah we will have the best broadband network in the world, which will cater for 16% of people who will use it, and a dodgy health and transport system.
August 11th, 2010 at 10:25 am
NBN fibre 100 times faster than Coalition Wireless
The Coalition has announced its Broadband policy. A key part is wireless broadband, with “up to $1 billion in investment funding for new fixed wireless networks in metropolitan Australia, with an emphasis on outer metropolitan areas.” A minimum peak speed of 12 megabits per second is promised.
This compares with the NBN proposal of a Fibre to the Premises service for 93 percent of the population, promising 100 megabits per second. The speed difference between wireless and fibre is actually much greater.
A wireless broadband service is shared between users, in practice several hundred or more. The same is true for HFC cable broadband. A wireless broadband service with a peak speed of 12 megabits per second is shared between users, so resulting individual speeds are far less.
Even where wireless broadband peak speeds exceed 12 megabits per second the same sharing principle applies.
In contrast, the NBN Fibre to the Premises gives each user their own 100 megabit per second service. It’s like having a shower to yourself rather than sharing a public shower at the beach with 100 other people.
A better comparison for these competing technologies is sustained or average data rate. We all understand sustained rate from YouTube: when it halts the sustained rate is not enough.
The performance of YouTube and future high definition video services depends on the sustained rate.
The sustained rate from a 100 megabits per second NBN Fibre to the Premises service is around 100 Megabits per second.
The sustained rate for a 12 megabit per second peak rate wireless Broadband service? Take a suburb with 15 Youtube viewers. Each gets less than 1 megabit per second. How about 150 viewers? Each now gets less than 100 kilobits per second, around the same as the old dialup.
The NBN fibre will truly be at least 100 times faster than the Coalition wireless Broadband.
Dr Tony Eyers
August 11th, 2010 at 11:38 am
No one is talking about the opportunities for business growth, particularly in the regions, that high speed broadband will bring. Many corporates would consider relocating out of cities if they had access to what they see as this basic infrastructure. High quality video conferencing, that only broadband can bring, would take a lot of people off the roads and out of the air. Any politician who can’t get his or her head around this is suffering from myopia.
August 11th, 2010 at 12:24 pm
Paul – according the Sydney Morning Herald Poll, I think you’ve won!
Which party has the best plans to upgrade Australia’s broadband network?
Poll form
1. Please select an answer. Coalition, it’s affordable, efficient and responsible.
2. Labor, it’s expensive but revolutionary.
3. Greens, fast broadband but no internet filter.
4. View results
Coalition, it’s affordable, efficient and responsible.
19%
Labor, it’s expensive but revolutionary.
54%
Greens, fast broadband but no internet filter.
27%
Total votes: 21225.
Liberal’s getting major trashing in the press over this
August 11th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
I have read what Paul Budde said as reported on the ABC website at
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/08/10/2979229.htm
I agree with your comment about using old technology, having spent most of my
working life in telecommunications (radio / satellite / optic technologies),
the only real option for the future is optic fibre, it may seem more expensive
at this time.
But I seem to recall before I was made redundant from the then Telecom
Australia
in 1992 there was some some concern about the copper network then as it was
getting old and most of the inner city cables was still lead covered paper
insulated, and all this need to be replaced soon. Now a days there seems that
there is no training in lead cable repair and the guys that used to do it are
retired.
I would love to ask the Coalition who has to pay for the replacement of the
copper network if ADSL is the prefered last mile connection to populus? Optic
fibre is a far cheaper option and it has many more uses like you point out
in that ABC item. One doubts that telstra would be interested in spending
the equivilent to the NBN or more to replace the copper network in the next
10 or so years.
Cheers Eddie Saunders.
August 11th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
There is no authoritative definition for ‘broadband’ – at least not as the word is used today in its many different contexts – regardless of which country is being discussed or how fast the aggregate data signaling rate (speed) of a line or wireless link may be.
I’ve read the replies to this question asked by Paul and it appears that the only criteria that have been considered by anyone to characterize broadband (as opposed to providing a definitive description of it) are the number of potential bits per second (link speed) that can be sent over a medium, and the boundaries of individual states, i.e., quantitative and geographic. Some mention has also been made with respect to the type of ‘applications’ that are carried over links, e.g., telemedicine, gaming, e-government, and so forth, but as applications they are for the most part all equal in weight, since bits do not discriminate over applications.
The term ‘broadband’ has been usurped, leveraged, co-opted, shaped and reshaped again and again, and then stepped upon in a dozen different ways by Telco, Cable TV and vendor marketing departments the world over, in order to describe their various products, bundles, biz-models, and so on, which everyone seems to have no problem accepting, but instead erroneously equate the word with a single monolithic set of qualities and characteristics, that are at best chimeric, leaving to question only the quantitative and geographic criteria as the ones that matter. I submit that none of the definitions offered even vaguely resemble what we should really be seeking to define: connectivity.
A few words on the history of ‘broadband’ follow. I welcome input from the usual suspects in return. I’m making an issue of this because it’s the elephant in virtually everyone’s blind spot that finally has to be aired.
During the telephone industry’s middle-aged years (from approximately the 1940s through the 1970s) television and radio transmission lines, called broadband lines, were installed between studios and antenna sites and over cross-country routes using coaxial and various types of radio links that were described as ‘broad’-band, to differentiate them from ‘voice’-band technologies.
At [about] the same time, perhaps beginning in the late 1930s, various forms of common carrier analog multiplexing systems used non-loaded twisted pairs, such as N-carrier, ON-carrier, K-carrier, J-carrier, and later L-carrier, which employed coaxial systems, and, at about the same time, R-carrier systems were being used over microwave systems that employed amplitude modulation and frequency modulation techniques. The common thread shared by all of the above was that they each employed some form of analog modulation and frequency division multiplexing technique, as opposed to what would later be introduced in the late sixties in the form of digital transmission techniques.
Similarly, during the late forties and early fifties the facilities that supported early cable TV deployments also employed RF-type technologies, along with coaxial and microwave systems, and later satellite as well. All of these were likewise referred to as broadband.
The word ‘broadband’ in its earliest iterations was used as a comparative term, signifying ‘broader than’ or greater in bandwidth than, and in the latter case it could easily be seen meaning broader than voice-band, since voice services had been, since the late nineteenth century, the industry’s primary service and focus. Broadband also connoted a channel of sufficient width to encompass multiple narrower-band channels; hence a broadband TV system would carry many narrower band video channels.
The highest modem-produced bit-rate data services of the sixties and early seventies, which were exclusively used by businesses, governments and the Telcos for their own internal purposes, topped out at 200 kbps over specially-conditioned twisted pair and coaxial systems (sometimes achieved by utilizing facilities comparable to T-1 spans and converting them to analog media for AM/FDM forms of transmission). The latter, too, were known as ‘broadband’, in comparison to earlier the limitation that was set at 50 kbps over analog radio and coaxial systems.
Later, commencing circa 1976, when DDS (digital data services) and T-1 digital services began emerging as public offerings (the T1/E1 had already been in use by telephone companies for interoffice trunking purposes since the early 1960s), the term broadband lost much (but not all) of its relevance in the telephony sphere, but continued to describe the underlying technologies supporting TV transmission in that segment instead. The reason it lost its significance in telephony was in deference to the new paradigm that was being shaped around ‘digital’ transmission and switching platforms.
At the time, both the N.A. and European digital hierarchies evolved using denominations of capacity such as T1, E1, T3, E3, etc., and later SONET/SDH container sizes as well. ‘Broadband’, however, remained a legacy term that soon began to wain even in the telephony sector. For example, Broadband ISDN, or B-ISD, was a term that was initially used to describe a proposed successor framework designed to supersede the public switched telephone network (PSTN), and it was predicated on asynchronous transfer mode, or ATM, which during the nineteen nineties yielded to Internet protocols, thus reference is seldom if ever made to B-ISDN anymore.
Moving forward to the 1990s, you may recall my mentioning that VDSL was first called BDSL (Broadband Digital Subscriber Line), in recognition of the fact that 90 Mbps and 100 Mbps utilizing twisted copper pair DSL technologies were comparatively much ‘higher than’ ADSL, which was at the time limited to 1.5 Mbps. Again, ‘broadband’ connoted a ‘higher than’ capability, even here, where one form of DSL was being compared to another, irrespective of what type of content was being carried, and equally interestingly, irrespective of the type of modulation and line-coding scheme employed.
If one wants to analyze and list the qualities that make today’s broadband offerings different, when applied to the residential bundled service offerings of six providers whose HSI capabilities are the same, say 10down / 2up, it’s easy enough to do. All you need do is compare their non-bit-rate-related attributes, such as their program TV guides and cable channel line-ups and add-ons such as VoD, OOT, etc. and the type of VoIP services made available, and of course the price, as well.
However, such an approach would have nothing to do with the word broadband’s use as a means of establishing a quantitative comparison, but would be relegated to one of listing commercial products in the way of ‘services’ that are made available over the underlying medium’s non-discretionary portion of its overall bit-carrying capability (as opposed to the discretionary portion, which users are still free to use for high-speed Internet connectivity purposes). If we use the original criteria for using the term broadband, then the high-speed Internet (HSI) allocation would necessarily have to be comparatively much higher than the norm, or a speed on the order of 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps for HSI, which would be a relevant grading only for as long a period as it would take for the rest of the pack to catch up. By then it would no longer be considered a comparatively higher bit rate, and so it goes, ad infinity.
Focus on connectivity, not broadband. Connectivity bubbles over with choice and opportunities. Connectivity is generative, not restrictive. On the other hand, broadband, as it’s been popularized today, thwarts choice and limits innovation to the narrowest of “permissible” possibilities as defined by the operator. In any case, most of what is now considered the ‘service bundle’ that is carried by broadband today will soon be subsumed by plain vanilla connectivity capabilities before long, anyway, and that will occur in the form of IP-based telephony, where it hasn’t already, Web-TV, and continued access to the vaster richness and other future possibilities enabled by the World Wide Web, as well.
Framing discussions around faux broadband is good business for some, but portends a road to insanity, per Einstein’s definition, and mainly bad for others.
Broadband or Straightaway Connectivity? Choose for yourself.
Frank A. Coluccio
August 11th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Very disappointing policy and general understanding of these issues from the Liberal party. Who is coming up with these decisions? Don’t they have well-informed industry people advising them on this?
I have just written to my Local MP to express my displeasure. I’d encourage others to do the same. If they are ever going to listen, then election time would have to be the best chance.
August 11th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Paul,
It rather seems to me that the Opposition is simply parroting the American playbook, presumably in alliance with Telstra, taking well-rehearsed talking points from American incumbents. The key issue is structural separation. What structural separation does is allow a single common provider of facilities to achieve the economies of scale needed to upgrade the facilities on behalf of all service providers. With NBN, the facilities will exist to provide future services, on a competitive basis.
With the Coalition’s plan, in contrast, today’s “services” define tomorrow’s limited goals, and the only facilities built are those needed to support a very slightly sped-up version of what today’s providers have decided to offer. It will provide dramatically inferior future services and is inefficient in the long run.
I also note that HFC is inherently asymmetric while DSL, as provided for consumer services especially those including video, is also highly asymmetric. This is very much a “consumer of content” model of “broadband”.
Fred Goldstein
August 11th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
The Coalition in opposition have not come up with an original idea since they were dumped in 2007. They failed this industry for almost 13 yrs and seem too lazy to come up with a policy worth presenting on any subject. Everything appears to be a rerun of jwh ideas. sad really Australia deserves better.
August 11th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Another component is why is all this necessary. It appears that the public, from the Leader of the Opposition down are confused by technology comparisons. They may better understand a simple why.
A simple analogy will serve. The coalition broadband plan, under a best case scenario (successful LTE rollouts, upgrades to DOCSIS 3.0 and beyond), will at the end of this decade provide sustained rates similar to ADSL2+. Assume this rate to be the magical 12 Mbps. More getting this to be sure, but still 12 Mbps. A widespread FTTN rollout with VDSL2 would be needed for substantial increase on this, it won’t happen.
So. Everything stays the same.
Imagine 10 years ago building a network which locked everyone into dialup speeds for a decade. The current Internet would be unusable. The same applies looking ahead.
I think people would understand that.
August 11th, 2010 at 5:49 pm
This is about Fiscal stimulus not technology. Cabling will require heaps of union workers to be employed over 7 years. and probably all those guys that have been booted from Telstra.
Are we going to start laying cables again?!?!?!?!
Wireless technology is developing at a rapid rate, why shouldnt the country be patient and wait until this type of technology catches up. It seems the growth in communication services are all about wireless and this trend will continue……laying cables across one of the most desolated coutries in the world, we really are idiots………this is a Big Labour spending package not a technology solution.
August 13th, 2010 at 9:30 am
These are questions ATUG is asking the Opposition:
A private sector dominated by Telstra has delivered slow speed broadband and prices which stifle use – how does your plan change this?
What is your plan to move Australia from the copper network to a fibre future?
What is your plan to deal with dominance in this sector – and to deliver real and strong competition and choice to consumers and businesses and potentially your own government agencies?
Why are you prepared to provide big subsidies to Telstra ($700 million for PSTN remediation and $2.75 billion access fees for backhaul) when they have just declared $6.2 billion free cash flow for last year?
Your headline is $6.345 billion for high speed broadband – in fact in the first three years you only spend $1.230 billion – ($500 million for fixing PSTN mistakes and only $375 million for regional wireless services) and deliver 12Mbps “peak” speeds. Under this plan, Australians really have to wait until 2014-15 and beyond that for real high-speed broadband don’t they?
August 23rd, 2010 at 12:30 am
Hi all,
Rosemary and Paul have hit upon the two crucial points I think Labor failed to nail the Opposition to the wall on WRT the NBN.
- Can Abbott, Hockey, Robb, Smith, et al, tell us just how much life THEY see in the copper CAN? Obviously its some number substantially greater than 10 years? From whom did they obtain that number? Did they obtain a second opinion? What is the projected maintenance costs for the copper CAN beyond year eight (by when it would have been largely decommisioned under NBN) until the Opposition’s nominated EOL date?
- What will be the tecnology to replace the copper CAN when it does finally go EOL under the Oppisition’s plan? How long will it take to roll out? When do they plan to start building that infrastructure?
Let’s park the productivity benefits we just KNOW would happen. Let’s not do some simple arithmetic to devine that even if NBN blew out to $50B, the useful life of GPON FTTP was only 25 years, population stayed at (today’s) 22.5 million, Quigley did a runner with our dough so we received $0.00 in the dollar back from NBNCo AND the asset was worth $0.00 in the end i.e. the worst of the’worst case’), it would require a little over 0.002% boost to GDP ($75 each person, per year) to fully fund this thing. But let’s not talk about such things
Without taking any of that into account, I cannot fathom why investing our funds – $43B of them – and receiving all the money back, with sufficent interest to offset inflation – and receiving a shiny new NBN to boot – why that’s ‘waste’? I don’t understand the short-sightedness that determines this is ‘spending’ at all, let alone spending of the ‘reckless’ and ‘irresponsible’ kind? This is ‘infrastructure investment’, where you use some public money to kick start something then whack it back into Government coffers down the track. Yes?
I particularly cannot fathom why exiting the ongoing maintenance burden for the copper CAN, ASAP, is a bad thing.
Let’s compare that with the Coalition’s ‘plan’. Again, let’s park the apparently contentious notion that the product is second rate. Let’s concentrate instead, just on the operational budget required in both cases.
If the non-NBN were to get up, the existing copper CAN would be required, I’d submit, to perform way past its use by date. Like any old asset, there comes a time when its just not economically viable to continue maintaining it when compared to replacement. This is where it gets interesting…
Under Abbott, as well as sizable ‘gifts’ (very astute use of public funds) to existing players to encourage them into areas not otherwise viable, the costs of continuing to maintain a network that one could only generously describe as ‘beyond its prime’ will effectively be bourne by all of us for goodness knows how long. This, apparently, is a ‘rational’ and ‘responsible’ use of money; several $Billions in grants, gifts and subsidies, plus the proping up of an already geriatric network beyond its useful life; that’s the real cost of the alternative. Free money, given away to postpone the inevitable and the subsequent waste of pushing an asset w-a-y beyond its original remit. Just what will we have to show for it in 10-15 years from now? Not-bloody-much, I’d put to you.
Invest big in the NBN, reap big rewards in the opportunties that provides and abandon the dinosaur at the ‘right’ time? Where will be in 15 years under THAT scenario. No money flushed down the toilet and a pretty ubiquitous FTTP network for the community to leverage.
Despite the headline $43B pricetag (which, again, would be offset by just a $75 p.a. in savings/earnings/efficiencies; or a 0. 002% boost to productivity) even in the most ridiculously pessimistic model – if it was not going to be paid back with interest anyway) – the NBN makes more operational sense, even were it to deliver only what the Lib’s have promised. That would be the ‘original starting point for Labor; not the ‘end of line of Abbott’s foley. Add to that the reality of a world class platform to support better outcomes in a plethora of areas, especially in the efficient implementation of Government initiatives and programmes WITH sufficient upstream bandwidth to enable compelling interaction and collaboration and I’m still dumbstruck that none of the Coalition’s hardline economic rationalists have broken ranks to buddy up with the Nationals/NLP whose constituants, by and large, understand the irrationality of not moving forward with the NBN, licketty-split. Cheers, Mike.
August 23rd, 2010 at 1:53 am
Oh and Nick mate; let’s put the wireless one to bed, please. Its very fashionable to cite the ‘incredible’ improvements in wireless in ‘recent’ times, but therein lies the rub…
The only way to increase the speed/range/reliability of wireless – lets call it ‘capacity’ – is to increase its effectiveness within any frequency band/environment. We (everyone) have only limited spectrum available and basically from the fall of the hammer to the day before its handed back, operators are trying to maximize usage capability – per cell, per backhaul, per band. The broad term for this is ‘spectral efficiency’. Better spectral efficiencies drive better radio bandwidth. Trouble is, the same new algorithms, chipsets, techniques, are all applicable (by and large) to copper (Ethernet) and fibre too. Mathematics is Mathematics; if you discover some neat way to represent more 1′s and 0′s in any time slot (banding, hopping, keying, phasing, shifting, etc, or increasingly, some combination therof) then you can usually apply that same maths to other media, like fibre. All other things being equal, think just how directional fibre is. For wireless, appreciate that any signal, no matter how good, will give varying percentages of that propagated signal, depending on the range. GPON Fibre? 100, 500, 2500 metres; 100Mbps, uniform speed available at every client premise. Just as ‘they’ finally get pretty reliable 100 Mbps (real world) LTE happening, GPON will be doing 1Gbps in its sleep. So fibre = 10 x wireless (at least). Ad infinitum.
Apart from the physics, I want as few fixed line wireless systems as possible, because every fixed connection is a slot not available for mobile use.
Finally… I’d bet on GPON through to its 10 GPON and upwards successors when that eventually comes to pass. On standard GPON with 4 lasers, you can achieve 10Gbps… today. LTE is a long way from even putting that on a slide… The sheer scale of CPE production for GPON single laser devices (or four=10Gbps) standardised on the same frequencies whereever they go because crosstalk and EMI aren’t issues (radio needs, at the very least, lots of guardband to insulate the base station from harm). Also different bands/channels per different location so there’s shared technolgies
Different, means $$$ and the more variants there are, the less competitive they’ll each be.
Even the staunchest proponents of Wireless (inventors), would not put the product up against FTTP. Let me leave you with this thought. If wireless is the gamechanger, why is it that Marconi didn’t send Bell, Edison, et al, broke. Wireless is an answer to part of the puzzle, but not THE answer. When wirless is utlised well, in mobile scenarios where a wire isn’t practical, its great. Cheers, Mike.
August 28th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
G’day All the above comments refer to the internet side of the NBN. I would like to draw your attention to a flaw in the phone side of the NBN.
The current landline phones get their power from the exchange via the copper network. Thus they keep on working during a 240v blackout.
The optic cable will need a convertor box to drive your phone. The box and the phone will have to be powered from the users 240v outlet and hence will NOT work during a blackout. As the elderly are the biggest users of landline phones this will leave them with no connection with the outside world just when they need it.
You can have the optic cable for your internet but we need the copper network for reliable phones.
August 28th, 2010 at 11:24 pm
Of course all involved in the design of the NBN are very well aware of this and an NBN that wouldn’t look after this would simply be not acceptable. There are a few options that are currently reviewed in order to ensure that , some of the test sites are actively looking into this.
August 30th, 2010 at 12:37 am
Someone once told me that when reading specifications it’s not what is written that is important rather it’s what’s not written. Info concerning the phone side of the NBN is thin on the ground. This is telling in of itself.
It is interesting that your answer is vague and contains no actual data which means that the NBN experts didn’t think of this problem until well down the line and now they are stuck. They are rolling out the NBN in
Tasmania and are still looking into the problem.
Two copper wire to each home to power the convertor box and phone is the only acceptable solution and any others are substandard.
I hope placing batteries at each house is not one of the solutions. They would have to be larger than the ones in fire-alarms. They would only last a few years and then someone (the elderly?) is going to have to replace them regularly and then dispose of Millions of them.
You have too much faith in the govt experts to do the job properly. All the Labor Govts plans are always rushed and never thought out completely.
I’m not a Liberal voter, just an old sceptical techo.