Recently Laura Tingle wrote that the NBN train had left the station and should achieve critical mass before the next election. Tingle did say that the Gillard Government should provide us with information on what productivity improvements might flow from the NBN. On Wednesday last week Gillard herself quoted information on this from the UN in answer to a Dorothy Dixer last Wednesday, which follows in full:
Mr SIDEBOTTOM (2.24 pm)—My question is to the Prime Minister. How will high speed broadband, such as that being rolled out in my electorate, drive a modern, productive Australian economy?Ms GILLARD—I thank the member for Braddon for his question. In answering this question, I say very clearly to the House that I have taken inspiration from the first speech in this parliament yesterday by the member for Greenway, who gave a great dissertation about the National Broadband Network. In her speech she reminded all of us that if you look across human history it is divided into those who embraced the challenges of the future and those who were stuck in the past. Inspired by the member for Greenway, I found another few examples of people who did not see fit to embrace the challenges of the future. Thomas Watson, the Chairman of IBM, said in 1943:
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
He might have missed the challenges of the future.
HM Warner of Warner Bros said in 1927:
Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
And Decca Records said in 1962:
We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.
These are a few examples of people who missed the challenges of the future. In the modern age we have the Leader of the Opposition saying that the National Broadband Network is a ‘white elephant’. That will join this series of quotes as yet another example of someone who cannot embrace the challenges of the future.
When we look for inspiration about the challenges of the future we should probably look at some of the studies around the world looking into the benefits of broadband.
I draw the House’s attention to the United Nations Broadband Commission for Digital Development, which demonstrated the economic benefits of high speed broadband in its report:
In the 21st Century, broadband networks must be regarded as vital national infrastructure—similar to transport, energy and water networks, but with an impact that is even more powerful and far reaching.
The report goes on to say:
… for every 10 per cent increase in broadband penetration we can expect an average of 1.3 per cent additional growth in national gross domestic product (GDP) …
Broadband is the infrastructure of the future, which is why the government is committed to building it.
Meanwhile, we see the other side on a mission of destruction to prevent Australia having this technology of the future. Members of the parliament and members of the Australian public may have seen claims from the opposition about cost-benefit analyses and the National Broadband Network. I draw the attention of the House and members of the public to the fact that an independent McKinsey-KPMG implementation study has been conducted into the National Broadband Network. It was done at a cost of around $25 million and it has produced a weighty tome that makes War and Peace look like an airport novel. I recommend members, if they are seriously interested in understanding the economic benefits of the National Broadband Network, to look at that implementation study. We are committed to the technology of the future. I say to the opposition: it is time to stop the campaign of destruction, to recognise the benefits of the National Broadband Network and to work with the government to ensure that Australia gets this technology of the future.
If you compare this answer with Conroy’s attempt in the Senate the previous day it illustrates why she’s PM and he’s not. He did provide specifics on the roll-out:
In addition to Tasmania, the NBN is being rolled out on mainland Australia. Over 2,300 kilometres of the 6,000 kilometres of fibre-optic backbone links in up to 100 regional locations around Australia have been completed. These links include Darwin, Emerald, Longreach, Mount Isa, Geraldton, Victor Harbor, Broken Hill and south-west Gippsland.
Construction work has also commenced on the five first-release sites on the mainland—Brunswick in Melbourne, Townsville, Minnamurra and Kiama Downs south of Wollongong, Armidale, and Willunga in South Australia. Planning and design work is underway for 14 new second-release sites, including regional locations such as Geraldton, Casuarina and Coffs Harbour.
Earlier Conroy provided a succinct answer to the question of the impact of HM’s Opposition’s refusal to pass legislation enabling the Telstra deal. He said it would delay the roll-out, make it more expensive and more would be above ground.
Critical here is the attitude of Senator Fielding, who says that the Telstra deal might not be good for Telstra shareholders. Of course, he would know better than the Telstra management. Telstra shares recently hit a record low because of uncertainty on the issue.
The House was also informed that over 50% of customers had opted for an NBN connection in Tasmania and that:
in total the five internet service providers—Exetel, iiNet, Internode, iPrimus and Telstra—are offering services at a price as low as $29.95 per month for 25 megabits per second and $59.95 per month for 100 megabits per second. iPrimus has a broadband and phone bundle which includes all calls in Australia, including to mobiles, for $89.95.
The iPrimus deal anticipates the bundling which will occur if the Telstra/NBN deal goes through and the copper network is replaced. There is a trend also, I suspect, to throw in telephone calls for nothing. We recently negotiated a new deal with Telstra on a cable/fixed line package, where our download allocation was doubled, speeds increased (though we reckon they haven’t increased at all), plus all local phone calls and calls to Telstra mobiles were thrown in for nothing. The first monthly bill was less than half the last under the old scheme.
Lower prices are part of Telstra’s new strategy to retain customers, but I don’t think they necessarily calculated on intervention by the regulator. I’ve lost the AFR clipping, but they recently screwed down what Telstra is allowed to charge for wholesale access.
The article suggested that this could result in the renegotiation of the Telstra/NBN deal (presumably the copper network is not worth as much) and add a few billion to the cost of NBN. My reaction was ‘WTF, do the boffins in the ACCC really know what they are doing?’
So the train may have left the station, but various people are trying to steer it, Turnbull, as we know, trying to crash the whole thing. If the Govt do want to get the approval of the Senate, they still have to run the gamut of the Greens, who want to retain NBN in public ownership.
Meanwhile the Future Fund’s David Murray seemed to think he deserved a special briefing as Telstra’s largest shareholder. Properly, he was told to bugger off. But he too couldn’t be pleased with Abbott/Turnbull and Fielding.
The United Nations Broadband Commission for Digital Development seems a relatively new kid on the block with Conroy appointed as a commissioner and Australian broadband advocate Paul Budde also recruited to write a major research paper. This may have been the paper Gillard was quoting from, or there may be another report from the Commission.
In a quick search this morning we have Ban Ki Moon accepting a report various entries on BuddeBlog about broadband, A Platform for Progress, and A 2010 Leadership Imperative: The Future Built on Broadband.
Whatever the basis of these reports, we certainly have some high-level urging coming from the UN.
Interesting examples from Gillard and the opposition should think about the implications. IBM, Warner Bros and Decca managed to avoid any serious consequences from these misjudgements by being light enough on their feet to adapt once they had a better grasp of reality. One hopes Abbott’s mob, persuaded by the likes of Turnbull, will find a way to do likewise. It would be a national tragedy if irrational opposition to the NBN or anything resembling it were to become an immutable pillar of conservative strategy.
The NBN is a tremendous project but Conroy is a hopeless champion for it. I sometimes cringe when I hear him trying to explain why it is needed.
I am undecided as to whether Conroy is an intelligent person who lacks some communications skills or is he just a dipstick who doesn’t really get it. If it is the latter then who is the champion for this project now? I suspect the original idea to call Telstra’s bluff and move to the NBN/FTTH model was Rudd’s.
Trevor, I heard his answer in Question Time and Gillard’s. Apart from disgraceful interruptions in the senate compared with a HOR on pretty good behaviour, his delivery was dreadful. Rushed, bumbling and monotone. Hansard reads a lot better than it sounded.
Also he’s not very quick on his feet as the recent appearance of Q&A showed. The Opposition tried the same schtick as Mirabella on Q&A about broken promises and Gillard, Swan etc simply creamed them.
Yeah, Conroy’s a bit ordianry in comabt. His failure to terminate Mirabella’s inane & utterly brainless ranting on Q&A was frustrating to watch.
I didn’t watch Qanda, never do in fact, but I did see Conroy forcefully score lots of valid points against an entirely hopeless and out of his depth Turnbull on “Lateline” some few nights ago.
Brian: On reviewing more of Conroy’s performance’s, unfortunately the jury seems to firming on the bumbling fool. If he is really the intelligent person lacking communications skills, he has become very skilled at masking his intelligence.
I have just started reading again Don Watson’s book “recollections of a bleeding heart”. Oh to have someone in the parliament with the intelligence and oratory of PJK. Will we see the likes again?
hannah’s dad, I think Conroy could only have done that if Turnbull was bullshitting, and knew that Conroy knew it. He’s considerably more articulate and, I suspect, brighter, than Conroy as a rule.
Agree about Q’n'A, btw – I always start to watch it if there’s someone who looks interesting on it, and end up throwing things at the TV and going to bed 10 minutes in. I shouldn’t bother.
Well, Conroy did have the advantage, on Lateline over Turnbull, because he actually knew what he was talking about.
Mal was left looking pissed off, at the end, with Tony Jones offering him the consolation that when he came back next time he might be able to engage more if he had a policy.
I think you misjudge Conroy, Trevor. He knows his stuff well but is left a little bit flatfooted by idiot Mirabella style antics. Maybe he just needs to relax because he is a pretty serious character.
Ah yes, survivor bias. We quote these mispredictions because they are memorable. What is excluded are all the times when the critics were right.
By the way, the last time that “build and they will come” was used as an argument vis-a-vis the internet, we had the dot-bomb crash.
I don’t care if he’s Einstein and Mother Teresa rolled into one with sprinklings of Jesus dust and lashings of miracle cream. He’s responsible for multiple attempts to introduce the clean feed and cannot be forgiven for it.
It’s time for the Opposition to wake up and smell the reality…it’s an essential piece of infrastructure in the 21st century.
Malcolm continued to show his complete lack of nous on this by stating that he thought $65 was too much for people to pay for broadband…totally clueless.
Yeh, Jacques you wouldn’t want the person who is most around the NBN rollout because he has pissed off peeps on another issue.
We all just want to get back at him, right? And sidetrack the thread, as well.
Conroy will have little to do with the project. I imagine that the actual Project Manager was hired months ago.
Besides, what use is ‘fast’ internet if it’s filtered all to hell?
You’re letting TEH SHINEEZ distract you from an actual matter of principle.
Brian, do you seriously think Gillard’s fatuous rhetoric establishes an iota of a case for the NBN? What on earth have Warner Brothers’ views in 1927 on talking pictures got to do with the worth of the NBN in Australia in 2010? Or Decca’s about the Beatles? Doesn’t the fact that she is reduced to using these sorts of ludicrous analogies as justification for pissing $43 billion against the wall and hiding it off-budget ring any alarm bells? Are you arguing that all visions are created equal so that the fact that the talking picture vision came to fruition must mean that anything that Julia can describe as visionary and inspiring will be equally successful?
How does the fact that 50% of Tasmanians signed up to something that they were effectively given for a vast discount by a huge Government subsidy say anything about the value of that subsidy? Is it not more likely that the 50% who didn’t sign up even with a vast discount are the meaningful statistic in regards to the NBN’s value to potential customers?
The McKinsey report was, as even Gillard is forced to admit, an implementation study, not a business case or cost-benefit analysis, and such an analysis is still non-existent.
Pshaw, to use another expression from 1927.
I notice also that you have avoided quoting from the very next question in Hansard, on the same subject, from Turnbull about precisely this issue of the lack of a business case – and Treasury’s stern warnings on that score – and Swan’s utter bumbling of a response.
You may be right that the train will be too far down the tracks to be able, to mix the metaphor, to unscramble the egg by the time a more responsible Government gets a chance to do so. This is hardly however a justification for the project; in fact it merely underlines the degree of irresponsibility involved in the current approach.
Why is the UN in any way relevant to the question of how Australia chooses to manage its communications infrastructure?
Bugger the principle of that thing, Jacques. Conroy is the best man for the job because he has his head around the rollout. It would be madness to put some rooky in, to look after the portfolio, at this stage of the game.
When we’re dealing with one of our most important freedoms than the principle of the thing is fairly important…
You know the chances of it passing now are almost nil right?
You’re letting an irrelevancy distract you from the reality…and the “quotes” around fast aren’t really appropriate. Comparing 1Gb to 12Mbps maximum, the NBN is flat out lightning…
The 7:30 Report had this interesting tid-bit for what the NBN could do for rural communities.
I couldn’t even imagine benefits like that. I was hoping the work-from-home revolution would at least entice some professionals to move rural and thus give more spending opportunities to rural communities but I wasn’t even sure if that could be modeled.
And I totally dug this, because it irks me when people talk about why the kids are fleeing the country areas as being the lack of services. Imho it is not. It’s the lack of opportunity.
Wozza I know recycling is good for the environment but I don’t think it extends to tedious discredited arguments like ZOMG THERE’S NO BUSINESS CASE!
Oh, sorry, Ken – there’s a business case and I’ve missed it?
Can you point me to a copy please?
You might point it out to Wayne Swan too. He’ obviously lost his – when specifically asked by Turnbull about a business case, the best he could do was say we had panel and they sat around the table and talked about it for a while.
rumrebellious, well done! I saw that report and was disappointed that they did not make a bigger deal about the high tech dental facilty.
The angle for the story seemed to be more about free homes and other money to spend, as a way of getting people to the bush, when super fast broadband was the real reason for optimism.
Wozza, it’s not $43 billion – the govt is only paying for $19, the rest is investment.
Wozza, here you are: http://www.dbcde.gov.au/broadband/national_broadband_network/national_broadband_network_implementation_study
Wozza is boringly running most liberal talking points, patrickg. Old fart ground.
Wozza the business case argument has been convincingly rebutted in previous threads here, and in multiple other publications. If you want to argue with the rebuttals feel free, but at least do us the courtesy of responding to them. You can’t really expect us to indulge you in an endless Groundhog Day loop of the same material, gratifying though I’m sure it would be for you.
Just because that tactic worked with respect to climate change doesn’t mean it’s a one-size-fits-all approach suitable for all public policy discussions.
Ken Lovell said:
Hear! Hear!
“I didn’t watch Qanda, never do in fact, but I did see Conroy forcefully score lots of valid points against an entirely hopeless and out of his depth Turnbull on “Lateline” some few nights ago.”
Yeah, I saw him effortlessly bury an LNP opponent on Lateline around-about the time the Opposition’s wireless ‘plan’ came out. I guess he’s not always of that calibre, but he’s defended the NBN well before (while simultaneously undermining himself spectacularly with the censorship plan, but that’s another story).
He has to be crushed, politically. No politician should ever want to touch it again. I want that policy raised to the ground and salt plowed into the dirt.
*razed
Latest news from Russia Today or RT News is the whole of Europe very likely is heading for a 1000year coldest winter.How is the bet we will have a cold one,that even makes the neoprene around your glass stand up like an erection!? I expect the pipes that already run across a bridge out here to ocassionally freeze, because the Blicks River does.Other countries have ,or their populations know all the plumbing for cable are not deep enough underground.Same with Fibre optics.I hope the majority of Russians survive,and communication matters resolved some way.Strawbales over some areas may reduce coldness.Not happy to go on about the political circus of who is going to be right.There is also the Igloo approach,that could be tried in Europe.Walls of ice above important underground matters.
Hear hear.
Lefty E @4, in Conroy’s qanda defence, as host/moderator Tony Jones should have taken hold of the situation and stopped Mirabella in her tracks. After all, that’s his role, not Conroy’s.
She constantly and at volume, talked over anyone who was either answering a direct question or whose turn it was to address a topic.
She is probably the most ill mannered person I have seen in this sort of forum.
Having said that, my opinion of Rob Oakeshott rose a few more levels when he shut her up with a few pithy words. He was warmly applauded as a result, so obviously I wasn’t the only one who wanted to slap and gag, her.
Wozza, read rumbellious @19. Good business case for regional and country Australia, I would have thought. I would be the first to sign up, if NBN were to become available where I live.
Interestingly, late last night on the ABC, NBN and its advantages were being discussed on a program. Can’t remember its name, but health professionals in WA and other regional areas were in concert.
They unequivocally want NBN for its diagnostic uses and the ability it will give them to send and receive very large files very quickly, saving them and their patients a lot of time and money both diagnosing and treating illnesses.
IMO, that is a pretty good endorsement for NBN.
I actually think the reaction of the incumbents to a new technology is a measure of the importance of the new.
For example Kodak were the last to see the digital photographic revolution as were IBM incapable of seeing the personal computer game changer. The list goes on.
If the new stuff is really good the incumbents will not see it coming, this is a good thing or they would be out there placing obstacles.
Those who think the present system or some cobbbled together “wireless” alternative is even remotely comparable with a true really fast broadband network are on the same happy campers railway crossing. The NBN express will wipe them out.
Huggy
I wonder, do Liberals conduct a cost-benefit analysis before having kids, or falling in love, or deciding to make comments at LP?
Imagine if the cost-benefit anyalysis crew had been around in 1939?
Wilful, do you really not understand the difference between a cost-benefit analysis and the McKinsey implementation study? (Hint: look in the McKinsey report for a quantified discussion of benefits. Second hint: it’s called an “implementation study” not a cost-benefit analysis for a reason.) Still, at least you tried. Ken Lovell apparently believes that lofty references to vague “previous convincing rebuttals” and “multiple publications” should be sufficient to prove his case; who needs to provide, like, actual documents?
Rhetorical question, of course. Previous threads have amply demonstrated the woeful lack of understanding of the concept of cost-benefit analysis (honourable exception: Labor Outsider) round here. I give up. You can play by yourselves again now.
Huggybunny: everyone I know who has tried wireless says it was like returning to dial-up. Most seem to quit the wireless experiment in frustration after a few weeks.
Wozza, do you really think that a CBA is the be-all and end-all of this project, that it could not go ahead without one, however spurious and based on guesswork any such ‘analysis’ would have to be?
But hey, I fully support your last sentence!
Oh and Jane and Rumrebellious: yeah, right. An anecdote on the 7.30 report about a possible development of one ruralbuilding now equates to a business case for $43 billion of nation-wide infrastructure.
The frightening thing is I think you believe it should.
Ginja, in two months I will be on NextG wireless, as my only option apart from 56k dial-up. Apart from being totally stuck with telstra, it looks OK so far (except the missus has an irrational fear of EMFs)
I bet there’s some wonderful piece of economic analysis gathering dust somewhere in the US that helped make the case for financial deregulation, too.
“According to our modelling, mixing propriety trading and conventional banking will add 0.3% to GDP,” it no doubt reads…..or some such nonsense.
Wilful – congratulations, you’re one of the lucky ones. No one I’ve spoken to has a good word to say about wireless.
….proprietary trading, of course.
I think you were watching the re-run of The Deal, the four corners report on the independents decision about government.
There was a clip on that where they showed the independents meeting the Rural Health Alliance.
Ginja, A wireless vs fibre war is crazy.
It’s the kind of black and white fight the liberals want this thing to become.
Wireless will continue to improve- even off the back of high speed broadband- and will have it’s place.
Joe2
Wireless is not even in the same paddock as Fibre.
It will not “improve”, because there are certain immutable laws of physics that forbid this.
The only way it can compete is via line of sight microwave beams that will die when it rains and that require over 1000 times the amount of energy per bit than fibre.
In a broadcast system there are frequency limits that define the bandwidth and they are not even close to fibre.
Huggy
You know I haven’t read a good theological case for the NBN either, but since the state is no more a religion than it is a business, I don’t regard the absence as a problem.
When did this dreary, myopic, ideological obsession with cost/benefit analysis overwhelm imagination and entrepreneurship amongst conservatives in this country? I guess it’s all of a piece with their timorous craving for safety and security and avoidance of risk, which is why we’ll never see conservative demands for a cost benefit analysis of an Abrams tank or the Christmas Island detention centre or the American alliance.
I’ve had Unwired wireless at home before. It was fine but now I have ADSL2 which is fast enough for me for the stuff I do at the moment.
My laptop has one of those 3G wireless keythingies which is very useful when I am out and about or at the snow etc. I’ll still need something like that whether there is a NBN or not.
And of course my phone is connected to the Internet via 3G wireless.
Wired v wireless seems a bit dumb – I expect I will be using both for the foreseeable future…
Huggy said
Whilst not wishing to talk for Joe2, I took his position to be that new wireless standards will continue to improve theoretical peak speeds, which, in tandem with improved trunk speeds thanks to the NBN, mean wireless will continue to be a useful niche technology. Typically people who have a need for mobile broadband, or itinerant types (like students) who don’t wish their broaband connection to be tied to a single address.
In fact, the NBN is likely to make mobile broadband even better by removing users like me who currently use it as it is cost effective and ADSL2+ is not realistically available in my suburb. This will improve the undoubted problems with contention and congestion.
“Wireless is not even in the same paddock as Fibre.”
Didn’t say it was, Huggy.
I use it sometimes and know well it’s limitations . What I was saying, if you read closely, is that it has it’s place -on the road- and there is a trap to simplistic, over-egged, arguments which benefits the wreckers ;always intent, as they are, to side track matters.
“Whilst not wishing to talk for Joe2..”
I am more than happy with what you said on my behalf, Aidan.
Thankyou.
Wireless will continue to be a useful “niche” in the sense that everyone with a mobile phone or 3g laptop or iPad equivalent will be using it. Which is quite a big niche.
The story of Woodstock dental is in the Land.
At a stroke, it makes a case for the NBN and for Telstra having nothing to do with it.
Imagine how Britain would have been left behind without the Imperial Airship Scheme.
IMHO the value to be created by the internet in the future hinges on ubiquitous, continuous, reasonably fast mobile data, not massive amounts of data coming to fixed points in our homes. All that’s good for is watching more TV.
Ken Lovell @47, yeah, let’s just spend lots of money on stuff without thinking about it.
Ginja, I don’t know what sort of wireless your friends use, but on Optus (not the best 3G network) I can get 1-3mbps in most places.
Oh Dear. Stuffed up the embedded link. I knew I wouldn’t get it right twice in a row.
[Fixed - ed]
rumbellious @44, thanks for that. I was painting and mostly listened vaguely until I heard them talking to the Rural health Alliance. Listened harder after that.
Re wireless, I know I’ll be stuck with wireless, because I don’t expect the population in our hamlet (popn.70 including dogs and cats), to increase much in my lifetime, even though we now have the fckn marina the stupid bloody state government insisted we had to have.
Hopefully our status as part of the wind manufacturing centre of the country and off the beaten trackness, will prevent the thing from ever really getting off the ground. One can only hope.
Your 47 is interesting Ken.
Back up there at 20 you asserted there was already a business case (“arguments like OMG there’s no business case [are] tedious and discredited”).
Now apparently you acknowledge that there isn’t a business case, and the argument has shifted to but that’s OK because business cases are dreary, myopic, the obsession of conservatives pining for security blankets, stifling the imagination etc.
I will give you that your own imagination has clearly not been stifled. But if you ever want to join the real world, I suggest you put a bit more thought into factuality and getting your story straight. Firing at random won’t cut it when you get away from your own little security blanket at this blog.
Wozza, the cost of the current setup for providing internet services, the Australian Broadband Guarantee, needs to be factored in when considering the cost of the NBN. My experience that it is crap. The satellite service I get is often poor and the satellites start to fail very quickly. I’m on my third satellite in five years and the ABG paid for two of them.
A lot of things become possible with ubiquitous wireless – the internet is not just people talking to each other but machines talking to each other. Google pervasive computing.
As an example of a valuable tool now in use that relies on pervasive but low or medium bandwidth networking consider the handheld eftpos terminal.
For another example think of the Kindle.
Wozza: I have looked back at Ken’s post on 20 & I don’t read it as claiming there is a business case. I think it is clearly consistent with his later posts.
Still, it seems this is consistent with the conservative play book on debates. If the facts don’t fit play the man, create diversions.
Be nice if you could provide some rational arguments rather than polemics.
Wozza, try re-reading Ken, this time making an effort to understand that he was saying:
Constant repetition of the same irrelevant, discredited bullshit is really fucking tedious when the rest of us thought a stake had been driven through its heart here a few weeks ago.
Wozza said:
Ken did no such thing. What he called myopic dreary, myopic, the obsession of conservatives & etc was the focus on CBA’s.
It’s disrespectful to attempt to create strawmen with whom to argue. That’s why you go on to say:
You apparently, are its gatekeeper and Ken a supplicant, at least in your mind.
Factuality? What kind of word is that? End even were it a word, what is non-factual about Ken’s claims? Ken was advancing a claim about the real world where the facts are not in serious dispute.
This is purely a swing.
here’s a challenge for you Wozza. You like CBA’s? Off you go and suggest a framework for a CBA that would enable the state to make a judgement on the financial, schedule, and organisational feasibility of the project.
Be sure to specify the models you are relying on for various public goods (negative and positive) and the counterfactuals (the costs of inaction) and to show how these can be pertinent over the likely service life of the technology.
When you have done that, you will have given us something to argue the toss over. Until then, you are just handwaving.
Can’t agree. If anything, I’d say it is the opposite. Your wish to have “ubiquitous, continuous, reasonably fast mobile data” is critically dependent on reducing contention on wireless connections. You want AS MUCH DATA AS POSSIBLE to be travelling on fibre so the wireless is freed up.
There is also the possibility, once download caps and whatnot become pretty much redundant, that more people would be willing to share the home/business wireless for nix. Why not? Doesn’t cost them anything, and for businesses it is a useful marketing tool or point of differentiation.
I’m on 3. When I first got it was well stoked. 1.5-2Mbps fairly consistently. Now, with the popularity of mobile broadband surging, we get anywhere between 190 Kbps to 1.5Mbps. It is the variability that is infuriating. “Oh no .. can’t watch youtube now .. iPlay is a no-go at the moment”. Annoying and frustrating.
Wozza, fer farqsake — you’ve been given the answer, now, go read it:
http://www.dbcde.gov.au/broadband/national_broadband_network/national_broadband_network_implementation_study
The reason nobody has any patience or interest in humouring your pewling and mewling is that the implementation studies have been done, the ROI estimates are in, and if you can’t be bothered to educate yourself that is your problem and nobody else’s. Just try be a grown-up about it, OK?
And don’t come back until you can offer a response against the substance of the exhaustive studies that have already been undertaken, instead of spewing up the same tendentious points that have already been addressed, elsewhere, repeatedly,
you tiresome bore.Oh FFS, I’ll make it easy for you. Chapter 7, especially pp. 355-365.
Sharing your Internet is all fun and games until you’re sued for copyright infringement and raided for distributing child porn…
Libs love mediocrity and therefore the idea that Australia could be a world leader with the NBN simply terrifies them.
Tom @ 53 you may be confusing an assessment of financial impact and risk, which of course should be an integral element of sound public administration, with commercial cost benefit analysis in the context of an organisation concerned to verify that a new venture will return a profit to that organisation.
As I said @ 46, the state is not a business. It is Role of the State 101 that the state undertakes development of infrastructure which is not attractive to the private sector, one frequent reason being the unquantifiable nature of the returns on offer and the impossibility of capturing them for the financial benefit of the infrastructure owner (for example, it is practically impossible for the organisation that builds a new road to capture a share of the economic benefits created by that road). The fact that it is necessary even to point this out demonstrates how crude government-as-business ideology has blinded some people not only to the nature of contemporary society but also to the history of this country’s development.
Fran says: “You like CBA’s? Off you go and suggest a framework for a CBA that would enable the state to make a judgement on the financial, schedule, and organisational feasibility of the project.”
It wont happen Fran. The whole reason this CBA cat was thrown in was in the hope that the govt might be spoked into actually doing one. This would then have opened up a whole new front to attack. No matter what the resultant report provided there would have been endless detail which could be argued over. Grist to the mill for those wanting diversion and intent on creating an image of confusion.
Ken Lovell sezs
Oh brilliant comment. What a ridiculous mantra this is and as if it were ever possible to do a meaningful cba in the first place about anything.
Rightwingers/conservatives hate and oppose the NBN because it is precisely the sort of nation building infrastructure that the state and only the state today can or will finance and complete and secondly because it will be a another great slab of brickwork in the democratisation wall. Oh the horror.
Ken @65,
That is an argument for not requiring a “business case”, but it is not an argument against a cost-benefit analysis, since the latter would seek to measure all public benefits, not just the direct financial benefits to the NBN business.
Indeed, a CBA is commonly the foundation for decisions on State infrastructure development. Whether or not a CBA is appropriate in the context of the NBN relates to the practical difficulty of predicting futuristic benefits, not to any ideological perspective.
I’m sure that you know all this, but you seem to be leaving some confused commenters in your wake.
Wirelss, Of course there is a place for wireless, you use it when nothing else is available.
That is it.
Please don’t try to pretend that you can use it to transmit and receive really big data files or streaming high definition video or any of the data intense applications.
The difference between fibre and wireless is like that between a six lane highway and a winding bush track – complete with bushrangers and potholes..
Huggy
“Please don’t try to pretend that you can use it to transmit and receive really big data files or streaming high definition video or any of the data intense applications.”
Nobody would dare, Huggy. You’d have their guts for garters.
@52 No one in particular:
Wireless will continue to be a useful “niche” in the sense that everyone with a mobile phone or 3g laptop or iPad equivalent will be using it. Which is quite a big niche.
I expect that with the NBN people/businesses could have an in-house wireless network that visitors could connect through, reducing mobile broadband traffic (as libraries, community centers and coffee shops currently offer) and @ 64 I guess these places could/do use a filter.
I’d also like “wireless” and “wireless” to be differentiated more clearly.
I & U @ 71 I’m not bothering to develop a detailed argument because it’s all been done before ad nauseam, at LP and elsewhere. If anybody is genuinely confused about what I’m arguing, as opposed to making bad faith objections, they can go and read the very thorough dissection of the various issues on previous LP threads.
Excellent point drsusancalvin@74.
I suppose wireless and wi-fi need to be more clearly differentiated as Liberals will purposely confuse them.
Interestingly, London city has, apparently, already a free connection local wi-fi network. So it can be bigger than even a building in house arrangement.
Ken, the argy-bargy on the NBN from the timorous ones is comparable to climate change skepticism. Of course the term skepticism in this context is an utter misnomer.
The NBN objective and the reality of climate change pose ideological and practical challenges that to be met will undermine a certain sort of politics and worldview and therefore must be resisted at all costs.
Yeah, we know.
But sorry, folks, it’s the economy, stupid, ideology comes second. Therefore you lose.
The Liberals couldn’t be any more irrelevant if they tried.
*Cheers*
If I’m allowed a very slight thread derail, I do so love this quote
But sadly, isn’t it an urban myth? ( I will be more than happy if someone proves me wrong!)
Wow helen:
First Ken takes the words out of my mouth and now you. That’s so spoky. AIUI the attribution is in doubt.
In my case it was most annoying because as an IT teacher, I had used it for some time in classes before reading that Watson probably never said it. It was so perfect that if he hadn’t, he should have.
I also love the story about Edison pooh-poohing the idea that “records” would have any useful application beyond setting down the final thoughts of the dying and rejected the idea of putting music on them until finally being persuaded some years later that the idea had merit.
I hope that is true but now I just don’t know.
oops … [
hHelen; spooky]Well said, Philomena.
….and let’s do a cost-benefit analysis on, I dunno, maybe the private health insurance rebate. While we’re at it, state funding for private schools.
These cost-benefit analysis thingies could be fun. Like how Howard’s neoliberal baby, the Productivity Commission, now spends its time on progressive causes like problem gambling and paid parental leave.
Careful what you wish for right-wingers!
Ginja said:
Actually, those are things for which you probably could design meaningful CBAs, precisely because the public goods and costs are far more knowable, and unlikely to be affected significantly by risk or uncertainty.
The measures proposed would be reversible, or capable of amendment and don’t go decades into the future either.
@35.
For God’s sake when will you get it through your climate denying head: there is no CBA, there can be no CBA. If that is all you have then, OK you’ve made your point now sit down and let the “grown-up” govt do its work.
Hope I don’t sidetrack the thread, but after the detection of the stuxnet virus, who honestly doesn’t believe that internet filtering– oh, sorry, actually it’s more internet filtering isn’t the way of the future? Honestly…?
I have a filter on my computer. I put it there myself. It filters what I want it to and protects me from viruses.
If you can’t see the difference between that and a government run filter blocking a secret blacklist of sites then you’re being disingenuous or an idiot.
Please – freedom of speech is a fundamental human right and should be supported by both right and left. The Internet has the potential to be so wonderful and we’re seeing its promise being eroded.
What’s the point of the world’s fastest communications channel if the state will decide what we can say to each other on it?
There is some genuine cross over where some ISPs will provide line of sight wi-fi connections. For example, lots of people set these up prior to widespread ADSL usage. And in the past a few companies have popped up with wifi services where Telstra have not rolled out ADSL.
Huggybunny @ 72 – I don’t think most people would find it difficult to imagine some pretty valuable possibilities if we had cheap wireless (or wi-fi) access everywhere. The kind of things you can do if you can just assume that you have access to the internet *and* are not tethered to a cable. Just one example – the ability for constant monitoring of people with medical problems – the ability to pick up problems much earlier and an easy way for monitoring systems to call for help when necessary.
The problem with wireless at the moment in Australia is you can only get two versions – expensive with a pretty poor network, or very expense with a half decent network. A fibre rollout will help with this, but its not the end and its not a replacement for wireless. Unfortunately wireless has a bit of a bad reputation because at the moment its used a lot as a substitute for decent broadband access which it doesn’t do as well.
Helen @ 79, it seems you are right.
I remember hearing of someone in London circa 1900 saying that we have no need for the telegraph because there in no shortage of message boys.
I think we need an urban myths thread!
In today’s AFR there is an article saying that Optus is in discussions with NBN about rolling its cable network into the network. Optus has 425,000 cable users, 510,000 telephone. Its cable passes 1.4 million homes in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
“disconnected on a fixed line basis from the rest of the world” Malcolm Turnbull on RN just now threatening the frighteningly likely, probably, don’t say I didn’t warn you consequences of not accepting teh hypermonopolisticnetinopticity into yur home. The NBN is apparently more incidentally vengeful than the Borg.
I remember hearing of someone in London circa 1900 saying that we have no need for the telegraph because there in no shortage of message boys.
I remember hearing of someone in London circa 1900 saying we have no need of life boat rations because there is no shortage of cabin boys.
Posters here have amply discredited the CBA mantra. I like the train analogy for describing the NBN.
The development of railways in the 19th century provide an excellent parallel, as Tony Windsor, who has articulated the urgency of NBN for regional Australia better than most, has claimed. “Do it once. Do it right.” is an excellent simplification. We can perhaps do it better than the various railways did with their differing gauges.
And on the railways: they might well not have proceeded if subjected to a CBA. The private investments failed until taken over by the state. And then they succeeded because of social and political need. The tilt in population distribution between city and country was bound to make them marginal at best, but they were needed for development of the hinterland and getting our products to port.
We had a similar case with the distribution of electricity. It was only after the utilities were nationalised that the less populous areas got connected. Private sector suppliers regarded a lot of it as unprofitable. Yet the economic benefits gained by the states justified those steps.
Paul Burns and other history buffs could probably tell you more on this, but on the evidence of the past the NBN investment and urgency can be amply justified.
Brian @ 89 – some of that cable network can already deliver 50-100mbit/s (though shared) and other parts of it could be upgraded so doing so would save a lot of money if it means the fibre rollout to those areas can be delayed until the cable speeds are not sufficient or get too congested.
I actually think that CBA should be attempted for major projects, or at least a very good argument put up for why they are inappropriate. That has not really been done, and has therefore become a club for hitting the Govt over the head.
The problem though, for the opposition is that since they too do not do CBA for major items of expenditure (middle class welfare, detention centres on Xmas Island as examples), why would I change my vote to favour them?
If the lack of a CBA process is a club to beat the Govt, it is an equally potent club to beat the opposition with.
I note that the opposition has not come up with a promise (core/non core/written down with a group hug) to use CBA itself on major items. Very prudent of them.
Thus far they are equal.
And MarkS amongst those non-CBA big ticket items are sacred cows like defence procurement. Nobody tries to work out the public benefit of a Joint Strike Fighters, submarines, tanks etc. The submarines are a fun one. Currently Australia has, IIRC, six but due to maintenance problems and the difficulty of staffing them — apparently submarine life is really boring (who knew?)between 1 and 2 are in service at any one time.
So not only has no CBA been done on the next generation of subs (there’s talk of a $25-40 billion budget on this one) but they haven’t even worked out whether they can keep them in operation for most of their effective life, or even whether, by the time they can be brought into service, they will be of any strategic use.
If the opposition weren’t frightened of looking weak on national security, this is a point they would make.
Marks @ 94, Possum thoroughly demolished the idea of providing a CBA for the NBN (and, by extension, any other bit of public infrastructure) here.
Chris @ 93, I think that’s the general idea. It’s a matter partly of improving the whole system as fast as possible and taking out possible cherry-picking by other players. The metropolitan areas will in any case need to subsidize the remote areas.
The Telstra/NBN legislation I gather is an amendment to the Trade Practices legislation in order to allow a monopoly in this area. This is necessary if we are to have a rational and equitable approach to services.
I heard this morning that Tasmania is going ahead with its ‘opt out’ legislation. In other words you will get an NBN connection unless you specifically opt out.
Marks @ 94, Tingle pointed out that the passion for CBAs on the part of the Coalition coincided with their losing power. She gave a number of examples, including billions of dollars worth of infrastructure under Onelink.
During the election they promised $1.8 billion for a Toowoomba bypass road in spite of a study that showed it was uneconomic.
Brian@ 97 – that approach makes much more sense than the previous mantra of “fibre now everywhere”. It also makes sense for optus as their cable network will be worth very little once fibre is run in those areas and there’s currently no incentive to do maintenance or upgrades on the existing cable with the nbn rollout. Upgrading existing cable to 100mbit/s is much much cheaper than doing a new fibre rollout,
The opt out as it applies to the physical connection only and not the service also seems appropriate. Though I’m sure government will start quoting take up rates of 99%
Chris, I think McKinsey was based on an uptake of 80%, which seems very pessimistic to me. The only ones not connecting would be those who don’t want a fixed line phone and also don’t want the internet.
To me that’s just about no-one.
I think one of the problems in getting people to understand the value of the NBN is people can’t imagine the benefits, and that’s not entirely their fault because if you haven’t had regular exposure to what’s possible with much faster speeds and the ability to transmit much larger packets of data, it becomes one of those ‘known unknowns’.
A very simple example – recently I got to use a new state of the art videoconferencing system that will be one of Rudd’s minor but really good legacies. In order to reduce C02 emissions, this videoconferencing is being installed in every Commonwealth Parliamentary Office around the country, which means that many COAG meetings for eg will be able to be run by videoconferencing.
Not very long ago I used CSIRO’s videoconferencing which is some of the best in the country, so I thought I knew what to expect. CSIRO’s is ok, but doesn’t handle multiple locations well, has a tendency to have movement lag etc. So videoconferencing based on CSIRO’s ‘cutting edge’ is not something I could honestly say I would see replacing face to face.
The new system we used simply blew me away. It was really like having the other meeting participants in the same room. I would use it to hook up across the country in a heartbeat.
So now imagine that available cost-effectively to every business, school etc, particularly say for kids doing remote learning. Or you would be able to distance ed through a uni and actually feel like you were in the classroom, not second rate with limited interaction through the net.
That’s a very small example, but I go back to my original point. I’m reasonably (on the user side) tech savvy, have good exposure to technology and new innovations, and am positively predisposed towards them and the opportunities they bring – yet sometimes you just have to see it to understand it.
So just one small riffing off that – I live in Tas, where people have to regularly fly to the mainland to see medical specialists. Hugely expensive and stresful. Imagine if you could videoconference with them directly from your home, or from a local GP office with diagnostic equipment to hand.
I think the NBN is going to be like that for Australia until it’s rolled out more substantially. In the meantime the pollies really do need to get better at selling it, using examples from overseas or wherever, preferably tangible ones.
Brian @ 100 – I’ve got to run, but there is some confusion over the take up rates. There is the percentage of people who have consented to the NBNco installing equipment (at no cost to the householder). There’s no revenue from those people. Then there is the percentage of people who actually subscribe to the service – be it phone or internet – presumably that is what the report’s 80% refers to.
I *think* (but happy to be proven wrong) that the 50% rate which the government quotes for Tasmania is actually the former. The reason for believing this are the articles on the NBN rollout talking about having problems with people allowing the NBNco to install equipment and only 50% allowing them to do so. I believe the actual take up rate of internet services is lower.
Also the prices which are quoted in the post are also potentially misleading as the NBNco is currently providing access to ISPs for free – obviously not sustainable in the long term. The numbers I’ve seen for monthly access costs for a commercial return are estimated to be around $30-$50/month so in the longer term they need to be added to the numbers quoted above. Still a good deal as far as I’m concerned as someone who works from home, but perhaps too expensive for others.
myriad74 – it will be very interesting to see if the travel budgets are actually cut. One argument for face to face travel is you get the informal talks outside of meetings as well. Which you don’t really get with phone/video conferencing, but you can get with some other technology (virtual worlds is one).
Amen to your last sentence myriad74 @ 101. They’ve allowed this myth to take hold in the non-IT-savvy part of the community that broadband is all about faster downloads of movies in private homes – internet-as-entertainment-medium. Many people don’t understand that it’s primarily commercial infrastructure for economic development.
Yes Ken. Why is the government so crap at selling its policies and can we just blame the media? Discuss.
Oh, look what’s happened while I’ve been out in the real world not paying attention. You’ve been busy rallying round the flag.
I know I shouldn’t do this, it is quite pointless in any objective sense talking to the innumerate and ideologically driven about economics and good governance, but there are so many fish now in the barrel that I can’t resist taking a shot at just a few of them.
@ 69 “as if it were ever possible to do a meaningful cba in the first place about anything.” The prize winner. Just declare cbas impossible, then you are excused from any need for actual reasoned discourse. Classic.
@ 85 “when will you get it through your climate denying head”. Leaving aside the basic illiteracy – I don’t think that even Andrew Bolt actually denies there is a climate – how, pray, does the justification or lack of it for the NBN relate in any way on what is or is not happening to the climate? Oh, that’s right it doesn’t.
@ 66 “Libs love mediocrity and therefore the idea that Australia could be a world leader with the NBN simply terrifies them”. And I’m accused of setting up straw men? At least I don’t just plain make up some shit up that is completed unrelated to the issue in question, and use it to declare victory.
@ 62 “You like CBA’s? Off you go and suggest a framework for a CBA that would enable the state to make a judgement”. It is up to one individual blog commenter to do the state’s work of justifying its expenditure? The Government can just sit back and wait for someone else to do it? I know that this blog’s firm view is that this government is not responsible for any of its fuck ups, past, present or future, but this is carrying the thesis a bit far.
I’m sure you will all have read and rationalised away also the comments today of the Chairs of Wesfarmers, the ANZ and the NBA, all criticising the lack of business case for the NBN. Liberal shills the lot of them. And the revelation that the alleged 50% take up in Tasmania is actually only 15-25%, and the business model is being changed to sign more people up whether they want or not. Can’t be true.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/nbn-switches-to-opt-out-model-to-boost-take-up/story-fn59niix-1225935147644
Oh, and Fran, google “factuality”. There are 705,000 hits, including numerous dictionary definitions (‘the quality of being actual or based on fact; “the realm of factuality must be distinguished from the realm of imagination” ‘, a truth that Ken among others might bear in mind), so there would appear to be quite a few people who know more words than you do. For the self-appointed grammar and style director of LP, your lack of basic literary skills is often disturbing.
Wozza, have you (as suggested multiple times) read Possum’s take on CBAs?
Didn’t think so.
Chris, agree entirely about the value of face to face, I doubt it will ever be fully replaced unless our transport options become severely constrained.
But COAG makes a good example – there are numerous working groups and committees of bureaucrats sitting under the ministerial structure that meet hundreds of times a year – as in around 600.
That leaves plenty of scope to have key meetings / regular meetups face to face to maintain relationships etc, and still save thousands of travel budget $$ and tonnes of Co2 through decent vid links. So for eg if half those meetings were done by vid link, and you calculate a very simple meeting cost premise of:
1 rep per state/territory (8)
x $1000 average meeting travel expense (that would be modest from my experience of working in national distributed networks)
x 300 meetings a year
= saving about $2.4 mill.
I should mention too that the example I’ve used of halving the number of F2F COAG meetings is a serious goal that’s being worked towards.
So using a relatively small eg like this, I don’t think it’s particularly hard to see how the NBN will pay for itself in spades.
I’d already exceeded my pedantry quota for the day when I read this post or else I would have pointed out that the Watson quote was an urban legend…
But apparently the ‘message boys’ one is real. It’s usually attributed to William Henry Preece, who at the time was consulting engineer to the General Post Office. The talk page on his Wikipedia entry has this link to an 1882 issue of the Popular Science Monthly
http://bit.ly/cXhxvV
which says this:
Whether Preece was the person who said this, I don’t know, but if it was before a select committee it would probably be possible to find out. Looking at his bio he was no luddite — in fact he developed his own telephone system and put it in use in Britain, and later on got into wireless telegraphy and telephony (he was an admirer of Marconi). I might have to dig a bit deeper into this…
Wozza quoted me as follows:
Then continued:
If you want to claim that they should have done a CBA then you imply that it would have been possible to design a meaningful CBA, much as if someone had wondered why nobody had thought to staunch the Pakistani floods by deploying tens of thousands of pumps and to pump the water to some place in need of water. Unless one asserts such is possible, the claims is absurd.
If you aren’t sure that a meaningful CBA on the NBN is possible, then your objection amounts to mere handwaving, in this case in the service of Telstra’s copper network monopoly, the opposition’s campaign to obstruct infrastructure development and so forth.
Your response is therefore non-responsive and dissembling.
I never declared it wasn’t a “word”. Anything can be a word. People can coin words as they please. What I challenged was its utility in context [Hence: Even if it were a word ...]. That people know “words” that I don’t is not at all surprising, especially given that they can make them up.
Disingenuously snarky. This was not an instantiation of your claim and you’re not the least bit “disturbed” by my alleged “lack of basic literary skills”. What disturbs you is that I called you on taking an unsupported swing at another poster on the basis of his want of “factuality” and your cluelessness on the matter of CBAs.
For the record, your cluelessness about this matter, if that is indeed what we have seen above, disturbs me not a jot. Whatever mental state Liberal supporters are in, ostensible cluelessness (disingenuous or sincere) is one of the postures that Liberals adopt on a regular basis in order to avoid being called upon to say anything useful on public policy.
PS I also find amusing the claim that he was in a position to evaluate my basic literary skills.
Doubtless, literary skills can be basic, intermediate or advanced — perhaps the difference might show up when comparing those capable of composing witty remarks for a toilet wall, a well-composed article for a mass circulation magazine and something comparable to the oeuvre of Brecht.
Where this blog stands in that is hard to say, and harder still is it to specify the basis of Wozza’s assertion of the ability to offer such a critique.
NBN site Optus story
@ Wozza
I know other posters have pointed these things out but I am genuinely interested in getting your feedback on two things
1) The NBN Implementation plan which outlines the commerciality of the NBN
link
2) Possum’s criticism of the usefulness of a CBA here:
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2010/09/17/cost-benefit-delusions-of-the-nbn/“>link
I would be interested in your response to these.
Wozza,
The limitations of a CBA on a 40+ yr infrastructure project, are, surely, completely obvious?
A CBA on the copper network in the 1940′s would not (could not) have been able to factor in the internet, for instance.
So, a CBA on the NBN, is not the be-all and end-all of the question, in fact, it’s hardly even a beginning.
Well, Wesfarmers’ Chair has a bit of form. As I remember during the campaign he denied Abbott’s levy to pay for parental leave (which Labor had nicknamed the “Cole and Woolies Tax”) would have any impact on retail sales and demand. Don’t know that banks have been all that friendly to Labor either.
Seeing The Australian seemingly has a vested interest in stopping the NBN, I wouldn’t regard them as a more reliable source than they have proven to be on climate science.
Looks like you’ve missed the NBN train too, Wozza. Anyway, if it does worry you so much, do as they say and take a look at Possum’s post on the subject.
Actually, something has just occurred to me about the motivation behind the endless shrieking for a business case for the NBN. (Some may think I’m a bit slow on the uptake, but I digress.)
Whenever I ask my users for a business case for a new report, screen, or other bit of software at work, it’s because I don’t want to do it, as I’m pretty sure it’ll be a waste of my time – I know damn well that if it’s just something the users would like to have because it’d be nice or it’ll save them five minutes a week, they won’t bother. (In many cases, even when it could perhaps be justified they won’t bother.)
Ken @ 103 et al
If it is primarily “commercial infrastructure”, why does it need to connect households at all? Why not just connect high speed broadband to offices, schools, GP surgeries, government departments, hospitals and so on? We are then talking about perhaps tens of thousands of connections rather than millions.
Since the main cost of the NBN is associated with residential connections, it is, in fact, primarily domestic infrastructure and any case for it must be predicated on residential, not commercial, uses.
Wozza with all due respect (i.e. not much), I suggest it’s you who needs to take a walk in the real world.
Following a tied election, Tony Abbott announced that he was going to use the NBN as a political tool to undermine the government. Obediently, people like you jumped into the fray to repeat Liberal talking points. That is not the real world. That is the version of a kabuki play they have adopted in the rarefied world of parliament house and the Canberra press gallery and a handful of political blogs … a world familiar to no more than two or three per cent of the Australian population.
Out here in the actually existing real world, the NBN is being built and lots of people think it’s about time. One of my colleagues ran a public seminar last week about its implications for our region and the enthusiasm was palpable. So keep bleating about CBAs, while the mass of the population gets ready for an exciting new digital age.
@ 115 bIf it is primarily “commercial infrastructure”, why does it need to connect households at all? And driveways are a needless connection to the roads which go past all those houses too.
Because, I&U @ 115, a business’s employees and contractors will increasingly be located at their homes. What need is there for an expensive office building when staff can function just as well from home and save two hours a day travel time to boot? IT is going to decouple many people’s work from a fixed physical location just as surely as industrial production forged the link in the first place.
We are in the early stages of a transformation of our whole conception of work and leisure; a transformation that will be enabled by technology just as much as the Industrial Revolution revolutionised conceptions of work and leisure in the 19th century.
@117,
Driveways are not needless, since the vast majority of households own and use cars.
But if cars were only owned and used commercially then, yes, driveways would be needless.
Ken,
Well, that is a good point and certainly something I am looking forward to. Having already “transformed” my work and leisure as you describe, I would love to have the sort of videoconferencing facility that myriad74 describes @101.
“If it is primarily “commercial infrastructure”, why does it need to connect households at all?”
No worker should be allowed to tele-commute they should be required to attend an office even if they don’t need to interact directly with co-workers or clients. How else are the bosses supposed to monitor the lazy so and so’s and how are landlords to make a quid if all their offices are empty,
No business should be run from residential premises. All businesses should be made to go out and rent commercial premises whether they need them or not. What about the poor landlords missing out on all those rents for no good reason.
No consumer need interact with a business via the internet. Make them get off their fat arses and go to the shops/businesses etc or use the telephone. Think about all those petrol companies and the profits they are losing from those people staying at home and not using their cars. Not to mention the telecommunications companies losing profits because of all those people not hanging on waiting to speak to call centre staff.
No aged person/chronically ill person should have their life made easier by enabling remote monitoring of their health and well being. Make the lazy so and so’s etc
Wozza, maybe you should consider the provision of internet infrastructure to the provision of the telecommunications infrastructure in the past – after all why did they ever bother providing all those telephones lines to every home when they could simply have provided them only to business premises.
@112 – Paul, sadly you’re wasting your breath.
Those links have been posted, and Wozza has been referred to them and invited to respond to their substance on no less than 3 or 4 occasions by different contributors on this thread alone.
He hasn’t done so, nor will he, because Liberal HQ doesn’t have any talking points for him to squawk about those documents, and because those documents reveal just how absurd, spurious and tendentious his objections are.
Tedious troll is tedious.
Just on the videoconferencing, they are transforming the school in my little town, and the kids are able to join classes with other small schools around NSW, and staff use it to hold remote conferences without the need for travel. A lot of senior (HSC) students are able to pick up additional lectures and remote teachers this way too.
Can’t be done without a fibre optic backbone between the two points. The NBN is essential for keeping little towns like mine on the map, and transforming the lives of the kids here.
If Wozza thinks the kids in my town aren’t worth the expenditure, he can go join the rest of the whingers in the far queue.
But if cars were only owned and used commercially then, yes, driveways would be needless. Now you’re just taking the piss.
I know you’re being sarcastic, but actually that would be a major reason that more employees do not work from home. Adequate bandwidth to work from home for many workers already exists (I do it), but employers that allow you to do this fulltime, especially Australian ones rather than global ones is not that common.
One other thing to consider. Say as claimed by a few people here that a 10Mbit/sec connection is not sufficiently fast for them to work from home and they need a 100Mbit/s connection to the workplace. And that workplace has say a 100 employees. They’ll need a 10Gbit/s outgoing connection.
Incidentally I currently have a 10Mbit/s connection, and the bottlenecks tend to be the servers and the backhaul rather than my connection.
There was an article a little while back on zdnet I think comparing 20Mbit/s cable vs 50 or 100Mbit/s and they said that unless you want to run a lot of concurrent connections you won’t see much of a speed up because many sites are not setup to serve content that fast and the ISP backhauls get congested.
@ 121 – I’m dreading the day video conferencing becomes commonplace! Will actually have to get dressed for work.
@122,
You seem to be confusing me with Wozza. I have every right to feel seriously hurt.
@125,
Well, if we didn’t own cars, we wouldn’t have driveways. Now, admittedly, drive ways are useful for deliveries also (which is the point that Pollytickedoff is making @122), but I’m not sure that houseowners would be inclined to devote a large part of their front gardens to driveways simply to accommodate the occasional delivery.
Just athought on the Business Case; can any-one direct me to the Wright Brothers business case for flight?
Huggy
Chris @ 126, 100 employees each requiring 100Mb/s does not equate to a 10Gb/s pipe inwards.
I don’t feel like doing the analysis as my queuing theory is a bit rusty, but you need to include an estimate of the probability they’d all need it at the same time, and also estimates of how long and how often they’d need it at the same time. That’s actually a slightly more complicated model than the one you assume.
My gut feeling is that a 1Gb/s connection would be sufficient most of the time, as the different input streams could be multiplexed to look simultaneous anyway.
Chris @ 126,
Perhaps most of the NBN bandwidth will be taken up by employers spying on their teleworkers to make sure they are not shirking.
And I’m sure that by the time home videoconferencing becomes a reality there will be imaging software to make it look like you are wearing a suit and tie.
I’ve heard the Incas couldn’t make a Business Case for the wheel.
Was there a business case for the invention of the business case?
Or a CBA for the invention of the CBA?
David @ 129 – Actually I was talking about outwards rather than inwards. And ISPs have a habit of charging through the nose for high outward going speeds as you’re now a “business”. NBN plans for example are commonly 100Mbit/s down, and only 8Mbit/s up which is pretty limiting for using that sort of connection to serve data.
Most business will do as you say, but you do end up with congested peak times – Eg first thing in the morning is common as everyone starts work and really hammers the network. Of course you can choose just to accept that employees won’t work every efficiently at those times – lots already do where employees require good internet access from the office to do their work.
In reality there’s probably not that many people out there who do really need 100Mbit/s connections to their workplace (not that it wouldn’t be convenient to have).
Don Wigan @ 92: “We had a similar case with the distribution of electricity. It was only after the utilities were nationalised that the less populous areas got connected. Private sector suppliers regarded a lot of it as unprofitable. Yet the economic benefits gained by the states justified those steps.
Paul Burns and other history buffs could probably tell you more on this, but on the evidence of the past the NBN investment and urgency can be amply justified.”
I highly recommend “Brown Power: A Jubilee History of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria” by Cecil Edwards, which I picked up from an op shop some years ago. I wouldn’t say it impressed my girlfriend who I was shopping with at the time – but she was nevertheless intrigued as to why I’d chosen the thickest, most boring (and brown) looking book in the store by far…
Anyways, it’s fascinating (as I’m sure she found my retellings for several weeks at the bedside), and iirc very much confirmed what you’re saying, Don. Privately owned electricity was limited to the inner city at the turn of the century (except for Goulburn Weir, with its hydro electric lights, which I used to live a few minutes from – they were quite the tourist attraction in the late 1880-90s) – the big theatres and companies with their own generators etc., and never going to extend much further. Though I can’t remember who powered the tram lines at different stages – I think there were maybe a few privatisations/buy backs – time to dig it out again!
There’s also a very detailed account of how Victoria’s world-first pioneering brown coal technology, based on German experiments with the same, would totally remove its (economically crippling) dependence for years on NSW for supply of black coal – and it of course features every Victoria engineer-politician-with-a-university-now-named-after-them that you’d expect.
Where’s the business case for that relatively recent, imperial elite imposed, antediluvian, regressive, conflict-ridden, inefficient and uncharitable entity known as the nation state? Enquiring minds wanna know.
You want a globalised economy? Then we want a global state. Like night follows day. These two sweeties are made for each other.
Thanks for that, Nick. Monash was a true hero in war and in peace.
In SA, the electricity nationalisation was achieved by Tom Playford, a Liberal Premier, who was from a farm village and felt strongly about the Adelaide Electricity Company’s recalcitrance in supplying to country areas. His hardest battles were not with Labor but the reactionaries in the Legislative Council, who were opposed to it.
Aah! So that’s why he got a university named after him. Brown coal technology. Who’d have thought.
There were some people who I’ve spoken to who thought that he got a university named after him because of what he did in WW1. It would have been worth you mentioning it if that were the case, but apparently that didn’t happen.
Thanks for the heads-up.
Casey, this has to be yet another of the poor deluded souls who have fallen into your clutches and from whom you have extracted their vital essence (Copyright G.Greer 16.10.2002)
“So that’s why he got a university named after him. Brown coal technology.”
That’s not what I wrote. If it were, it would have been a massive understatement of Monash’s countless civic and civil engineering achievements.
The rest of your comment is drivel. The people you spoke to were only partially correct.
GregM, you are trolling. Attempting to provoke a stoush by misrepresentation of what others have said (“He got a university named after him because of coal!” “She trashed the Bali bombers!”) is trolling.
Worse, you are very bad at it and keep writing comments that don’t accord with what people actually wrote.
Worse, you are trolling across multiple threads after getting your ass handed to you on previous ones.
Stop trolling, or go away. Those are the options.
My mistake, there is, a third option: if you ever do manage to substantiate your claim that Greer trashed the victims of the Bali bombing in print, kindly put the evidence in the Saturday Salon.
Chris @127: Your error (100 x 100Mbit bandwidth clients need a 10Gbit bandwidth pipe out of the server) is an innocent one, made in good faith, but it’s indicative of one of the main problems with debate on this topic: most people, even with the best of intentions, simply lack the necessary understanding to conceptualise what is being discussed, be it at the small-picture technical level, or the big-picture what-it-will-do-for-society level.
Your statement about the bandwidth needs is so many kinds of wrong on the facts that it’s hard to know where to begin. Without drawing a picture, let me just say that network engineers have thought of this problem before you did, and designed a network architecture to help get around it. A 1Gbit out-pipe can handle a lot more than 100 simultaneous users, even if they are all downloading pron at the same time. A lot more. Now factor in the idea that all the pipes will be 100Mb/1Gb pipes and think about the system-wide capacity this creates, especially with all the latency and redundancy and alternative pathways the data has to move around. Now factor in the fact that businesses can put their sites into server farms where their website is located on multiple machines across multiple pipes, in multiple sites.
I get the feeling that if blogs had been around when TV was invented, forums would be full of objections to the broadcasting masts being so high — after you’ve chopped the actors up into tiny little bits to make the picture, why do you need to haul their tiny tiny little pieces so high? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to transport them along the ground? And has anyone done the CBA on this?
Mercurius – the examples of usage people have been giving though are generally not of things like movies or public data which you can cache around the network. It’s things like VPN connections, and live video or medical data generated on the fly which the isps are not going to be caching. There’s no magic to reduce the bandwidth you need (short of compression which would be taken into account in the first place) in those sorts of situations.
Chris @ 103, we keep being told that the pricing of NBN charges in Tasmania are indicative only and are not a true indication of what they are going to be when the roll-out is substantial on the continent.
Similarly take-up rates really don’t mean much, I think, as we don’t yet have a situation where the NBN is replacing the fixed line phone connection.
When we get to that stage I would think there would have to be an optional service for pensioners and the like who want a phone service and nothing else.
I understood the implementation study showed, inter alia, that on pessimistic assumptions about take-up and usage plus the cost of construction and connection, the thing would still make money.
If anyone is interested, I’ve tracked down a longer (and slightly different) version of the Preece quote, though to no farther back than 1941 (Marion May Dilts, The Telephone in a Changing World), at least as cited in a few places. This is the version Dilts apparently gives:
The circumstances of the statement are still the same (William Preece, 1879, House of Commons committee). Dilts may give a reference but I don’t have access to a copy.
I haven’t been able to find the quote or similar sentiments in any contemporary British source I have access to, nor can I find a select committee sitting in 1879 which might have discussed telephones. However — in December 1880 the Post Office took a private telephone company (Edison Telephone Co.) to court, essentially in order to prove that telephones fell into its domain. The court ruled that for the purposes of the Telegraph Acts, a telephone was a telegraph, and a telephone conversation a telegram (because the signals travelled by wire). As the Post Office had a monopoly on telegraphic communications within Britain Edison was not allowed to set up their own telephone network. The upshot seems to have been that another company, United, paid for a license to do so in London, while the Post Office more slowly set up a state-owned telephone network.
Anyway, Preece may have been a witness in this court case for
the Crown — a lecture he gave in 1878 was quoted by the defence,
and the prosecution reserved the right to call him to the stand
to explain or rebut the defence’s interpretation. So perhaps this
is where Preece made these remarks. If so, they should be seen in
light of the Post Office’s motivations: perhaps he was trying to
downplay the significance or uniqueness of the telephone in order
to bolster the Crown’s case.
Stepping back a bit, when and whether Preece said this is beside
the point, in a sense. The Popular Science Monthly version of the quote, even if made up or exaggerated, shows that it was thinkable in 1882 that it might have been said by someone like Preece. So even highly-technical people might fail to see the woods for the trees when it came to new communications technology, and people with conservative attitudes towards social conditions might try to hold back technological progress.
Hmm, perhaps I should have posted this on my own blog! But that’s about aeroplanes and stuff.
Oh noes, italics fail!
[Fixed now, Brett]
Mercurius, if I were you I would be a little humbler on this subject. Your credibility on it is not high. Last time there was a lengthy thread on the NBN and cost-benefit analysis, Labor Outsider tore you a new one. You may wish to study that exchange again before assuming your accustomed position of arrogant know all-ism
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2010/06/22/the-telstra-nbnco-deal/#comment-9210
Yes, I have refrained from responding to suggestions that I study Possum’s works, because there is no prospect of a meeting of views and unlike you I don’t enter into exchanges purely for the pleasure of making snarky but stupid remarks. However since you are continuing to snark, I will point out that if those urging the sagacity of Possum would read their own link, they would see that in the comments he has been refuted a number of times.
The most cogent point in my view is that the greatest value of a cba is to make clear the assumptions on which the project is based – enabling tweaking of assumptions and sensitivity analysis to see if more cost-effective approaches are available. Currently we simply have no idea of the basis of the Government’s planning.
But there are a number of other points made. See eg Peter Martin directly nailing the flaw in the Possum piece (and also his point that, if the Government really believes that there is no way to put a value on benefits, they should refrain from making comments which do exactly that. Remember Rudd recommending the NBN as a fail-safe investment opportunity?)
http://www.petermartin.com.au/2010/09/were-spending-fortune-on-new-wires-in.html
Or a Japanese cost-benefit study of optical fibre roll out, showing that it can in fact be done (note that it makes the obvious point that, contrary to Possum’s rabbitting on about the very long term of the project making calculation of benefits impossible, given the speed of change in IT the very long term is irrelevant; the project needs to show benefits front-loaded to minimise risk).
http://203.180.140.4/iicp/chousakenkyu/seika/pdf/2006-05.pdf
Or even the Productivity Commission on how sensibly to discount for social benefits. It can be done even in Australia:
http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0012/96699/cost-benefit-discount.pdf
But I’m nothing if not generous. If I were to concede that the complexity and long time horizons of the NBN make it impossible to do a cost-benefit analysis of any value, would you concede the corollary that, since the circumstances are even more complex and long term, cost-benefit analyses like those of Stern, Garnaut and the Treasury modelling of the late lamented CRPS are crap?
Thought not. Apparently cost benefit analysis is very acceptable if it gives the politically correct answer.
@146
“But I’m nothing if not generous.”
Wozza you forgot to mention how humble you are.
Also love the way you put words into others’ mouths.
FYI if you come out abusing everyone as you have then your links don’t get clicked,. A rant never persuades anyone.
Brian @ 143 – yes the nbn prices are artificially low at the moment because the nbnco is not charging ISPs for access, but it’s not unusual for companies to loss lead in the beginning. I’d expect that plain telephone service prices will continue to be regulated so it’s affordable for people on low incomes. I wonder if try will do the same for a very basic Internet connection as say $50/month would not be affordable for many on low incomes.
Take up rates in the long term are pretty irrelevant as once they start decommissioning the copper network people will have no choice but to subscribe. Which is why the proposed opt out system for the physical connection makes sense.
I think Wozza makes some good points. In particular, the argument that “we know that the NBN is hugely worthwhile, but we cannot demonstrate or even illustrate how” is pretty lame.
Either we can set up some plausible scenarios under which the NBN delivers net benefits (and that is really all that a CBA is) or we must acknowledge that it is a leap in the dark, a huge gamble riding on gut instinct.
As Wozza also notes, there are choices around how the NBN is designed, implemented and tariffed. Should all premises be connected at the same time, or priority given to high value ones such as schools and business parks? Should the roll-out be first in cities (where it is cheaper)or in regions (where there is no broadband alternative)? Perhaps these issues are discussed in the implementation study, but I find it difficult to see how informed choices can be made without some sort of CBA framework.
Possum makes some good points, but these apply to a greater or lesser extent to all CBAs. They are always founded on heroic assumptions and simplistic models. But it is the process of making these assumptions that forces us to generate rational arguments to support our instincts.
“But it is the process of making these assumptions that forces us to generate rational arguments to support our instincts.”
The assumption that current upward trends in the data-intensivity of telecommunications will by and large continue is a rock-solid one.
The assumption that currently and historically increasing uptake of fast broadband will continue is too.
The assumption that new technologies will come along which place increased demand on the infrastructure is too.
Do you disagree with any of them?
If not, what more do you want?
The Howard Legacy was killed by the Rudd Legacy! LOL LOL LOL
I wonder if Wozza has worked out yet that he is wasting his time on CBA for broadband.
I suppose that soon enough it might dawn that since neither party is overfond of CBA, then no matter how much one party arm waves and finger points at the other about project A, the other party waves and points back at project B which also had no CBA.
Thus uncommitted voters are faced with equal propositions of “we’ll avoid CBA when it suits us” from both parties.
So it then boils down to whether or not most punters want it – whether for downloading games, videos, or ‘just to have in the corner’.
However, if Wozza and others opposed to it want to keep banging on about it, I suppose it keeps them out of mischief in areas where they might possibly expose a relative weakness in the Government.
Baldrick, er Wozza, you do realise that this is a ‘cunning plan’ by the Government to divert you from things that might really hurt it electorally, don’t you?
I&U;
Except pretty much no one has argued that. There have been some pretty good illustrations of it’s worth.
Wozza,
I think this is a lost cause. The majority here simply don’t get it. Are they intellectually lazy, hopelessly partisan or just over it? I guess the title of the post speaks for itself.
As for me, being accused of being a Liberal stooge is just too much. I guess I’m just going to have to fall into line with the consensus.
Good luck with your continuing mission. Whatever it is.
You know I&U the argument about CBA is one I have some sympathy with since it lets people know what costs they are up for and whether or not they are prepared to pay the extra if the CBA does not stack up. But a full CBA in this case is just not possible since the future benefits are not known. Please explain how you can come up with a ratio of C:B if you do not know, nor have a methodology for determining B? The only way I have ever seen this attempted is when people put some arbitrary value on the future benefits – talk about a total rort.
The arguments being put up for a CBA sort of remind me of the old communist utilitarian idea that the masses get what they need according to some formula devised by the central committee.
I prefer a democratic system where if people want something, and are prepared to pay for it through their taxes, then they can have it.
I also suggest that those spouting about the CBA in this instance have never once addressed the question of how does one do a CBA if one cannot know the future benefits.
Failure to address that point, and to acknowledge that in a democracy we can have what we want from our government if we are prepared to pay for it, tells me that it is the CBA proponents who don’t get it.
But at least Wozza managed to flatter himself by mentioning how humble certain other people aren’t. And to further flatter himself by portraying how rarely he takes a position of arrogant know all-sim. And how refreshing it was to hear him inform us that he doesn’t enter into exchanges purely for the pleasure of making snarky but stupid remarks.
Thanks for all the Pot Kettle Black moments @ 146, Wozza. You’re a treat.
Last time there was a lengthy thread on the NBN and cost-benefit analysis, Labor Outsider tore you a new one.
Oh, is that what LO did? Funny, from where I’m typing, it looks like LO just woke up with shit on the liver one day and decided to hurl a few gratuitous and highly personal insults my way, yet for added comedy value failed to even spell my name correctly:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2010/06/22/the-telstra-nbnco-deal/#comment-9210
Potato potahto.
Incurious and Unread @ 154:
For me, over it comes closest.
My understanding is that the implementation study used worst case costs and came to the conclusion that the NBN would make about 7% on investments, in cash terms, with a very limited conception of likely uses. That is, it shouldn’t lose money.
That gave a platform on which to make a decision.
Now the decision has been made and the train has indeed left the station, but is being steered in various directions by such as the ACCC making it more expensive and the Greens who don’t want to flog it off.
The conversations should now be about the implementation options.
A decision, at least partly political, has been made to build the regional network first. This is obviously not based on the need for cash returns, or they would concentrate on the high-use potential in the big smoke.
exactly why abbot put Turnball in Telecomms portfolio, to make sure hes DOA after the next fed
@66
I’ve been off in the real world working with, you know, tech-nol-ogy. The level of my grammatical error is simply a reflection of my frustration at your inability to articulate anything other than the opposition’s talking points. I’d say you know as much about major infrastructure as Joe Hockey does about audits. There’s a few non sequiturs for you. Now Was, when are you going to get started on this CBA? and do you think it will be finished before the NBN which will be built anyway?
A decision, at least partly political, has been made to build the regional network first. This is obviously not based on the need for cash returns, or they would concentrate on the high-use potential in the big smoke.
Though what do you think Brian, of the application of rural equity, a la the cost of stamps? Apart from the obvious politics of the matter in the current Parliament, do you think this is a fair approach?
I’m biased, as a rural person who’ll only get 12Mb/s wirelessly under the NBN, but who currently suffers from no competition, it’s Telstra or Telstra.
wilful, I’m in favour of rural equity, but hope they don’t leave SEQ until last.
I tried about four ISPs before settling on Telstra and have to say we’ve found them better at actually solving our problems than any of the others by a country mile. But it’s been quite a few years since we had anything to do with the others and some of the current players weren’t around then.
wilful,
Given Telstra looks like it will be turning off the copper network after this it will be NBNCo or NBNCo. One (soon to be) former government monopoly for another.
.
BTW – has anyone yet come up with a real benefit to the majority of Australians from this, other than “it shouldn’t lose money”? Oh – and if you go on it you will not lose your telephone?
.
Michael,
If there are “…some pretty good illustrations of it’s worth…” perhaps you can link to them. I would be genuinely fascinated. Remember – this thing is only worth anything if there are benefits for the great majority of Australians and not just some benefits for rural hospitals and others with some niche needs.
“I would be genuinely fascinated.”
Rubbish. You are not in the slightest bit interested, Andrew.
Many people here and elsewhere have already pointed to a multiple uses for the NBN.
Do your own homework, stop playing dumb and running tedious Liberal spoiler messages.
joe2,
No, joe2. I have been commenting here for several years and have been consistent (I hope) in being clear about what I believe should and should not happen. If you think I am a Liberal shill, well – I will not try to disabuse you as you have a right to your opinion. I have been reading this debate closely and, so far, all I have as possible benefits are the ability to back up large amounts of data remotely, the ability to send and receive large datasets for analysis and the ability to do remote diagnosis using large images from remote hospitals – all (IMHO) niche applications.
If you have some other benefits that I am not aware of I would be, as I said, genuinely fascinated.
Given Telstra looks like it will be turning off the copper network after this it will be NBNCo or NBNCo. One (soon to be) former government monopoly for another.
Andrew Reynolds, that’s not how it will work. NBNCo will own the basic hardware in the nearby tower, any of a range of companies will be able to lease that spectrum from them and offer me retail services.
This is a natural monopoly and definitely the role of government.
1. It wouldn’t be a commercial proposition to put in a second fast wireless tower once one was already there, so the barreirs to entry would mean only one fully private service provider – and I really prefer my monopolists to be government owned and/or heavily regulated rather than cowboys.
2. a second tower would be a waste of resources as well as a visual blight. Standard extreme capitalist bullshit – don’t bother counting anything but the financial case dollars, never mind that only one tower would be needed in anything decently planned.
wilful,
…and any number of companies will have to pay whatever the NBNCo says they have to pay for access to that – subject, of course, to the same telecoms regulator that has proved very able to restrain Telstra’s pricing regime and force open access.
That’s OK then. The plan that NBNCo will go private obviously does not bother you?
I have issues with the idea of a natural monopoly in any case, but even that aside – having the government impose one when we are only just able to get around the last imposed monopoly just seems silly, IMHO.
having the government impose one when we are only just able to get around the last imposed monopoly just seems silly, IMHO.
This misses the point totally. The problem with Telstra is that it is the monopoly owner of the infrastructure and it competes as a retailer with other retailers who have to have access to that infrastructure. Not surprisingly, wholesale Telstra has favoured retail Telstra over other retailers. In technical telecomms jargon, Telstra has given it to them in the tradesman’s entrance.
The NBN will be a wholesaler only, so that problem won’t arise.
Sam@168,
Spot on. God knows why we could not have achieved vertical separation without having to spend $43bn on a new network.
Andrew, I’d prefer the NBN to continue in govt ownership as per The Greens.
I can’t see any point in building, for example, two two-lane highways, or even two single-lane highways, when one will do.
I do see some point in different transport companies offering competitive services.
Andrew Reyynold’s they’re only privatising NBNCo in the future due to stupid economic “orthodoxy” which I believe you’re a subscriber to). It makes no sense really.
yes, this is a natural monopoly, the government isn’t imposing it in any sense, it’s a feature of the world. I believe that with appropriate oversight a good service can be provided at a fair price. Like AEMO (though I’m no expert).
The alternative is the pissing up against the wall of money to overbuild facilities in the foolish pursuit of “competition”. The planet can no longer afford these sorts of indulgences.
Because, I&U 169, Telstra wouldn’t agree to it.
Would it have been better if they had agreed? Maybe. The cost would have been a lot less. But then we would have had a decaying copper network rather than a new fibre network.
But anyway, they wouldn’t have a bar of it. Telstra’s strategy under the McGauchie-Trujillo regime was to play hardball, thinking the government would concede. But the government didn’t conceded and the results are in for Telstra’s shareholders, with the share price of $2.70, compared to $4.70 three years ago.
If there has been a worse case of shareholder value destruction in a major Australian corporation caused by sheer strategic stupidity I’ve yet to see it.
Sam @172,
Well, Telstra also wouldn’t agree to closing its copper and handing over its customers until it was paid $12bn (or whatever the final figures is).
In fact, I think it was the Senate that rejected operational separation wasn’t it? Between them, the Howard government (in privatising the vertically-integrated monopoly), Telstra management and various Senators have done immense damage to the economy by lumping us with the Telstra beast. Thank god Keating got it right with electricity.
We must now all cross our fingers that NBN is not going to be the new beast on the block.
wilful,
I am on the record several times as calling for the re-nationalisation of Telstra (one of the many areas I disagreed with the previous government on) and its break up into a wholesale division and one or more retail divisions and then re-sale to the public as I believe there is at least some argument that the copper network does constitute a natural monopoly that needs to be treated a bit differently to other industries, at least in the short term. To me this is actually the result of the effective prohibition of other operators for decades, but why that occurred is (IMHO) not as important as the best possible outcome given what we have.
The major problem I have here is that I cannot see that gigabit broadband is a natural monopoly and an essential public utility of wide benefit to all when we already have a comprehensive copper network and good wireless coverage (with, admittedly, some faults that need rectification) that can supply the vast majority of our actual needs.
To me, the NBN plan (even if it works) is going to have an appalling effect – investment in expanding the current infrastructure will effectively stop from now until its retirement, meaning that the current issues will persist for up to eight years in places. Other, possibly cheaper, technologies that may actually be better will be ignored. We will have a new “whale” in service provision that will have the market power to do, effectively, largely what they like, subject only to (as we have found with Telstra) a largely reactive regulator that simply is not able to affectively restrain the monopoly provider of backbone services.
All this for the outlay of a large amount of money? Wonderful that we are all paying for it.
Brian,
Keeping it in government hands is not the current plan so that is pretty irrelevant unless and until any amended Bill is put through the Parliament. Even then, as with Telstra, I cannot see that no future government would sell NBN Co – so whatever the Greens policy is it would also be irrelevant.
The question then becomes are you prepared to support this even given it will be fully privatised at some point in the future?
AN 174, the dramas from regulating Telstra have arisen because of its vertical integration. Regulating a wholesale only backbone services provider should be quite straightforward, as it has proven to be in the regulation of electricity transmission companies.
Once it is all bedded down and the NBN is just a boring utility then for all I care it can be sold to super funds, or whoever, who like the safety of regulated, quite safe cash flows. That is a minor issue.
Andrew, I am no expert, but the experts are virtually unanimous in saying that fibre is as close to future proof as we’ll get, and that wireless cannot ever do what fibre can. So yes it is a ‘bet’, a risk, to place fibre past nearly every home, but the informed view is that this isn’t any sort of a risk.
The only way to do it properly is to do it universally – there is no sense whatsoever (outside the self-referential world of current fundamentalist financing and economics) in running six cables down the streets of Balmain and no cables at all down the streets of Mudgee. While this may be ‘overbuild’ in the sense of the next decade, in the sense of the next three to six decades it’s a lay down misere.
The path of future technology is unpredictable, but the laws of physics are not. And the laws of physics, as I understand it, say that wireless places fairly tight limits on what you can do. Huge files, such as MRIs used in tele-medicine, just can’t be sent wirelessly.
Sam,
Shannon’s Law is as close as you will get to a decent physics response to how much data can be sent over a wireless connection. The addition of the (ex TV) white space will help, but clearly you do not want to be sending huge amounts of data wirelessly.
The thing is that, at least in my case, most of my use is not in sending or receiving huge amounts of data and I would think that is true for most people. I want to use my email client on my mobile and to view some web pages and perhaps respond to blog threads. Wireless is fine for that.
For the bigger stuff I agree that fibre is the best current (or foreseeable future) solution but I just cannot see why we need to throw away the huge investment we have already paid for in putting in the copper wire to replace it with the best possible technical solution rolled out to everyone (or almost everyone) when the current system (with some incremental improvements) will do what most of us need. Any other niche issues (like medical imaging) can then be dealt with on a piecemeal basis, addressing the actual need, rather than spending a huge amount to put a lot of dark fibre in the ground.
apparently the copper is generally well past it’s use by date, the cost of simple maintenance is high and climbing.
…”dark fibre” and shiny copper, is it Andrew? Malcolm needs your work.
joe2,
Engage in the argument please, rather than just making silly allegations.
.
wilful,
That is an argument to improve maintenance, not for complete system replacement. The problem is, of course, that all the NBN is going to do is have the current telcos patching it and making do (rendering the current situation worse) until the fibre is actually working.
That is one more thing I am not happy about with this proposal.
Just FYI – if you want to look up Shannon’s Law it is here.
No, it’s not an argument to improve maintenance, it’s an argument to replace. Things wear out, the cost of maintenance goes up, the reliability goes down.
I don’t understand your objection. There will be one maintenance authority, NBNCo. What do you mean about “fibre actually working”? Once in, it’s in.
Andrew @ 179,
Hey, Shannon’s law is a mathematical theorem, not a law of physics. It’s about compression, not bandwidth.
Are you saying that we could do much better on compression and therefore don’t require the extra bandwidth? It is an interesting theory.
Actually, Andrew @ 179, etc, Shannon’s Law was originally applied to copper wires, not wireless transmission. The “noise” is thermal.
What you are forgetting, I think, is that the existing copper wire has deteriorated and is no longer capable of optimum performance (mostly, I suspect, because the insulation has started to break down, causing a lower signal to noise ratio). It needs to be replaced anyway. The major cost of its replacement is in the effort required rather than the material chosen, so it makes sense to replace it with fibre rather than new copper.
By the way, you shouldn’t drag in Shannon’s Law when you’re discussing this stuff with people who actually know something about the subject.
Comments crossed, I & U. Shannon’s law is about the physics, although it can be applied to compression as well.
David,
Shannon’s law applies to any communications channel, wired or wireless provided it is bounded and subject to Gaussian noise. It was, as you note, originally applied to copper, but it is effective for any channel, wired or RF.
Please – I do know something about the subject. Perhaps you should review the difference between Shannon-Fano coding and the Shannon–Hartley theorem. You appear to be confusing them – as does I&U.
.
On the replacement – certainly, as that is a normal function of installed equipment over time. It all needs to be replaced eventually. All at once, with a brand new system with a single monopoly operator? That is a different argument entirely.
David,
Shannon’s law converts the physical limitations of a communications medium into an effective limit on information flow. So, I suppose you could say that it is “about the physics” but it is really just a generic, abstract mathematical theorem that you could apply equally well to smoke signals as to fibre or wireless.
I imagine we can violently agree about this one.
Andrew @188
Let me just consult wikipedia and I’ll get back to you.
Andrew, I note you’ve still not addressed the degraded condition of the copper wire.
David @191
No, but we are having some fascinating excursions into information theory.
I think Andrew, after an attempt at the sensible maintenance of copper argument, has slipped cannily to planned replacement by fibre.
There is movement at the station. Get on board!
True, I & U. I’ll have to dust off my copy of Tannenbaum on networks.
David @191, not to speak for Andrew, but I can understand how 80 year old copper needs replacing anyway, but what about newer suburbs – the 10 or 20 year old copper should be fine.
Joe2 – I think there has always been more nuance to what Andrew has been saying than what you claim. Opposition to a nationwide rollout now of fibre to every home is not the same as opposition to an upgrade as required (under whatever crtieria you want to use). An infrastructure analogy – it may well make sense to have a very fast train route running melb to cbr to syd. But that doesn’t mean we also need to upgrade the Adelaide to Alice springs route to a vft at the same time.
Incidentally the talks between nbnco and optus over their cable network imply they realize there is not the need for fibre now everywhere. As the nbnco would end up delivering 50-100mbit access over cable instead of fibre. Then presumably when that reaches it’s limits, upgrade it to fibre.
And I agree with the comments about Telstra – the problem is it’s dual retail/wholesale nature. The nbnco should never be allowed to do any retail, not even as was suggested it migtht be allowed, to have only very large retail clients.
wilful @ 161 – stamp pricing I believe is not about equity, at least it wasn’t originally. It just costs too much in human time to calculate prices for each letter sent so a uniform pricing was used.
Chris,
No disagreement here.
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David,
With respect, I do believe I had addressed that, but Chris has put it more succinctly. Parts of it do need to be replaced, but that should and can be done on an as needed basis, upgrading to fibre as and when this makes sense and the capacity is needed. Doing the whole lot now? Why?
I’ve probably been a little unfair, Andrew.
However, even in suburbs where the copper wire hasn’t yet degraded, it’s possibly cheaper to replace it sooner than later. It will never deliver the performance of optic fibre.
David,
Thanks, David.
If you can show me a typical suburb that actually needs optic connections right now (not just wants them) then I might agree with you. Personally, I would love to have a gigabit connection to my home. The server I am running would be much happier running its backup jobs.
I just cannot see why everyone should be forced to pay for it.
.
Replacing an existing perfectly serviceable solution that actually does the job with an expensive solution, even if spectacularly better, is very unlikely to be cheaper. By definition you are throwing away the existing investment.
@198: Andrew, I can affirm that Lathlain (inner suburb of Perth) desperately needs the copper replaced. I don’t live there now, but when I did the line would disappear in a crescendo of noise at least once a year, and I doubt I ever got the broadband performance I was paying for. The Telstra techs would dutifully patch the system and apologise because it could only be a temporary fix.
Do you have an argument for renewing the copper? Or would this be a good time to upgrade the service properly by installing fibre?
Andrew @ 75, in my book structural separation is more important than who owns it. I’d prefer NBN in public hands but I wouldn’t die in a ditch over it.
Andrew @ 198 your distinction between needs and wants is fundamentally misconceived. It is the nature of capitalist society that the latter are transformed into the former over time in a dynamic process. Strictly speaking nobody ‘needs’ the internet at all, as demonstrated by the fact that millions of Australians still get by perfectly well without it. However internet access is now required to participate in all aspects of our society and the dimensions of that participation will increase exponentially in the near future in ways we cannot predict.
Your claim not to be able to understand why the NBN should be publicly-funded is straight out disingenuous. It would be perfectly good faith argumentation to deal with the arguments for public funding and conclude that they are flawed but to imply that nobody has even made a reasonable case suggests you have an ideologically predetermined view that is not open to rational persuasion.
Ken,
To deal with the arguments for public funding one would need a book – and several have been written on the subject.
As for being “…disingenuous…” on this topic – where have I claimed “…not to be able to understand why the NBN should be publicly-funded…”? I may have asked others to justify why they think it should be, but to claim, as you have, that this implies I am not aware of the arguments is (IMHO) a little bit rich.
If I itemise all the reasons why some people think it might be a good idea and then argue against each I would (quite rightly perhaps) be accused of making a strawman argument. I avoid this by asking why it should be and answering (to the best of my ability) when asked why I think it should not be I am avoiding this. I also do not then have to write the book as well.
.
As for your substantive point – you are correct (and I happily concede that) no one needs internet access – but most of us now use it on a fairly regular basis. Personally, I do not see this as an argument in favour of putting gigabit fibre to the vast majority of housing in this country, but perhaps you have a differing perspective.
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Brian,
Fair enough.
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zoot,
Replacing the copper to give Lathlain a decent internet connection (if that is what is needed – I am not a technician) will be several orders of magnitude cheaper than re-cabling virtually the entire State.
What I believe should happen is that the infrastructure should be replaced on an as-needed basis. Perhaps Lathlain does need new cable and there is enough demand there to replace the copper with fibre. While I drive through there on a fairly regular basis and an uncle used to live there (Planet Street) I never used his phone or internet, so I would not know.
The point is that the possibility that Lathlain and many other older suburbs has poor copper does not (IMHO) constitute an argument that the copper in the whole of Australia needs to be retired to be replaced by a publicly funded fibre network.
If you want to make that argument go ahead – but pointing out one suburb with old copper does not (IMHO) create a convincing argument.
Actually, I think it was Finland that recently declared internet access a fundamental social need in their society, up there with electricity and water.
Andrew @198 “If you can show me a typical suburb that actually needs optic connections right now (not just wants them) then I might agree with you..”
Andrew@202 “…but pointing out one suburb with old copper does not (IMHO) create a convincing argument.”
See, Zoot, he really did not want an example anyway. Arguments that shift with the wind are Andrew!
Andrew to ‘itemise all the reasons why some people think it might be a good idea and then argue against each’ is the OPPOSITE of a straw man argument. Arguing with a straw man is to engage with arguments that nobody has in fact made. The process you have described, on the other hand, is the essence of constructive discussion, if you substitute ‘consider each on its merits’ for the pre-emptive intention to argue against each one regardless of evidence and logic. Much more constructive than a cavalier dismissal of the whole case as worthless because you ‘cannot see why’ there ought to be public funding. Sincerely? Not even one point amongst the many put forward has any merit? That’s not good faith argumentation, it’s just dismissing the case for public funding as worthless without bothering to provide a reasoned rebuttal supported by evidence.
Endless repetition of the reasons AGAINST something does not constitute rebuttal of the arguments FOR something. Constructive dialogue takes all points of view into account and tries to reach a balanced conclusion based on available evidence. It is only in a debate, the term almost universally adopted by the media to describe political argument in this country, that people are forced into two opposed camps and each side takes an extreme position in opposition to the other. Unfortunately debates are a poor means of reaching an optimum outcome.
joe2,
Try applying some logic there and understanding that old copper is not the same as new fibre and you may understand. If you want to have a discussion, please cut the abuse.
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Ken,
I have been asking and answering questions and making points as they come up. I believe that is what a discussion is. If I have been boring you by making an occasionally forceful but consistent case then I apologise. Perhaps you could read something more to your taste.
If I listed arguments no-one had made than that is a strawman argument, Ken. I would have to disagree with you there. Where people have made an argument I have attempted to counter it. That is a discussion on the topic. If you disagree, please point out where I have not made a point in response to someone or have made a “a cavalier dismissal of the whole case as worthless” then please, point it out. I might add that the quote “cannot see why” I do not regard as being a “…cavalier dismissal…” – it is an honest opinion in the context given. I, personally, cannot see why everyone should pay for me to have a faster offsite backup method.
I may occasionally use a little hyperbole to make an argument but, except where I have been simply abused I always try to treat my interlocutors with respect.
.
I also note you have made no apology for the accusation of disingenuousness, so I would think that means the accusation stands. I think this is unfortunate. Given your apparent resort to strawman abuse up the thread perhaps I should not be surprised.
In areas where the copper needs to be completely replaced I’d imagine it’s cost effective at that poiint to go fibre. But that’s simply not true for newer suburbs. If maintenance costs of copper vs those of fibre were so significant telstra would be doing the replacement anyway.
I think the operation of the nbnco does need to become a lot more transparent regardless of ownership structure. For example all wholesale pricing should be public knowledge. So unlike the current situation with telstra we know that they don’t play favorites. It’s also useful for the end user to know just what extra above the nbn access price they are paying.
Andrew R simply doesn’t understand the meaning of abuse if he thinks @204 constitutes it.
Andrew @ 206: ‘If I listed arguments no-one had made than that is a strawman argument, Ken.’
Precisely, thank you for agreeing with me. However that is the complete opposite of what you wrote @ 202: ‘If I itemise all the reasons why some people think it might be a good idea and then argue against each I would (quite rightly perhaps) be accused of making a strawman argument.’ But then again you now contradict yourself by claiming that ‘Where people have made an argument I have attempted to counter it’.
In fact you have done nothing of the kind; you have simply ignored most of the arguments in favour of public funding and restated your reasons against it, in the vain hope of shifting the discussion into your preferred frame. It has been a textbook example of talking past people who have tried to engage you in a constructive discussion, thus allowing you at the end to announce that you see no reason to alter your original opinion.
Ken,
Why some people might think something is not the same as any arguments that may have been made on this forum. This seems to be the root of your misunderstanding of what I was saying. Where an argument has been made since I joined the thread (I was not involved for most of it) I have tried to counter it. If you want to make an argument in favour of public funding go ahead. If it is a good argument that I cannot counter then it may well be that I have been wrong and need to change my opinion.
On public ownership, you may choose to look at my #174, as I have at least partially agreed with some on that.
So far, though, I have not seen such an argument. Perhaps you can drop the meta-discussion and get on with it. OTOH you may just choose to believe that I have a “dreary, myopic, ideological obsession with cost/benefit analysis” and ignore what I have actually said.
.
adrian,
I would have to agree with you. I was wrong. It is so feeble perhaps I should have said “attempt at abuse”.
Andrew the case has been made at great length in previous threads here and in other places, at least one of which has been linked in this thread. Huffing that you weren’t around for that and can you please have it all explained again so an identical argument can commence one more time is classic trolling tactics intended to ensure a discussion never gets anywhere.
More accusations of bad faith, Ken. Can you please argue without them?
Perhaps you could link to any arguments you think have particular merit. I would not want to waste my time reading this whole thread and several others just to miss the argument you think is the most important.
Andrew who’s arguing? I’m accusing you of bad faith argumentation and giving my reasons, in the hope that other people will reconsider the merits of indulging your trolling and ignore you. Having nothing more to add (indeed your latest comment being an excellent example in support of my case), I will now do something more useful.
Unfortunate, Ken. There is a reason why I have never been banned from any blog in the over 6 years I have been a regular commenter (other than one in the US when I suggested their immigration policies might be counter-productive). It is because I always try to argue in good faith.
If you simply cannot deal with that, or any actual arguments I may make then all I can be is disappointed that you want to withdraw than defend your position.
I would note, though, that you seem to assume bad faith rather than try to engage.
“I would not want to waste my time reading this whole thread and several others just to miss the argument you think is the most important.”
That’s right Andrew, as I said earlier, you would prefer everybody to do the work for you. People like myriad @102 had taken the time to mention great benefits she had personally seen from an excellent system when you clumsily entered the discussion@163 with ill informed and lazy nonsense like..
“BTW – has anyone yet come up with a real benefit to the majority of Australians from this, other than “it shouldn’t lose money”? Oh – and if you go on it you will not lose your telephone?”
As Ken suggests, why should others be asked to explain matters, again, for your personal, petulant, benefit?
joe2,
Thanks for actually pointing to something useful, in amongst the further attempts at abuse.
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myriad’s argument is a good one – but one I, in turn, have dealt with on other threads.
Video conferencing is a very useful technology, and one I use on a regular basis to multiple locations from both home and work. I do not see this, though, as an argument for the NBN as I can handle more than one Skype hi-def streams at once from my home now – using the existing cable internet. You do not need fibre to the home to do this.
You are welcome Andrew. I took the time to read the thread before I made a comment. You should try it some time.
I have Telstra cable and would be more than happy to have 12.5 megabits per second while they replace old copper in places not reached by cable.
Eventually, however, there would be an equity/ubiquity argument for going all the way.
Andrew @ 216, I wonder whether you could still do it if several people in your street set up businesses at home requiring large capacities at times.
We recently struck a new deal with Telstra which should have doubled our speed, inter alia. Subjectively three people in this household reckon nothing has changed as far as download speed is concerned.
Brian – and cable can go much faster than that if the telco is willing to invest. The experience you have had does not necessarily mean your link is not faster. You really need to check the speed against a local (to you) Isp site. The limitation on the speed that people in your house are seeing may well be due to the backhaul or sever congestion and improving the speed of that final part to your house just doesn’t help much – you could have gigabit speeds to your home and still see not much of an improvement. Possibly you can do more downloads in parallel though.
Turnbull has made a sensible speech on this.
I don’t know about the engineering, but the economics seem sound.
Chris, the query I have is, what would the situation be if all the other parts of the network were upgraded except the cable to my house? Would it still perform at speed if a large number of people in the street were using the cable at significant volumes?
If a large number of people in the street were using the cable at significant volumes *and* all the other parts of the network were upgraded (including the servers) then the cable would become the bottleneck. How much of a bottleneck depends on what capacity the network was designed with in the first place (how many users on your stretch of shared cable). Overcommit in networks as has been mentioned previously is common and the people really notice it with the cheaper ISPs during peak times when speed goes down and latency goes up.
If you have a fastish ADSL connection (say > 10Mbit) its quite common to download from servers that do not have sufficient bandwidth for the number of people downloading for them so you can’t actually get a single 10Mbit/s connection to them. And its often not that the owners of the server are unable to have more bandwidth if they want (they’re in big datacenters with large pipes) its that they don’t want to pay for it. At the higher business end you tend to pay for capacity of the pipe rather than usage so they start making decisions based on performance – eg we have “this much money” which means it will generally take a person “this long” to download a file from us where “this long” is much longer during peak times and much shorter during the light periods.
Chris, what was behind my comment to Andrew was hearing people on talkback before I first posted on the NBN saying that they had OK cable, then next door started up a business and their speeds were down the crapper.
Now with the roll-out favouring the regions I’m hoping that they will still upgrade the exchanges and backhaul in the big cities, which I hope will give me access at least equivalent to what they’ll get in the bush until they replace the whole copper network. Our suburb was built in the 1930s, so I’m assuming our copper is not too flash
Brian – I would have thought an ISP would throttle a single large user rather than let everyones performance degrade significantly but perhaps not. In your example its also possible that around the time the businesses started up a lot of other users joined at the same time. My experience of cable (though in the US) was that it was pretty fast even in a fairly tech heavy residential area. The provider may have used different performance criteria when designing the network though.
wrt backhaul my understanding is that comprises a pretty small part of the budget. The costly bit is that last mile. Which is why some of the examples given are not necessarily those which require a FTTH network – eg running fibre to hospitals/medical centres/schools in regional areas is quite a different proposition to running it to everyone.
btw has there actually been a new rollout schedule published? I haven’t been able to find anything….
Brian,
I would expect that, in the event several businesses opened on my street that there may well be a business case to put in fibre – or perhaps renew the copper or upgrade the cable the the 100mbps stuff they claim to be putting in to Melbourne and Sydney (which, I presume, will now be stopped as it would make no sense if the fibre is going to come in a few years).
I am not trying to claim that no street anywhere needs upgrades – or fibre for that matter. Clearly there does need to be a lot of work to continuously upgrade the many systems that supply data and telephony around the country.
What I am saying is that not every street everywhere (or almost everywhere) needs fibre right now – and, additionally, (pace Ken) I
cannot seedo not agree that it should be the government that does it who then later sell it off.Brian,
I should add, Brian, that I very much doubt the current telcos will spend much on upgrading or replacing existing networks when (and if) the NBN is being built. It would make no sense at all to properly maintain the copper or cables if all that is going to happen is that they will be made redundant by a government subsidised competitor.
I would guess you can look forward to steadily degrading infrastructure over the next several years until you are “blessed” with the arrival of the fibre.
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Chris,
Move into a marginal rural seat – they will get it first.
Andrew – I’m in a very marginal seat though not rural which is probably why I think the suburb I’m in is scheduled in the next stage of the rollout. At least the old schedule anyway. Presumably it will get delivered before the next election – probably just before
I & U @ 221, it only took me a couple of sentences of Turnbull’s speech to realise he’s either clueless or mendacious. This:
gives him away.
Presumably then, David, you will join me in opposing the Gillard NBN, since an integral part of the plan is the sell down of public ownership. Or do you, like me, think that the professed sell-down intent won’t be implemented, because it is merely sleight of hand to – mendaciously – hide the expenditure off balance sheet, and anyway no-one would buy into it except at knock down prices that would expose the waste of money that it is likely to be?
And quite seriously the fact that you can claim that the statement “the first principle is that Governments should not go into business in areas where the private sector is capable of providing the necessary services” is clueless says a whole lot more about you and your ideology than it says about Malcolm Turnbull. I look forward to your proposals for nationalising my local greengrocer.
Wozza, the only thing wrong with the NBN is the proposed sell-off to the private sector.
Turnbull’s problem is that he knows (or should) that the private sector doesn’t do public infrastructure without some serious public subsidies, and they only buy it later if they can get it for far less than its actual value.
Unless you have a particularly dismal greengrocer, I think you are missing DI(nr)’s point. I took him to mean that the private sector is not actually capable of providing the necessary services in this instance. It certainly hasn’t done so, so far.
David@231
Perhaps you didn’t read down as far as this point:
You may not agree with Turnbull’s views about the respective roles and capabilities of the public and private sectors, but I don’t think that makes him mendacious or clueless.
“Move into a marginal rural seat – they will get it first.”
Presumably, since you make this claim so categorically, Andrew, you will be able to answer what Chris asked @225…”has there actually been a new rollout schedule published?”.
Otherwise, we can assume that, yet again, you are speaking through your hat and cannot substantiate your allegation of any preferential treatment in the rollout. Apart from what is already known about a proposed rural advantage.
Brett, yes, your interpretation is probably right. But the broad statement that it is mendacious or clueless to maintain that Governments should avoid involving themselves in service delivery that the private sector can provide is what was made, no ifs, buts or restrictions to telecommunications infrastructure. And there are plenty of others round here who would certainly cheer the extension of public ownership into far more than telecommunications – the reason for my indignant reaction.
I am far from convinced personally that it even applies to telecommunications, or even just the NBN. It is interesting that Korea – the world leader as I understand it in high speed broadband roll out, and often quoted as the model for the NBN – has built its swift telecommunications modernisation on deregulation, liberalisation and privatisation. See eg this summary
http://www.budde.com.au/Research/South-Korea-Key-Statistics-Infrastructure-Regulatory-Overview-and-Forecasts.html
OK, it has accompanied this with incentives by way of big tax write offs and Government pressure, but who is to say that this would not be a viable model, and a more cost-effective one, for the NBN? Perhaps this thread has evolved to the extent that I should not mention the earlier war, but this is the sort of judgment that doing a cost-benefit analysis is designed to illuminate.
And this – high speed optical fibre from a private company for Brisbane before the NBN gets there – is interesting too.
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/breaking-news/lord-mayor-campbell-newman-to-announce-deal-that-will-deliver-super-fast-broadband-to-brisbane-within-four-years/story-e6freonf-1225938613953
It may be a nonsense story, but if it isn’t, how will the economics of the NBN be affected by the cherry-picking of this (and perhaps others of the easier and more profitable markets) by alternative providers? Perhaps the Government will have to buy them off, like Telstra? $43 billion – sorry, forgot, that turned into $44 billion this morning even before this story, didn’t it? – plus now how much extra?
The Government doesn’t believe in explaining the economic costs and benefits, though, so I guess we’ll never know.
Shit, Wozza, the cost-benefit analysis has been thoroughly debunked ad nauseum, so don’t throw out that particular red herring.
Since you seem to be somewhat … slow … I’ll spell it out for you.
In a vast, sparsely-populated continent (like, for example, our own and completely unlike Korea) public infrastructure costs far too much for private enterprise to be interested in building it. (The early years of Australia’s electrification are instructive here.) Turnbull knows this, or he should.
Wozza – well there is an example in Australia already of private/public fibre rollout – TransACT in canberra which at least used to be partially government owned (not sure if it still is). They are also the power company and with all the power lines underground they also had all the rights to the conduits. So a bit less than a decade ago they started a fibre rollout to large areas of Canberra.
I suspect the cost structure of the rollout would have been fairly similar to an NBN urban rollout where they have access to Telstra conduits. There was a *lot* of excitement when they started rolling out the network, much like you see on the various NBN threads here and people have been able to get FTTN for a while (30Mbit) or FTTH (100Mbit) more recently. I got very excited about it all, especially when they started talking about houses being able to talk directly to each other on the network (not sure if this ever eventuated).
Timing was a bit unfortunate though as ADSL was already rolling out and ADSL2+ not far behind and they had to compete against that. So these days a 100Mbit TransACT fibre connection (including phone line) costs $150/month, but thats only the connection fee. You then have to pay the ISP connection separately (say $50/month for 50Gb as data is also more expensive on this network). So as a result many people have chosen to stick with ADSL2+ or connect at cheaper slower ADSL like speeds.
This is one reason I still remain skeptical over the costs (whether they end up being end-user or government subsidised). What makes the NBN rollout so much cheaper than what TransACT did when they had pretty good conditions (access to existing conduits which would not be that old)?
Wozza, South Korea has a population twice the size of Australia in an area under one and half times the size of Tasmania.
Just to add to what DI said@237 and wondering whether your comparison was some kind of joke.
He does know it. See the quote from his speech at @233.
Or do you just ignore evidence if it does not fit your preconceptions?
Oh dear, now that notorious woolly-headed socialist Graeme Samuel from the ACCC has joined the ranks of those rubbishing the whole notion of a CBA:
Which of course is precisely why Turnbull and company have dreamed up this Productivity Commission stunt: not because they are interested in any findings, but so they have raw material to criticise and ridicule in the assumptions that will underpin any submissions the government might make.