The recent Background Briefing program on broadband started with this image:
Di Martin: But as Phil Dobbie discovered for himself the other day, the poor old copper wires, laid more than a century ago, are on their last legs.
Phil Dobbie: We had builders out the other day outside the front of our house, digging up the road. And I, just out of interest, said, ‘Well, seeing as you’ve got a ditch there, let’s have a look and see what my telephone line looks like.’ I’m that sort of crazy person, you know. So I had a look, and you know, it’s just – only the duct was decaying, and it’s just this little line, and there was water dropping through it.
Di Martin: It really colours in the picture of the ageing copper wires doesn’t it?
Phil Dobbie: I should have taken a photograph actually, because it is a sight to behold. This is Australia’s broadband future in a ditch.
So that’s how ADSL2 is coming to the older suburbs. They are better off than some of the newer suburbs, where some speeds are slower than dial-up. Recently there was a fascinating segment on Kelly Higgins-Devine’s Drive program on local radio here.
First, she had two experts on a panel. They both agreed that fibre to the home was a stable and scalable technology and the only real option for a modern broadband system. Certainly it was the technology of choice around the world.
They said that wireless, by contrast, was unstable and consumers would possibly need to change modems and routers every few years. So for them the choice of national system was very clear and since there was no alternative view being put the discussion moved to what is now a widespread and excruciating problem.
The situation is this. Very simply Telstra has not upgraded the local exchanges to cope with new real estate developments. So you have a diabolical choke in the system. You can be sold new fast ADSL plans or whatever, but they simply won’t happen if the copper network can’t handle the traffic.
This was followed by callers of two categories. First, a number of people in the business of providing or servicing internet access by consumers, who confirmed what the experts were saying.
Secondly, a string of consumers who had experienced problems. One from Carindale, only about 10km from the Brisbane GPO as the crow flies, but new. He had broadband slower than dial-up. Another moved from the old Ipswich suburb of Brassall down the road to Collingwood Park. Suddenly he had daughters complaining that they had no life because they couldn’t get onto the net. It cost him an extra $900 pa on top of his plan for a wireless connection.
There were many more callers, all in furious agreement.
I have a Telstra cable connection, but it has been strung along the light poles. Mostly it works, but not always. My (limited) understanding is that it works reasonably well because not too many people in the street who actually use it. And the demands I make on it are very limited.
So the present system is a mess.
It seems reasonable to me to cost a replacement over 20 years. If you spread $43 billion over 20 years it comes to $1.90 per person per week. If you cost it as tax payers over eight years it comes in at about $8.60 per week.
I’d like someone to do some serious costing on the Coalition’s broadband future scenario, but I suspect that it would be more expensive in actual dollars, and as value for money it would be a sick joke. Moreover, before we were 20 years down the road we’d almost certainly decide that FTTH was the way to go.
Today I heard about a Malaysian man who chose to live in Australia because of our technological advancement. Now he’s pissed because his mother in Kuala Lumpur has FTTH before he does.
Conroy said originally that if business wanted the NBN they would have to sell it. Now his boss is trying to sell it through applications in health.
Nicola Roxon did a fair job of it yesterday, explaining the $392 million initiative announced in the Labor launch.
On Australia Talks on Monday night Dr Tori Wade, a GP and psychologist, who is completing her PhD in public health at the University of Adelaide, and an advisor to the Adelaide Western General Practice Network, explained how tele-medicine was already working on her patch. For what she was doing, superfast broadband would help, but was not essential. It would help, of course, in what they were doing now. She wasn’t talking about what they might do if better technology were available. One of the callers was from the University of Queensland, where similar practices were in train.
Yesterday John Dwyer had this to say:
The rollout of a really fast broadband network is really crucial if the technology is to be able to do the sort of things that the Prime Minister was describing yesterday.
But it just so happens I was talking at a conference in Melbourne yesterday on healthcare reform, and there was a number of experts telling us what’s going on around the world with e-health. And the evidence base that it’s cost effective, that it is probably the most single miraculous way of rapidly reducing medical errors.
The data is absolutely crystal clear and the public acceptance in Scandinavia, in Germany, in Italy, in so many places, and the benefits that have flowed are just there for all to see.
But it does require the infrastructure that we don’t have at the moment. If you’re really going to look at an angiogram in real time, in moving pictures, so that some expert in Sydney can look at something that was done by [a] technician in the rural areas, you’ve got to have the quality so that the person can make the judgement.
I can tell you that through the leadership of this man there were trials of tele-medicine back in the 1980s. We were probably leading the world at that stage. It is a fact that back then Roy Lundin hired a van and led a tour through the US of A demonstrating the use of telecommunications in a number of professions.
In Queensland we started with professional development for teacher-librarians, Roy’s original core business, where about 150 people spread in nodes around the state were connected and interacted for a few hours every so often.
The technology was a bit clunky, but the brilliance was in the educational design, the pre and post experiences and the structuring of the whole event. Training people in the necessary techniques and methodologies is part of what the $392m is for.
Sadly, Roy is no longer with us, he was a couple of years older than I am and died too young. If he were alive today he’d be in heaven.
When I worked in the Department of Education I had oversight of the introduction and support of all manner of curriculum resources into schools, including traditional books, but also microcomputers, films, videos, everything. We had a full film and TV production studio, and also produced software packages. I chaired the committee that set up the contracts for the purchase of computers by schools.
I was in this position in large part, I think, to provide a buffer between the technology nerds and the senior directors. I can’t remember how many times I was told that the world had changed forever.
Early innovations in ICT were a bit underwhelming, IMHO. One major breakthrough was the combination of full-text storage and the internet. Fast broadband available to school will obviously enhance these functions.
But for the next step every kid needs a computer and reliable access to the internet at home. There are also possibilities of clusters of small secondary schools offering subjects on a shared basis that they simply couldn’t contemplate separately.
But I’m not the ideas man. If my mate Roy were here, ideas and possibilities would be bursting out all over, together with practical strategies for implementation. He was that kind of guy. He was irreplaceable for those who knew him, but now there is a broad skill base in the country ready to take up the challenge.
For me, I’ve never seen a cleaner, clearer chance to take a quantum leap in in technology applications presented as a rational choice. Ubiquity and equity are important, as is the structural separation of Telstra. The last thing we need is competing interests in the provision of infrastructure becoming vested interests against change towards coherent universality.
I would humbly submit that we have reached a fork in the road. Either we dig a ditch and install a gold standard broadband future, or figuratively our future lies in a ditch.
Our most recent post on the topic is here and from there you will find links to earlier posts.
Update: Here’s an account of a Parliamentary Library analysis of costing.
Its not good in East Armidale. A few months ago the whole ADSL system was down for four days and over recent weeks my phone has gone out twice, though the latter might have had more to do with construction work on the corner of my street. I do know the copper wire being cactus was one reason why the phone was cut off last time.
Great read, thanks.
A letter in the SMH today points out:
The independent MP Tony Windsor, appearing on the ABC’s Lateline, made the point that he was being interviewed at Tamworth racecourse, as it had the only appropriate internet feed in the town for a live-to-air broadcast. He pointed out that his fellow-independent Rob Oakeshott was unable to appear as there was no broadband capacity in his electorate (Lyne) capable of handling the job.
Australians are very aware of the tyranny of distance and I suspect Abbott might lose principally on this issue — certainly among the under-40s.
Do you know how many new ditches the NBN will actually dig that aren’t trunks? Before the Telstra deal they were talking about just stringing them along power lines etc like was done with cable. With the Telstra deal they’ll use those existing decaying ducts – thats what they’re paying Telstra so much money for.
Though the fibre shouldn’t care as much about the water
Had a friend who had ADSL that would drop everytime it rained because the ducts filled up with water. Took him ages to get Telstra to fix it.
btw I think the examples of usage you cite above do not require FTTH, but they do require a much better network than the Coalition are proposing.
Incidentally some of the (in retrospect) really bad decisions that Telstra made (which make ADSL difficult to get) when they were fully owned by the government are because they assumed that fibre would already be the standard by now and that ADSL would not be important. They had plans to do fibre rollouts 15 years ago but were prevented from the government (libs I think) from doing so. Something to think about when considering how independent the NBN should be from government in the long term.
I have no complaints about my ADSL2 service in Australia, it’s blindingly fast. The problem is the copper cable, as stated in the introduction to the post. It is literally underwater in places and last time the connection failed (during heavy rains), Telstra calmly told me they couldn’t do anything until the water level subsided (which took about four days).
From Richard Alston onwards, the Libs have seemed absolutely clueless when it comes to the internet. They can parrot all the routine talking points about efficiency and competitiveness but in terms of practical application, they think these mean making people work harder by getting rid of unions. The actual sources of efficiency and competitive advantage escape them completely.
Chris said “They had plans to do fibre rollouts 15 years ago but were prevented from the government (libs I think) from doing so”
They first made the plans when they were Post Master General back in the early 70′s. We got Black Mt Tower instead.
I’m training some teachers visiting from South Korea at the moment. They all have fibre to the home and schools. They are bemused and quizzical about the state (and expense) of internet access in Australia. They consider it rather quaint that we get the internet over telephone lines.
We don’t stand a chance in this century unless we build the darn internet infrastructure properly!
Reading the NBN 1st & 2nd stage roll-out, I notice that many areas have defence bases, others are in ‘dead spots’ (for mobile cover as well), and others in Metro areas that don’t already have fast BB.
Luckily I’m in Stage 2 thanks to defence bases/ installations (& balck-spots). I’m also in Tory Central. Makes voting life interesting. If Abbott gets in & doesn’t build it, life will get even more interesting!
OOps. Should be DeeCee.
[fixed ~moderator]
dylwah – I think where it has had most impact is where they were putting in RIMs because they thought broadband would be delivered via fibre instead of ADSL. Which might explain why they were so slow in rolling the latter out.
Gospel – the NBN will give us much better speeds, but I don’t see any signs that it will make it significantly cheaper (it is getting cheaper regardless). Currently the only utility where you get more for less every year.
@7 Forget the cultural cringe and forelock tugging.
From a very recent Guide for teachers….
“High speed internet services in Korea can cost anywhere from 25,000won – 45,000won a month.” ie $25-$45, and
“Internet cafes are also extremely cheap and hourly rates at many locations are under 3,000 won ($3) an hour.”
Looks similar to Australia..maybe a little more expensive, especially when you consider that wages are considerably lower than here (maybe HALF).
From Wiki….
“South Korea leads in the number of DSL connections per head worldwide. ADSL is standard, but VDSL has started growing quickly. ADSL commonly offers speeds of 2 Mbit/s to 8 Mbit/s, with VDSL accordingly faster. The large proportion of South Korea’s population living in apartment blocks helps the spread of DSL, as does a high penetration of consumer electronics in general. Special “Cyber” Apartment buildings have speeds of up to 100 Mbit/s. VDSL is commonly found in newer apartments while ADSL is normally found in landed properties where the telephone exchange is far away.”
From wiki….Australia
“The presence of non-Telstra DSLAMs allowed the service providers to control the speed of connection, and most offered “uncapped” speeds, allowing the customers to connect at whatever speed their copper pair would allow, up to 8 Mbit/s. Ratification of ADSL2 and ADSL2+ increased the maximum to 12 Mbit/s, then 24 Mbit/s.”
So…cheaper AND faster on average!! Yeah I know..wiki is a Liberal Party front!!
BTW. VDSL IS faster than Australian broadband, up to 52Mbit/sec, but not yet the standard in Korea.
I hope this helps.
Regarding Dr Tori Wade and supporting telemedicine, she has a vested interest as a supplier and spruiker of VOIP technologies in cahoots with the CEO of the Western Division of General Practice. The current technology that they are pushing is the equivalent of video conferencing; not particularly inspiring and irrelevant within the metro context.
So you’re unhappy, as I often have been, with Telstra’s rent farming of its infrastructure, and with its contempt for customers. And the proposed solution is… a new for-profit government monopoly. Great. Condemned to repeat it.
Countries that have fast cheap broadband have generally done so by letting individual customers choose the best-value home connection, not by the government providing one-size-fits-all.
http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/issues/issues-economy-small-business/nbn-the-wrong-policy-for-australia/
There are many reasons to dislike TA but “Labor=fast broadband” seems pretty spurious.
Brian,
All I can do is point out what I wrote on the other thread. If you want this for medical reasons, great – but why on earth does that mean we need it down every street in Australia? Mine, and the majority of others, do not have a doctor’s surgery on it. I do not have an MRI scanner at home.
To base a decision on whether the government should go into debt on the aesthetics of a ditch, or, worse, cultural cringe to South Korea, is just (IMHO) silly.
You have pointed out one of the other problems with the mooted new system in this sentence:
The simple fact that this new whizz-bang system is possible will be stopping future investment in the current system. Why would Telstra (or anyone else) put any money at all into new DSLAMs, replacing RIMs or anything else if they have been told that they will just have to throw them all away when this new system (eventually) is done? It would be insanity for them.
So – to summarise:
1. The new system is very expensive and way more than any possible technical need for it at home.
2. The “need”, such as it is, arises from a cultural cringe to countries with a high population density and much lower costs to deliver.
3. We will all pay for it even if we don’t want it.
4. The technical needs for broadband can be met by a much cheaper system that will be evolutionary to a new system that can still be put in when we eventually need it.
5. We will all have to put up with the obvious faults of the current system for the years that this one takes to roll out.
I have probably missed a few points, but I think you get the idea. A great outcome.
Chris @ 4, I’m not an engineer, which I’m sure shows, and we are still short of some information you’d really want to make a decision. But more often than not when I worked in the bureaucracy you had to make decisions on whatever information you had at the time. You have to get comfortable with that or die a neurotic.
What I’m saying is that on the information I have available I’d be more comfortable with FTTH. If there was ever a paradigm shift staring you in the face, and inherently that means you can’t predict how it will be used, this is it, IMHO.
Huggy had a vision for the future on the previous thread. You can say with confidence, I think, that he’ll be wrong. But his central point that this technology has transformative power is spot on.
The photocopier (what we called the Xerox machine) changed the world in that it made large committees possible, according to Marshal McLuhan. This one is in a whole different league.
Bean Counter, you keep telling yourself that, if it makes you happy. Fact, the large majority of them get 100m/bit/sec access, without download limits, at half the monthly price of the average ADSL2 8/Mbit/sec miserely download limit Aussie plan costs. And that’s just going off the wiki excerpt you provided.
If you choose to read that excerpt as Australia getting ‘cheaper and faster’ access than Korea, then please send us a postcard from your happy place.
Andrew R, on the evolutionary approach, I think we have the chance right now to solve the Telstra structural separation problem in a way that will ultimately be to the advantage of Telstra shareholders, who the Howard government sold a pup. I think the government has a responsibility not to dud them further.
That’s part of the thinking, but I have to fly now.
Brian,
Personally, I would agree with you on the Telstra shareholders. I would prefer (as I have argued for some time) that the government re-nationalise it and then put in place the structural separation that should have been there in the first place and then re-privatise it in bits – with the network parts barred from selling to final customers unless and until there is effective competition in the particular market they are in.
To me, this could be done in less than 6 months if both parties agreed. Possibly unlikely, but to me it should be the way forward.
And on reacquiring Telstra and doing structural separation properly, finally I am in agreement with Andrew, and said as much over at Quiggins the other day.
@Chris, “the NBN will give us much better speeds, but I don’t see any signs that it will make it significantly cheaper (it is getting cheaper regardless).”
Not true. See this for example.
More info on other pricing plans if you search Whirlpool.
Admin, can has fix bad html (I am not sufficiently caffeinated this morning, clearly)
[Sorted]
Good to see lopolz included the pie-diagram explaining their economic policy.
But we haz teh spaghetti one.
paul, spaghetti? Point me in the right direction and I will happily make you a lol.
I don’t think you understand what cultural cringe is. Let teh interwebz help you.
Meanwhile, if you mention “download limits” to Americans, you will be met with blinks of incomprehension.
But I’ll shut up about it now. It would be cringeworthy to mention such facts.
#15 I’m sure ubiquitous networking will change the world in ways we can barely imagine, far beyond videoconferencing with your doctor. The point is that it would not have been useful for the government in the 1960s to start installing photocopiers on every street, nor for them to install faxes in every home in the 1980s. We got through those minor revolutions pretty well by people buying the devices when they thought them useful.
#24, I believe that download limits exist as a way of divvying up the very expensive intercontinental bandwidth. America doesn’t have that problem because far more of the content people want to reach is hosted on their own continent. The NBN does nothing to improve intercontinental connectivity.
The internet is literally a “network of networks” and much of Conroy and Gillard’s rhetoric seems to ignore the last 20 years and assume you need a single centrally-operated network to be able to do, for example, teleconferencing.
Brian – what frustrates me about the NBN discussions is that its like buying a car and being asked to choose between a 20 year old car and a new Porsche. With advocates refusing to admit that something in the middle might be ok.
Rebekka – except that $1/Gb is *not* cheaper. I currently pay less than a $1/Gb including the monthly charge. And you can get ADSL plans now that charge around 50c/Gb. Also the NBN plans I’ve seen all charge for both up and down usage.
Uncapped plans like Extel’s can be quite financially dangerous for home owners if they don’t know what they’re doing. With a 100Mb/s connection you can pull 1Gb every 100 seconds (ok a bit more with overhead). So you can get a huge bill if someone leaves something running.
Enchante @ 25 – my understanding (which may be outdated but I don’t think so) is that we pay US companies a lot to connect to them so we can access their network, but they don’t pay us anything. Thus we pay a lot for bandwidth and they pay very little. Bastards. But we want access to their sites a whole lot more than they want access to ours.
ISPs in Australia generally don’t distinguish in their charging to customers between local and overseas sites because its too hard and complex to understand (a .com.au site may be hosted overseas and .com may be hosted in australia for example).
Andrew R @ 14 you think you don’t need it for the same reason people 20 years couldn’t imagine why they’d ever need a PC in the home. You don’t know what applications you’ll use it for because they don’t exist yet. But you can be confident they’ll be here soon enough and you’ll wonder how you ever got along without them … especially when the cost of driving your car goes through the roof.
“Rebekka – except that $1/Gb is *not* cheaper. I currently pay less than a $1/Gb including the monthly charge. And you can get ADSL plans now that charge around 50c/Gb. Also the NBN plans I’ve seen all charge for both up and down usage.”
That very much depends how much you use, doesn’t it. The average amount used by Australians is 5 gig a month.
I defy you to find me a 5 gig plan for $2.50 or even $5 a month.
“With a 100Mb/s connection you can pull 1Gb every 100 seconds (ok a bit more with overhead). So you can get a huge bill if someone leaves something running.”
Like what??
Rabekka am thicker than five planks of fourbetwo at the moment, but the “knowledge nation” thingie back in 2001.
Just reading a typically convoluted explanation from Barry Jones, the originator, who clearly misunderstood or misjudged the spatial intelligence/ capacity of the voter to follow the representation of a working knowledge nation plan offered by Beazley.
yea but thats because they’re on the end of a wet piece of string
If people actually *need* the speeds from the NBN then they’ll be using a whole lot more than 5GB/month. I work from home fulltime (one of things the NBN is supposed to encourage) and use between 40-60GB a month, though for those with high speed links that is by no means high usage. ISPs offer 200GB/month plans for example.
btw I’d guess those very low bandwidth plans are loss leaders and they bet on people eventually upgrading or using a lot more bandwidth than the expect occasionally. I have an exetel 3G wireless connect as a backup in case my ADSL goes down or I lose power. The fine print for other low usage Exetel plans has a clause that says they can disconnect you if don’t use the system enough (ie you’re not profitable enough) – and they do.
Bittorrent for starters and something I would be concerned about if I had teenage children. Video streams probably another (especially HD). Or if your computer gets hacked (people with high speed links are a much more attractive target).
Chris,
Add in a house like mine with 5 computers (one of them a server) and then MS puts out a major service pack. If I was on one of those plans it would hurt big time in that month – but then service packs might arrive in seconds instead of minutes.
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Ken,
Perhaps so – but I consider myself a pretty serious internet user as are the rest of my family. I use video conferencing a lot from home. I support many computers remotely – the rest of my family both here and overseas. I run a web and email server from home on dyndns. I do not, however, use torrent (on principle and due to the hacking risks of doing so).
I have no problem on principle with having a huge pipe to my front door – I might even actually use some (a very little) of the increased capacity it provides.
I suspect that in doing so I will be the exception – and I have no desire to have the rest of the country pay for my very high use of the internet. Again, on principle, I object to that. If I want this, I believe I should have to pay for it.
Having a government running it, particularly one that seems to like the idea of internet censorship, is not an attractive proposition either.
Rebekka, I’m in a share house with 5 others. Two of them international students. We get throttled at the end of every month by iinet on a 70+70Gb plan, largely because they download bucketloads of video from China. The rest of us downloading a few hours of TV a month each from overseas doesn’t help either I’m sure. Free iView is nice but not enough. FWIW our email and other browsing really doesn’t count for much compared to the video hit.
After having had a number of discussions about internet use with the housemates I’m certain that they would run way over their ability to pay if we had 100MBits at $1/GB. Personally I would be quite happy with $1/GB, but my personal use is generally around 10GB/mo and I watch very little TV (I meter my own use as well as the household). With $/GB billing I’d need to set up a system to individually meter people and that would be vaguely painful (I’m thinking about it now).
It’s still often easier to use a bit torrent client to download video than to watch streaming media. Leave that running and watch it chew up every speck of bandwidth you have. Trying to get people who struggle to remember to turn taps off to turn their download tool off is nigh on impossible. It’s a habit they don’t have. We also use a downloading tool for iView because in peak time we struggle to get more than one clean stream (6 people = more than one prgram being watched at a time).
If we had batter, faster internet use here I’d be using video calling a lot more and have more content on my websites. For that matter, if I could I’d be tempted to run my websites from home as well, since they cost me ~$30/mo and most of the users are in Oz. That would save Australia money, but right now Australian hosting is silly expensive.
As far as working from home goes, I’d like to but I can’t – there’s not enough speed. Remote desktop software is all very well, but at high resolution it needs a lot of bandwidth (6MP of screens) and the amount of data I use in a day at work is quite large (several GB). So using a computer at home doesn’t work either.
If anyone wants to see what major national infrastructure left to the “private sector, wth gvot subsidies” looks like, I suggest you take the train from Sydney to Melbourne.
(Clue: its now a bus from the Victorian border, cos the Australian Railtrack Corporation have neglected it so long they cant run when it rains)
Shockingly run down and worse than most places Ive travelled in the third world.
The medical use of FTTH is simply the tip of the iceberg. But it is a really big iceberg.
It is really difficult for the “faster porn” school to comprehend the transformative effect that really fast really dense data transfer will have on every aspect of our lives.
Huggy
Moz – a server which does traffic shaping and quotas is your friend. Would be great for share houses (and families I guess) to have a cheap easy to use box which did that for you. I think I mentioned on another thread that the NBN is going to bittorrent heaven.
btw for those interested this pdf has some technical detail on how the fibre rollout is done (both aerial and underground).
http://www.nbnco.com.au/content/upload/files/Network_and_Operations_Information_Session_Presentation.pdf
Chris, yeah, and now that we’re running a modem/VOIP/switch/WiFi, a second switch, a 40W media drive (4x2TB) and I suspect several laptops 24×7 the extra power consumption is less of an issue. I’d really like a box product to do it all rather than rolling my own, but I have yet to see anything that even tries to do it. Broadly, I’d like a server with the option of RAID 4-8 disks, media sharing and torrent capability as well as 8 or more network ports and the traffic management capabilities you mention. If it could act as a wifi access point that would be a bonus as we could put it at the other end of the house and perhaps finally get full coverage. This sort of thing has to be useful, just apparently not useful enough to be on the market.
This whole discussion revolves around whether you expect other people to pay for your activities. Or pay for them yourself.
A simple question; would YOU make a one-off payment of $20,000 for a 15 years’ Fixed-Line High-Speed Internet?
Companies have already been “asking” this question in reverse; “will we get $20,000 from each connection over 15 years?” to cover the costs. Their answer is NO and they don’t want a bar of it.
39, Beancounter “This whole discussion revolves around whether you expect other people to pay for your activities”.
You mean like the GFM, Fanniemac ‘n Freddiemeh, Goldman Sachs and multi trillion dollar payouts to fix up messes left by people on on half billion pa bonuses?
Well, we’ve had to pay for them, so why not a bit back, for us?
Here is a nice post on whirlpool on Australia’s backhaul capacity to OS/local/national areas
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1511009
Seems we have or have already planned plenty of connectivity to handle the NBN, so I’m not sure download limits are there strictly to divvy up international connectivity.
Enchante’s argument about photocopiers and fax machines is absurd, since these are appliances, not infrastructure. Try making that argument about power lines, or telephone lines, or dams, or roads. The NBN is more like these than like fax machines.
Andrew Reynolds. I find your arguments reasonably compelling, and they temper my techie-enthusiasm somewhat. But the one thing I think you have ignored in your posts is the trend. 10 years ago, many of us were still on dialup, and couldn’t conceive of some of the ways we would be using bandwidth as we do today. Even though you can’t see much of a need for high speeds now, is it that big a mistake to extrapolate the trend and suggest that if we had an NBN uses for it would quickly develop? I know extrapolating is often dangerous, but surely you could take it to the bank that our need for bandwidth will continue to increase.
Clearly the $1/gig plan would not work for everyone… but it would make internet considerably cheaper for many people, which was my point.
“It is really difficult for the “faster porn” school to comprehend the transformative effect that really fast really dense data transfer will have on every aspect of our lives.”
I’m a technology professional who’s worked on videoconference and remote collaboration projects and I confess I have trouble working out what these ‘transformative effects’ you keep talking about are going to be. I stopped getting all hopped up on Wired magazine cover stories in about 1996.
d
Rebekka – you’re assuming that usage patterns will remain the same, and that the price they’re charging is actually sustainable. As I mentioned before they’re almost certainly making a loss on people using only a few GB. Looking at other ISP prices, the NBN is probably charging the ISPs at least $10/month for a connection.
Note that Exetel have already doubled the price they’re charging to $2/GB, so you don’t have to use very much at all before its cheaper to go onto a different plan.
Daryl, one idea, beyond the boring video-conferencing and health benefits we keep hearing about:
Cloud computing. Its already happening. My entire university just switched to gmail for all staff and students (Macquarie Uni). I have 6GB of email stored somewhere in google’s servers, rather than spread across several computers at home and work. Tried Dropbox? Tried Office 2010 online? Netbooks and ipads and the like are becoming popular. This is because the value in having a computer is no longer in what the hardware and processing power can do for you, its in what it gives you *access* to. So smaller and more portable is ok, because you don’t need processing grunt, you just need good access to the internet. In the future, maybe a home will just have a few $100 consoles and an internet-connected large loungeroom display, and all the storage, processing and apps will come from wholesale locations in the net. Less e-waste, easier backup, greater transportability, and an end to the never ending “update your hardware” cycle. LEave the service providers to update their hardware, all we need is a console that can display stuff. No more multiple HDDs and USBs to back up valuable data and photos. Just stick it on the cloud and have service manage the backup for you.
This is not a prediction, I know it is hard to predict what will actually happen with the NBN. Its just an idea.
But what is clear is that we are on a trajectory to making full use of faster and faster speeds, and benefiting from faster and faster speeds, and it isn’t hard to conceive of remotely plausible uses for more bandwidth. If you are having trouble imagining possibilities, you just aren’t thinking hard enough.
Fast connectivity will primarily be used for business applications, not for passive consumer downloading. It will transform the way lots of us work, allowing us to do most of it wherever there is a high-speed connection. It will open the way for true cloud computing, allowing genuine, real-time collaboration in cyberspace. Full-service airlines and car fleet leasing companies face an uncertain future.
Virtually all businesses that have commercial collaborations with other businesses will change the way they work. And anyone who asks why we need fibre to the home when the main users will be businesses just doesn’t understand how quickly the artificial distinction between business and the private sphere is breaking down. The changes are literally unimaginable, meaning snarky requests for further and better particulars are pointless by definition, but there is no doubt at all that they will be dramatic.
Trying to recoup the cost of the investment in advance is not practical because it’s impossible to predict who the users will be or how they will use it. While it is certain that the investment will generate enormous productivity improvements and cost savings, they are impossible to quantify. Consequently the project is beyond the capacity of our risk-averse MBA-qualified management class who won’t approve of anything until they’ve seen the projections in a spreadsheet. An entrepreneur might do it with their own money but the sum required makes it highly unlikely. Therefore the community collectively must take the risk, via its elected government. I cannot see any legitimate grounds for objection apart from doctrinaire ideological opposition to governments engaging in commercial projects regardless of the circumstances.
Huggybunny,
How about you find someone making the “faster porn” argument and then discuss the matter with them? So far, I have not noticed that one on this thread, or, for that matter, this site. The only one I have seen raising that one is, ahhhh, you.
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SCPritch,
You are right in two ways – extrapolation is dangerous and I do think that we will eventually need all of the capacity this would give us and, at some point in the future, a heck of a lot more.
I am more than old enough to remember the euphoria in the US over the valuation of the companies that put in large quantities of fibre capacity during the mid to late 1990s. It was part of the huge “tech boom” that went really well on the back of extrapolations of the amount of traffic that was likely to be generated as everyone went “on line” – extrapolations that appeared to show that you effectively could not build enough capacity to satiate demand, anyone that put in capacity anywhere was guaranteed to make money.
I think most of us would remember how well that one went. A lot of that capacity, 12 to 13 years later, is still not being used, particularly with the newer technology that allows each fibre to deliver more capacity than it was thought possible in the 1990s.
All I see here is the same – but this time it will be the taxpayer footing the bill for the irrational exuberance (as it was when the US government incorrectly IMHO bailed out the banks, as paul walter raised above). I do not mind if a private company makes an error and fails: the share- and debt-holders pay the bill, and if I have made a conscious decision to invest then it is my look out. In this case I have no choice. As a taxpayer (and a higher rate one) I am likely to foot the bill if this ends in tears. The less wealthy will also have to foot the bill in terms of lower services in actually important areas than they would otherwise have been able to expect.
As I cannot see where the huge amounts of traffic will come from (at least, over the next 10 years or so) to justify this sort of investment all I can see is that we will be faced with a huge bill in both investment and running costs for the foreseeable future.
In the even longer term I expect that this will be worthwhile – but even then I would prefer that it be done privately so that if it fails it will not be on the heads of each and every taxpayer and consumer of government services in this country.
As a side note – I am also not confident that a government will be able to not use the power they will have over the NBN as owners for their own benefit – internet filters are one possible area, but they are also likely to have other security implications and then use the fact that they have legislative powers to “encourage” its use if it fails.
I do not see those as main arguments, but they make me nervous in any case.
If such a private network is eventually put in (and years from now it may be that there is a better technology than fibre) then the old one will still be there as a competitive alternative, as will the existing wireless and so forth.
I just cannot see why we need to do this now.
No, it doesn’t.
The discussion is much bigger than the hidebound ideological unthoughts revolving around in your head.
Well Bean Counter, unless you have ponied up cash to keep LP’s servers running, as many of the regular contributors here have, then feel free to practice what you preach and cease posting here.
Now that would be living up to your name.
Gospel @ 47. You want something but aren’t prepared to pay for it. standard behaviour from someone mired in cultural cringe “oh woe is me. Why are we so Quaint? Why are those Sth Koreans and Americans laughing at us” not that you’re worried about what Sth Koreans and Americans think of us…of course. Read your own posts at 16 and 24!!
Why don’t you ask Kim who’s funding MOST of this blog, dopey??
Darryl Rosin
The last people to see the Personal Computer train coming down the line were the “It professionals” of the time. Ask IBM.
Huggy
Bean Counter and Gospel Truth, civility is a requirement on this blog, and we have ways and means!
Chris @ 4, in today’s Fin review I read that the symbolic act in Townsville that Gillard attended consisted of drilling a hole in a post. So it seems a fair bit of the network may be above ground.
I’m not sure what gave me the idea it would be underground. Possibly that grizzle-guts who said it would cost 50-100% more because a single heritage-listed tree can hold you up for 6 months and it might rain occasionally.
If the last mile is going to be above ground there is greater confidence, I think, that the project will be on time and on budget.
I’m kinda with Chris @ 26 in being interested something “between a 20 year old car and a new Porsche”. But of the two I know which I’d go for.
In today’s Fin Review Mike Quigley of NBN Co is quoted as saying that demand for bandwidth is growing at 25% pa. Nevertheless he concedes that a few megabits per second would be heaps for many for a while yet.
Andrew R, I get the impression that you see the thing going in two phases. Roll out, then use. My impression is that the deal with Telstra means that in some cases there will be gradual improvement. For example in new suburbs where the copper connection is presumably good, once they get a fibre node operating in the area they can offer enhanced speeds.
Also they will be receiving income from about now. How that works out over the 8 year roll-out I don’t know.
Huggy @ 49:
That’s exactly how it happened in the schools sector. The mainframe administrators regarded the Apple 11e as rubbish and thought students would be using a terminal hanging off a mainframe, if anything.
And, yes, I personally experienced the hubris of IBM.
Brian – the impression that most of it would be underground I think was intentional on the part of the govt – because of the furore that occurred in many suburbs when cable got rolled out – remember those community protests against just one more cable being put on power lines? I think you’ll see it underground where phone lines are already underground and aboveground where they’re above ground. From the street to the house – well many people wouldn’t want their front yards/driveway dug up even if the NBN was going to pay for it.
I think if you look carefully you’ll find that these sorts of predictions are quite cyclic. Remember Sun talking in the late 90s about thin clients/network computers? You see similar flip flopping trends in other areas of computing such as video cards as well. The reason (I think) is probably because of the often bursty nature of improvements – where for example compute power suddenly gets much faster than network bandwidth and vice-versa.
And before people think “the cloud” is a panacea and we don’t want/need local storage they should have a think about the potential privacy and security implications. As well as future accessibility of their data – using something like the microsoft online products – a company which isn’t exactly known for making the products compatible with others – is a recipe for being stuck with using their software for a *long* time, no matter what they eventually decide to charge.
Just adding this here as an example of why (in addition to the filter) I find it difficult to trust the ALP when it comes to IT policy:
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/smartphone-apps/fears-smartphone-game-apps-could-get-the-chop-in-australia-20100817-128cr.html
Note that these games are commonly sold for anywhere from free to $5-$6, so paying a classification fee of $400-$2000 each time would just kill the local market.
Chris,
Off site data storage is essential for any serious business. Once we used to take tapes(!) home; now we take removable hard drives, also we use a secure web site for some stuff and send it encrypted data. The NBN will vastly accelerate a move to off site web based storage.
With the tapes and hard drives any-one really wants to get your stuff has simply to mug the person who carries it. If the Gummint, for example, really wants our stuff they would simply send a swat team over to the home of the employee who has it.
Hard to intercept an encrypted data stream. Once the data are in a multiple backed up storage facility – who knows where- getting it out without our collaboration would be really difficult. If you worry about all this you had better put all your money under your mattress.
The concept of a really broadband “cyberspace” has been around for over 25 years. Suggest you read the 1984 William Gibson novel “Neuromancer”.
If we wish to avoid his dystopian vision we need to engage with the broadband beast. If we run away and hide it will consume us.
Huggy
Huggybunny – there’s a big difference between offsite storage (hey even I do that by keeping encrypted backups at my mum’s place and store some encrypted blobs of stuff on remote servers) and running say an office program/email entirely remotely. The latter has an unencrypted copy of your data – they have to in order for you to be able manipulate it.
So you’re not just vulnerable to governments, but also to employees of companies, hackers or simply accidental release of data. Also longer term, what happens when you want to move all your stuff (photos/email/documents/tax return information) from cloud provider #1 because their service/price is now bad to cloud provider #2 but there’s now way of converting the data from the format that #1 uses to the one that #2 uses or #1 provider decides not offer any export functionality anymore? Its not just the raw data that you care about, but all the meta data as well.
A reasonable analogy would be a long time myspace user wanting to move everything (history of updates, comments, photos, videos) over to facebook. Just can’t do it atm.
Brian,
To me, stringing it from the
treespower poles is hardly likely to improve reliability. Someone complained on the last thread that they lost cable when it got hit by a truck and pulled out of the front of the house. In the search to do this cheaply that sort of this will just be more common. Another bad result – but at least it may actually come in on budget.As for the 8 years – to me this means that many of us will be waiting for at least 4 years to get any improvement at all. As I have said – why would any rational person upgrade the existing infrastructure if they are just going to throw it away soon?
You are right, though, Brian – it is likely that the back haul will be improved during this, but that is not the main bottleneck in the suburbs or in the towns. It is the lack of DSLAMs and the presence of RIMs in the exchanges that is holding it up – and putting fibre to the exchanges will not help that one little bit.
Again, this is going to be an expensive and slow way to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Given that this sledgehammer will also be under the control of a government that has some really worrying nanny characteristics I am not happy at all. Chris’ link is yet another example of this.
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Huggy,
Again – if a business wants a gigabit connection they can already have it. I just don’t see the need for everyone to pay for it.
If you think an encrypted connection is secure against (say) NSA snooping then I will let you continue to think so.
Huggy, the government usually uses the baseball bat decryption approach which works equally well on remotely accessed backups and locally encrypted ones. Offsite backups are still crucial, but unless whoever does them is prepared to go to jail for a long time they’re accessible to anyone sufficiently threatening.
Data storage today is in much the same state that banks were in Medieval times. Odd currency, arcane rules and a great deal of secret hanky panky. You could find yourself in a great deal of trouble if you tried to tranfer funds about, almost no International trade (not too many nations actually). England had no proper banks until the 16th century
The whole Internet thing will be driven by straight commercial pressure to get its act together as it becomes the dominant force in the economy of the future. Just as the banks and other finacial institutions had to get their act together from the 16th century onwards so will the Internet transform itself in this century. For example some governments will see the advantage in opening huge data storage sites under a very open but rigid set of laws that will protect their investment and your data.
We should all stop whingeing about the poor quality of the Parchmnent and the paucity of Quills, this is only the beginning.
Huggy
Correct, Huggy – we can finally agree. It should be commercial pressure that is used to get this right. Those States that have too great a government involvement are doomed to failure.
Well done.
Andrew R, I was the one who lost the cable by means of a truck. The height was probably legal and the truck not, but they put it back a few feet higher.
Luckily it happened before we were using it.
Mike Quigley said in the AFR today:
I was never sure what the cost would be post the Telstra deal. For 10 million households over eight years that makes it $6.50 per household per week. Or $2.95 per person for 22 million people.
I’m still with Ken @ 27:
Meanwhile if it puts the video stores out of business, if half a dozen people in our street work from home, and if it keeps an old lady out of hospital who used have herself carted off regularly (an example a couple of threads back), then so much the better.
BTW, Labor doesn’t put in nearly enough effort to counter Coalition lies. If $27 billion is the sum and not $43bn, why do I have to find it on p12 of the Fin Review a couple of days before the election?
Brian,
Even if the final sum that the government has to put in is $27bn we, as consumers, will be having to pay the full whack. It’s not as if the rest of the money suddenly turns up from nowhere and we never have to pay it back.
I would also bet that the government is having to take either or both of a first loss position or guaranteeing the remainder – but we will not see those deals as they are, naturally, commercial in confidence.
If that is the case then, even if the government is “only” putting up $27bn then we are on the hook for the lot.
Oh – and don’t forget the cost to run, maintain, upgrade, bill and everything else. Running around pointing at the capital cost and proclaiming that this is cheap (since when was that sort of money “cheap” when so far we have no real benefits to weigh the cost against) is merely looking at half the picture.
Let’s have this thing built when we need it, and by people doing it off their own bat and carrying the risk, rather than building a thing that seems to have few if any benefits now and then paying for it for a long time until we work out what it is for.
You are right – the applications don’t exist yet. Remind me of why we are building this now, then.
Brian @ 62 – isn’t the $27 billion the government expenditure assuming they can fund the remaining amount with private investment?
Of course given they’re planning on privatising it all in the future the government may get all the money back, but the end users will be pay for it all eventually whether through internet access/landline fees given the copper is getting decomissioned.
And just another way of looking at it – say we only spent half the amount on the NBN and instead spent the other $20 billion on clean energy research. What sort of returns could we get from such a large investment in that research?
Andrew, Telstra sales are $25bn pa and the same article said they had spent $20bn on capex since 2005, lord knows what on.
In the context of the industry $27bn over 8 years doesn’t seem so huge.
Chris @ 64, I googled and came up with a bit.
Here’s Quigley in the Oz.
Here’s Quigley at the ACS:
But there is also this, which I find curious:
Here’s Conroy on Lateline:
Remember that the ‘worst case scenario’ was supposed to be $38-$43 billion.
On your last question of opportunity costs, that was what Cabinet should have been looking at. Maybe they did, more likely they didn’t. I wouldn’t necessarily blame Conroy. He was the one who hopped on a plane to Dubai so that he could get in Rudd’s ear, wasn’t he?
Brian,
Interesting – so is it $27bn, $43bn, $38bn, $37bn, $32bn or some other number?
Again, we don’t know the costs, we have no real benefits (other than some idea that we are all going to have huge amounts of data at home to shuffle around – from where I have no idea) so how could any feasible business plan even have been drafted? I think I can guess why no cost benefit analysis was done.
This is the sort of thing that Accounting 100 students are warned about – never mind Finance 201.
Andrew, the further point is that we don’t know how things are going to work out in cash flow terms over the next 8 years. The only budget provision I’ve seen is $4.7 billion in the 2009 budget as party of the ‘Nation Building Infrastructure measures’, a part of the ‘normal’ infrastructure spending. Will the whole $27 billion be called upon? We don’t know and we should. The press, especially the AFR should have been more diligent in pressing the issue.
Chris is right, that there is an opportunity cost. It could have been allocated to transport infrastructure for the ingrates of Western Sydney, for example.
I guess my point is that in terms of the telecommunications industry the sums involved are not large. The Govt should have been seeking to diffuse the scary numbers thrown around by the LNP, who typically say $43bn minimum.
“Let’s have this thing built when we need it, and by people doing it off their own bat and carrying the risk”
In other words, let’s f*ck over anyone who doesn’t live in a major city, screw you guys we’re doing fine.
Clearly if country people want roads, or hospitals, or sewage or clean water, they should also do it off their own bat and carry the risk. Why should we do it for them? Lazy bloody farmers with a sense of entitlement, etc. *Shakes angry city-dweller fist at greedy country bumpkins*
Brian – there are other uses for the fibre backbone than just plain fixed phone and internet so there’s some potential revenue sources there. Perhaps I’m being too pessimistic in the case of the NBN costings, but when I see project costs related to IT, experience has demonstrated that they’re going to be much bigger than they first claim. May not be the case this time…
But whether the NBN is actually able to raise private funds is going to depend a lot on the global financial climate.
And I agree – can’t really blame Conroy if there was lack of debate about it in cabinet. Though I would be very interested to see how many alternative plans he presented, and the costings for those. Eg. A couple of years back Labor was claiming that they could do a FTTN with close to the same coverage as now for (I think) around $8-12bn of government funds. You have to do FTTN for FTTH anyway so it wouldn’t be wasted infrastructure spending.
yeah we should have applied that principle to hospitals and railways too.
Chris, the ‘last mile’ as indicated in the post is in a state of disrepair, so Conroy obviously decided to go for broke. then there is the vision splendid of possibilities as yet not dreamt of when we are all hooked up.
In Singapore, I believe the fibre was rolled out to the basement of high rise apartment blocks and the households had to pay for the last little bit.
Rebekka, the last 7% are always going to be lead in the saddle-bag, and if you ask Telstra I suspect it’s more than 7% where service delivery is always going to be uneconomic. Other than that the population in Oz is fairly urbanised and consolidated. If you grow the pie big in the populated areas the cost of getting a reasonable subsidised service to the boondocks becomes easier.
Rebekka,
Nowhere have I said anything even remotely like that, so please keep the ad hom to yourself.
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Brian,
As far as infrastructure spends this is about as big as it gets – the virtually complete replacement of the system. Additionally – it may be that this is one project that comes in on time and on budget. If so, this would be about the first time I have seen a major IT or infrastructure project come in that way. Additionally, the government have been very careful not to answer any questions on where any overspend risk lies – will it be with the contractor, Telstra, the final owner or the government or some combination of these? Again – to me we should not be voting in favour of a system like this without these answers. I am sick to death of “commercial in confidence” that we keep getting if the government deigns to respond at all.
Brian said:
I make it $0.66 per person per day for 8 years assuming the $43bn outlier figure and no population increase.
Fran,
If you had $43bn to spend on something in Australia would you see getting over-the-top blazingly fast internet (in preference to merely fast internet) in our suburbs as the top priority for spending – or would you see a better use as being improving social housing, better education, services to the deprived or perhaps something else as being where you would put the money.
No ducking this one, please – just if you had that sum of money where would you put it?
Brian @ 72 – it’s possible that they went ftth because they couldn’t at that point negotiate a deal with telstra to use their existing infrastructure. In the end they did, but without seeing the numbers and details for alternatives its possible it was a political rather than a technical decision.
For telstra, losing the requirement to service uneconomic areas is what is going to be worth a huge amount to them. Their fixed line business is rapidly shrinking anyway as people have been getting rid of their fixed phone lines and just using mobiles. I have been keeping mine just for the 000 service but think I won’t bother getting it again next time we move.
Andrew asked:
On several other things, as you well know. That of course is beside the point because those several other things are not being offered, and nixing the NBN won’t put them onto the agenda, so yours is a false dilemma.
Also, as we note, only about $26bn is public money and even this will be recovered when it is flogged off.
The total spend is not the best, but its probably in the top 25 things I would spend money on. If this wasn’t being spent, the government would spend it on some other wasteful thing, as the coalition has made amply clear.
One of the good things about infrastructure spending is that once the asset and its benefits are there, the next government can’t remove it in practice, unlike things like pensions and services.
If we had inclusive governance, I’d be inclined to look at higher priorities, but since that is not coming any time soon I’m for locking this one in and moving on.
That’s what I thought, Fran. And yet here you are arguing strenuously for this waste of money. Surely your time would be better spent arguing against this and for the other things?
The ALP has, occasionally, shown it is capable of listening when there is argument that shows up how they are going wrong.
Andrew @ 75 your question presents a false dichotomy. Improving internet connectivity will in fact lead, directly and indirectly, to substantial improvements in education, health care, citizen access to public services, not to mention all kinds of private sector activities that will make the poor and disadvantaged groups in society a lot better off.
To take just three examples:
1. Welfare recipients will be able to have real-time online consultations with Centrelink staff. Just ask them how much they will value not having to make frequent visits to Centrelink offices.
2. All students will have access to a rich cornucopia of learning materials that are currently only available in wealthy private school libraries.
3. People will be able to have consultations with medical professionals without having to leave home. The benefits to health care will be exceeded only by the costs and time saved by not having to travel all over the city to visit them in person.
And I’m only drawing on old-fashioned applications, not trying to anticipate all the new ones that haven’t evolved yet. None of these things will happen immediately, but they will begin to happen only AFTER superfast broadband is available. Waiting for the demand to exist and then committing to build the network is just not a viable proposition. It would be like saying “Let’s not build an electricity distribution network until everyone’s bought a houseful of appliances they can’t use without it.” Product innovation just doesn’t work that way.
Ken @ 79, you touch on a particular interest of mine, not so much now as it was 40 years ago when we were deciding whether we should have a central resource in a school at all. Ideally there should be no barrier between kids in the classroom and all the curriculum (considered broadly) materials that could possibly be relevant to them. Back around 1970 the case for a centralised resource centre in the school was very clear.
In 2020, with the NBN I’m not sure what the appropriate answer will be. I’m quite sure there should be the modern equivalent of a teacher-librarian, with skills in how to access and use information to achieve personal and educational outcomes.
But as to the need for a resource centre as such, I just don’t know what that might look like.
I can tell you that shelving books is not a lot of fun! But that too has been partly automated, I understand, in large research libraries.
Andrew R said:
I never agreed it was a waste. Just not my top priority. Of the things on offer, it is the top priority
I do argue for the other things, in addition to this.
Not in my recollection — and I say that as someone who makes it her business to tell them directly by writing to MPs and committees on a 2-3 times per week basis, buttonholing any politician who will listen when they show up somewhere etc.
I am pragmatic. If they are offering something I approve of, I support it, even if I’d want something else even more.
I do of course argue against stuff I disapprove of and which is a waste of money, or worse. (e.g. CC&S, intenet filter, JSF, Submarines, Afghanistan occupation, the CPRS etc)
Ken said:
Thats a rather interesting one to consider. There’s a significant proportion of the population who already have sufficient bandwidth to do this already. And Centrelink have the technical expertise to do it as well as the internet connectivity. So why don’t they already offer it to those who would be able to take advantage of it? I don’t know the answer for sure, but I would guess its either a political decision that has been made not to do so and instead force people to turn up in person or they simply don’t have the funding to do it. Its not primarily a lack of bandwidth issue.
Here’s an account of a Parliamentary Library analysis of NBN costing.
Brian – posting this here in the hope that you’ll see it:
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2992813.htm
Mark Newton really knows what he is talking about – works for a really good ISP and has been leading a lot of the protests from the technical side against Labor’s internet filter.
I think its a very good summary of the NBN – supportive, but I think a lot more realistic about it than some commentary seen here. Covers some costings as well as importantly end user costings. Currently the NBN is selling access in the trials in Tasmania to ISPs at $0/month which explains the really cheap plans – presumably to encourage take-up. Obviously they can’t do that in the long term.
Nick Ross’s post on the NBN is definitely worth a read:
69 and I have our differences, but I’ll loudly applaud her for this post which indicates a similarity of philosophy to one I identify with. That is, that people aren’t just unconscious commodities available for the economy, or the uses of a particular class.
The economy also should exist for people and not just rich or wealthy ones
Chris, I didn’t see yours @ 84 until I posted @ 85. Newton is more pessimistic on costs, but I like his notion of keeping it public.
NBN will inevitably charge for different levels of access. If you want 1GB per second you are going to have to pay.
It seems to me, and I could be way off, that we should have a universal base level of access which is cross-subsidised for the bush. A bit like the notion of a postage stamp for letters.
Perhaps institutions like schools should get it at cost, averaged across the country, but those using it for profit would expect to pay a premium.
Computerworld yesterday:
NBN 101: Floating the submarine cable question