The government’s announced that it’s given up on the original form of its national broadband network scheme, and is now proposing “a new public/private company to build a national network”. They’ve also taken a significant step up in the proposed technology, basing it on “fibre to the home” covering 90% of the population, with the remainder to be covered through wireless and satellite technology.
There’s a discussion paper here on the regulatory reforms that might be necessary.
My initial take is that this might just undo the historic stuff-up of creating and then selling, intact, the Telstra behemoth – a stuff-up that involved both the Hawke-Keating and the Howard governments. Then again, if takeup of wireless broadband continues at its present rate, it might be Australia’s biggest-ever white elephant.
ELSEWHERE: Paul Budde at New Matilda likes the announcement, noting the implications for e-health, amongst other things. The Whirlpool forums are running overtime, and seem mostly enthused. Joshua Gans “fell off his chair in delight”.
Update: [by Mark] A round up of blog reaction at Polliegraph and Swinburne academic Jock Given has an interesting historical perspective at Inside Story.
This approach looks much better than getting either Telstra or one of the consortiums to build the infrastructure. Not sure if the extra cost of going fibre to the home rather than just to the node is worth it at the moment though.
As has been pointed out on the whirlpool discussion one advantage of the way the infrastructure can be built is to do it outside in – eg fill in the gaps where ADSL doesn’t or can’t reach now.
I think wireless has a long long way to go before it can make wired broadband redundant. Bandwidth costs for wireless are extremely high and the current infrastructure seems to have trouble keeping up (eg in areas of high iphone density). I have a wireless broadband account, but its supplemental to my wired access – for when I travel or as a backup in case the ADSL fails.
Does wireless broadband allow for Naked DSL? I can’t wait for ASDL2 in my area so I close my landline telephone account.
What Chris said – wireless broadband is limited in what it can provide in crowded/dense areas.
Colour me gobsmacked though that the government is doing it themselves – I wonder if they’ll work a new acronym around “PMG”? That way they can recycle the footpath covers for the new fibre. Prime Ministers Gigawan? Poor Mans Googlepipe?
Fibre to the home doesn’t just do an end-run around Telstra’s copper network – it potentially does an end run around satellite pay TV providers too. Bring it on!
The government has committed more than $40b to this project! That’s about $2000 for every person now resident in Australia.
The government proposes to raise the capital by means of bond issue.
In these days of massive financial deleveraging, who will be able and willing to invest that enormous sum?
On the other hand, fibre cables are relatively cheap and the project will require the digging of the longest trenches in Australian history.
This is therefore a “shovel-ready” project.
As such is it a keynesian stimulation package disguised as an infrastructure project?
“Colour me gobsmacked though that the government is doing it themselves…”
Tanner was pretty clear that once it was all up and running the government majority share holding would be sold off.
If it’s only fiber to the node, then there’s a huge and pointless fight over access to Telstra’s copper. Or the government lays its own copper in which case why not lay fiber?
I’ve some doubts about the viability of wireless as well, but this is a wholesale network, so wireless providers should be able to buy in to the fiber and resell it wirelessly. Fiber strikes me as more flexible, scalable and upgradable.
I am wondering about the reaction from the established players, TV and the rest of the MSM and how Rudd is planning to appease them. I have trouble imagining him just telling them to go jump.
d
Darryl, its fibre to the home.
“As such is it a keynesian stimulation package disguised as an infrastructure project?”
Yep, on that front, it is probably no accident that it is to be rolled out in Tasmania first.
Sorry Chris, that was meant to be a response to your comment about whether FTTH was worth it. I should have included a quote.
d
They really are a bunch of fabians, this mob. Policy change by small steps until they presumably get to what they actually wanted.
Darryl @ 6 – good point about access to Telstra’s copper
David @ 3 – Although it would provide an alternative to satellite, its no guarantee things will get any better. Many parts of Canberra already have fibre to the node and I haven’t been impressed by the quality and cost of the TV/movie service (I think satellite is better).
Now if bandwidth gets cheap enough I’ll just pay for cable TV in the US and stream to Australia
It sounds good to me. It’s about time that government took responsibility for key infrastructure. Commercial broadcast owners will hate it. As an independent filmmaker, I suspect it will opportunities to distribute my work.
Tanner was pretty clear that once it was all up and running the government majority share holding would be sold off.
I suspect these things are easier for a government to set up than sell off. Aside from objections by the left-wing of the Labor Party/the Greens, the Government will probably encounter problems with the infrastructure roll out happening much slower than they anticipated, and lack of enthusiasm amongst private investors, leading to lower income/growth than they expected. We really could be stuck with this project for decades to come.
This is a bad idea. By the time the government has finished the national broadband network, the technology may very well be superseded.
I think Chris that, other than live sporting events, the traditional broadcast TV model is basically dead. If you give your kids the option of watching a DVD with their favourite show on it (or a network server full of episodes) they’ll go for that rather than wait for the TV station to get around to broadcasting their show.
A terabyte of local storage, a set top box and a FTTH connection would basically mean unlimited access to standard definition TV on your terms and not the broadcasters. Of all the local broadcasters, it’s channel 10 and OneHD (and maybe Fox Sports) that looks like the most viable business model (concentrate on live sports). The rest of them are stuffed. Who is going to pay for Fox/Austar to watch live broadcasts of mouldy old reruns that could potentially be downloaded in bulk and watched at leisure?
Judging by the popularity of some torrent sites, savvy Australians are already doing this illegally. Itunes is getting close to being viable on this model, it’s only a matter of time and the removal of the ridiculously small download limits on internet accounts that is stopping it. Government owned FTTH is going to make download limits stupid – you could blow a 25Gb limit in a matter of hours with fibre.
I’m going to pass around a hat pretty soon to start my online TV business – like Hulu but with local storage, a cheap Syabas based set top box and el-cheapo terabyte drives. I just need a few megabucks to get the TV show licensing sorted out. The only trick is making it more convenient than The Pirate Bay and people would subscribe to it.
Fantastic – sounds like another Snowy Scheme to power the future. Rudd has jumped over a cliff and voterland will love it, not to mention all those jobs.
Nick Minchin is jabbering hysterically, foaming at the mouth, and Telstra is furious at being ignored, again, so it must be good.
Paul Budde has already quietly made the point (which will be drowned out in the next 24 hour news cycle by News Ltd and the Libs yelling about how stupid this all is, who wil pay, blah blah) that the high speeds etc will allow delivery of health and education services into the home, as well as the internet.
Way to go.
Oh yeah, and if there’s a major stuff up in the broadband roll out process, you can bet that the government won’t take responsibility for it – they’ll just blame the private partners, and ignore it.
Anyone still complaining about the government lacking a narrative now?
TimT, the only problem I had with the govt’s scheme was that they were planning on selling off their share in a few years. If you’re right, that that’ll be difficult-to-impossible, it makes the whole thing perfect.
DR: “I’m going to pass around a hat pretty soon to start my online TV business… The only trick is making it more convenient than The Pirate Bay and people would subscribe to it.”
Not needing to maintain your torrents and keep a positive up/down ratio would just about do this for me. Plus I frickin’ LOVE dedicated, modular tech. To completely separate my TV/movie watching from my other digital activities would be great.
Not exactly in a position to invest, but I reckon I’d be keen for a sub!
Wait until it becomes a real drag on the budget, David… it’ll just set up a situation where the Liberals will come to power (under Turnbull, Costello, or someone else) and flog it off to the first bidder.
If this is going to render copper wire redundant, why are Telstra Shares rising on this news?
My guess is that Telstra, as major builders of infrastructure, will get a large part of the action on the build, and will be in a position to buy the whole thing when it is completed.
This adds up to a major public subsidy for Telstra.
David Rubie, I think saying this traditional model is dead is bit of hyperbole. The sticking point is that although your kids prefer watching tv in this way, so far no-one’s worked out a financial model for producing high end drama without broadcast/advertising dollars.
Of course, the model is rapidly changing, which is very good. But, if you look at ratings (still very high) and think about who supplies finance to produce programming, there’s still life in the old model. The Screen Australia website has very useful stats about this, btw.
Crikey seems to be suggesting that it’s not only the wires, it’s all the other bits of infrastructure (pits and so on) that Telstra controls that have suddenly become more valuable.
TimT
You are completelly overlooking the productivity improvements for business that this will create. These improvements will flow through to increased Govt tax returns – even if you are right about the model not being commercially viable in it’s own right and remaining in 100% public ownership, the overall Government bottom line won’t be worse off as a result of this, in fact the reverse would be true, if we don’t invest in this infrastructure, we will just see this sort of IT investment move offshore and Aus will be worse off.
Fine @ 22 – I think as digital recorders with easy advert skipping become more common free to air channels will have no choice but to embed their ads with the programs and we’ll see even more product placement in shows. Once adequate broadband infrastructure is in a subscription model may work for the development of shows.
David @ 14 – I think the major key to the iTunes success is the fairly easy to use interface and excellent integration with the iPod/iPhone. Already seeing some ISPs provide movie services hooked up to set top boxes, but I won’t dive in unless there are DRM free and open standard options.
A couple of people mentioned they aren’t impressed with TV over current fibre (eg Transact). But that’s FTTN so can’t deliver much bandwidth (from the node to the home is plain copper). FTTH can be very different.
Inherently, it can deliver far, far geater bandwidth than wireless, FTTN or POTS. Once the ultra-expensive cabling is done it is relatively cheap to upgrade servers, nodes, set-top boxes, etc to match advancing technology.
The failure of Transact and other cable providers to do these upgrades is why they are falling behind providers – they could do much much more even with FTTN, let alone if they had FTTH. From the consumer’s POV wireless has closed the gap with fibre only because it hasn’t been a commercial threat to fibre to date, so the providers have had no incentive to upgrade.
The threat to FTTN isn’t technical obsolescence, but that other modes will become “good enough” that people won’t be willing to pay for the best.
Maybe the next thing he’ll do is nationalise Telstra? Today Krudd is my hero.
Robert – it’s also the Telstra backhaul that just became more valuable. Nobody else in Australia can do the inter-city connections like Telstra has done.
I don’t think the idea of broadcast TV being dead is hyperbole at all. All of TV is now just data. We have a crude prototype at home (set top box, tiny network server) that has a list of “channels” (really just directories). Once the kids have done their homework, they just pick the show they want to watch and hit shuffle. New shows turn up regularly, either via DVD rips or whatever. All our music Cd’s are on there along with directories full of music videos. It would be trivial technology wise to replicate it cheaply if the internet were fast enough – cheaper, in fact, than a set top box and satellite dish. When you think about it, satellite is a very expensive way to transmit data and they can only send 80 shows at a time. Fibre makes it look totally wrong headed – think thousands of shows at a time, when you want it, not when they want to send it.
We only watch broadcast TV for the news now and gave up Austar due to the astonishing number of repeats. If I want repeats, I’ll just pick that episode again.
If Apple pulled their finger out of their fundament, they could turn that Apple TV thing into your next source of TV, completely. It’s no harder to hook up than a DVD player.
“A terabyte of local storage, a set top box and a FTTH connection would basically mean unlimited access to standard definition TV on your terms and not the broadcasters.”
Piracy will be a big gun in the Broadcasters’ and Producers’ arsenal as they try to get DRM and access controls on the entire network. “A dagger to the heart of the Australian film industry”, “The end of locally produced drama” etc etc.
d
This ball was at the feet of the Libs for years and they were too stupid to get it in the net. Now they’re crying foul. Serves them bloodywell right. Conroy’s talking 98% of all people will benefit. They all have to vote. Only those who do not want to see any wins for ordinary Australians if it’s a win for Labor will be whinging.
Darryl Rosin wrote:
I think DRM is basically finished. It failed on music and now most of the big music companies sell unencumbered mp3 files. It failed on DVD too. The simple problem they need to solve is to supply a better product than the pirates. Frankly, it isn’t hard even if you top and tail some adverts into the download. Pirates generally don’t care too much about quality or sustained availability, or “long tail” issues like giving access to obscurities in back catalogues. The industry has a decent model for reconfiguring itself (think magazines like “Mojo” for the music industry, who manage to sell any kind of old crap to music heads who’ll do anything to get hold of some obscure recording just for a single riff). Pirates don’t do obscure or unpopular as a rule and they don’t do quality. The only thing they do is “first” – where the media companies have an unequalled advantage but refuse to use it (c.f. region coding).
I do agree that they’ll complain though. All dying industries go out the same way.
“If Apple pulled their finger out of their fundament, they could turn that Apple TV thing into your next source of TV, completely. It’s no harder to hook up than a DVD player.”
Actually, I think the problem there is less Apple and more the content providers. The TV/Movie business has seen how Apple dominated online music sales and don’t want to end up in the same relationship with Apple that the Recording industry is now in. TV seems a little friendlier than movies, though, who are still pushing Blu-ray.
“I think DRM is basically finished.”
I don’t share your optimism, but I agree it’s probably a dead end. But multi-billion dollar cartels with everything to lose will keep flogging the dead horse until their arms fall off, to everyone’s detriment. The only ‘winning’ path for DRM is its foundations being legally required in hardware, at which point we’ll all be sitting back, reminiscing about the good old days when all we had to worry about was the government’s silly content filtering proposal.
d
dd @ 26 – don’t Transact offer 100Mbit dedicated to the home if you want it (and are willing to pay)? From what I’ve seen Transact simply don’t offer the video content at decent prices (eg cheaper than a video store) and for data are undercut by ADSL on price. As David Rubie alluded to at 100Mbit connections its the cost and capacity of the backhaul which is going to limit people’s usage and access.
Hard to stop someone pointing their HD video camera at their big TV though. Not to mention those dodgy hardware manufacturers in China who can’t even seem to get region encoding restrictions right or without unlock codes
The other thing to bear in mind is that the carrying capacity of fibre continues to increase. FTTH is a wonderful model because of the ability to ramp up speeds as technology improves.
I think this will go a long way to overcoming the problems that have been caused by the way Telstra was handled by government for the last 20 years.
David Rubie@28.”All of TV is now just data.” LOL. That’s unintentionally hilarious.
The point I’m making which you haven’t addressed is production costs, not distribution platforms. Currently, those costs are almost totally underwritten by a traditional broadcast model. That’s where the programs come from that your kids watch. I don’t think anyone has come up with a way of financing tv using other models yet. And music isn’t an exact analogy as there are far more people involved in making a tv program than making music. Give me an example of something you like to watch and I’ll tell you how much it costs to make. And most of those costs are bound up in labour. Technology can lower costs, but only to an extent. It still takes a scriptwriter the same amount of time to write something, regardless of technology.
Chris@25, yes, product placement and embedding ads is one of the things which is happening and will succeed to an extent.
This is good news. It will seperate the wholesale main highway from the content/ retail end – in effect doing what should have been done to bloody Telstra years ago. It also give post Sol Telstra a chance to get back into the game but on the government terms.
I’d be curious to see how many pick and shovel jobs it creates in digging or will it all be highly skilled people sitting in small glass covered vehicles with computers and joysticks running clever little tunnelling robots around our suburbs?
And for a purely technical question, how much of the money will be spent on foreign connections? Australia’s internet prices are driven by the cost of the overseas cables. Right now it’s a duopoly.
I also hope they encourage cooperation with the states on undergrounding electrical grids. If you’re going to dig up every street in the country you could lay powerlines next to fibre without interference. It would cut maintenance costs, reduce blackouts and remove one cause of bushfires.
Another thought occurs. As I understand, projects like these are dominated by the cost of digging the ditch. Duplicate fibre should be laid — say three lines to each household — and three companies spun off, each with an instance of the same coverage.
Otherwise Labor risk building the next Telstra: a single company which got a massively subsidised, market-dominating end-to-end network.
This is a fine thing. We could call it the PMG. Then enshrine the PMG in legislation so that it can never be sold off and ruined like its predecessor. I love it! Of course, Telestrah will whine like a stuck pig, but I didn’t buy any of Howard’s shares, so stuff ‘em.
This will also entail significant upgrades of exchanges as well, hence Telstra shares bouncing, as their infrastructure cannot be bypassed but must be integrated. I’m heartily surprised, and heartily delighted. But it HAS to be kept transparent – scheduling, access, and modelling. Though all this bewdiful new speed would seem a little silly if Senator Conroy’s filtering progresses.
You’ve just reminded me of something, Jacques. When I was in high school, underground power was installed in my inner city Perth suburb. I seem to remember some discussion at the time of the fact that they were also installing fibre optic cables for future use at the same time.
I’m not sure if that was true or not, but it makes me wonder how much ‘dark cable’ there is out there. It will be interesting to see how much of a fibre optic network the Government’s new company might buy up from existing installed infrastructure (if any at all).
It’s certainly wonderful news for the 98%. Guess the 2% of us will still have to put up with wireless or even more hideously expensive satellite until we have critical mass. Sigh!!
Make that the 10% of you, Jane. Only 90% of Aussies get FttH.
The best Turnbull could manage by way of opposition was to say how risky it all is. Spoken like a true conservative banker sir!
At least he’s moved beyond the ignorant Howard/Coonan drivel about spending billions of dollars so a few kids can download movies quicker.
Wow TimT there sure are a lot of kids on your lawn. No wonder you don’t want anyone digging it up.
A question: So if this solution is so terrible, what’s your solution to Australia’s ridonkulously slow speeds, bearing it mind it’s not just my precious bittorrent that suffers, but it’s a major impediment on business development in AU?
If the technology runs the risk of being superceded – despite the upgrade-ability of FTTH – what technology, pray tell, doesn’t suffer from the same issue?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for reasoned criticism, but this griping ain’t it.
“The best Turnbull could manage by way of opposition was to say how risky it all is.”
And he apparently plans to block any legislation to introduce it. Fielding was said to be agin it, also. Here we go again it would seem.
Will this get rid of the usual social media pimps and whores on Twitter or will their 140 character inanity just get to my door faster?
Anyhoo, it’s about freaking time. Good on the Govt for giving it a go.
Update: [by Mark] A round up of blog reaction at Polliegraph and Swinburne academic Jock Given has an interesting historical perspective at Inside Story.
Can someone explain to this ingénue why my internet costs a lot more, for a fraction of the data, than 24 hrs of cable tv (when net access covers none of the content cost)?
And on the aesthetic front, can we look forward to overhead cable and phone lines being taken away?
Wireless broadband ? Just totally forget about it Robert. It cannot compete in any way with fibre. Basically the fibre optic network will have no capacity constraints at all-apart from the servers that are common to both systems. Wireless on the other hand will rapidly run out of capacity if you try to do with it even a fraction of the work that fibre can do. Perhaps you use ADSL and have fibre envy? That Goldman Sachs guy should go back to predicting the financial meltdown perhaps?
Huggy.
Fine wrote:
Why? Radiohead practically gave away their last album so they could switch to revenue from concerts.
HBO have been moving for years to in-house, high quality production driven by subscription, not advertising. The markets for their shows are deliberately aimed at niches and occasionally they make a massive hit (Dexter for example) but they don’t build their business around it. People buy DVD’s but only because it’s effectively “sneakernet” – a relatively efficient means of delivering bulk data on shiny silver disks that was just made redundant.
There is nothing to suggest that television production needs to be supported by advertising. It’s data and it used to be horrifically expensive to get to the end user due to a lack of transmission facilities, but now it’s cheap, so the game changes. I’m looking forward to it.
Couple of points: why Testra’s share price in Australia went up today I have no idea. I can only presume that in the next couple of days it will drop substantially.
Wherein lies one part of the total solution: Telstra’s shares are already less than the price of the intial telstra 1 issue. It’s about time they should be bought up by the govt and then the company split the way it always should have been, with a publicly owned infrastructure utility and a separate retail section. That would also mean that a huge part of the fibre to the home network would be immediately available, by building on Telstra’s Common Backbone Network. It then falls to providing that last mile to each home.
While they’re talking about 100Mps speeds at moment, with fibre connections to homes it’s only a matter of upgrading the boxes to vastly increase speeds later. If you can get ADSL2 speeds out of copper wire, the sky is basically the limit when fibre gets hooked up- we aint seen nothing yet. Wireless will always be hampered by bandwidth limtations that just don’t apply to fibre, so we’ll soon end up with a mix of really high speed fibre and high speed wireless across the whole country.
We are going to see whole new industries, let alone companies, devloping from these technologies over the next few years.
And today’s announcements are effectively the death knell for free to air TV.
Krudd has lost his marbles. The only people who need faster internet access are kids playing time wasting games and perverts getting their daily visual fix. (With apologies to Richard Alston – early Australian internet pioneer.)
joe2 @47, d’ya think there’ll be blood in the streets, or is Malvolio really an ALP plant who’s infiltrated the Libduds with a cunning plan to keep them out of power for the next century?
@54 – evidently you’re not one of those of us who like to download tv shows to watch via the intertubes, wbb.
This move will also kill free to air tv as we know it, enabling an almost unlimited supply of video content to flow to (and from) homes. Which I think will be good!
Oh sorry, I see now that brettc had already made the point about the death of free to air tv.
Well I might, Mark, but only if Richard Alston approves. He was the telecommunications minister afterall. So he’d know and last I checked, he thought the internet was a fad.
I think Richard Alston may have been a passing fad, wbb.
I’m not sure I understand all this ‘Telstra is doomed’ stuff. Where does it say that the 49% private investment cannot be Telstra’s?
BBB
Telstra isn’t “doomed” but the basis of its market dominance (its monopoly over the phone cables to your house, combined with the fact that it was both wholesaler and the dominant retailer) will no longer exist.
As I understand it, the national broadband network company will have special rules limiting the maximum shareholding from any one company, including Telstra.
You would expect “blood in the streets” ,Jane@55, if this plan is blocked.
Still, it is all about the selling. The government will need to continue the nation building narrative. And start listing how very fast broadband will make life much more interesting, convenient and efficient.
I am lucky enough to get “ADSL2 speeds out of copper wire” and need no convincing. The problem is conveying the possibilities to the peeps that will compel them into action if the dinosaurs(see Minchin) start fiddling with the package.The Liberals just hate the idea that the rabble would get a seat in their Roller.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25307033-26103,00.html
“Radiohead practically gave away their last album so they could switch to revenue from concerts.”
Which earns you a living if and only if you’re a well-established mainstream band with a fanbase measured in the millions. There’s no-one making a decent living out of it who wasn’t already successful under the old studio/label system. (with the possible exception of Jonathon Coulton).
d
“today’s announcements are effectively the death knell for free to air TV.”
This bugs me because i) I like FTA TV and resent the idea of having to pay for it, and ii) how is Rudd planning to compensate the owners of the FTA networks and the rest of the MSM, which he will have to do unless he plans to win an election during a recession with the TV stations, The radio stations, the newspapers and the advertising industry all determined to stop him.
d
Darryl @ 63 – I’m not sure this changes the economics of the music biz all that much. It’s always been very difficult for most musos to make a living from recorded music.
@64 – I doubt that. I suspect they can see an avenue for profit from this too. It might mean an accelerating of the fracturing of the mass audience, but that’s well under way already.
Mark wrote:
I’m looking forward to seeing “LPTV” Mark – better start investing in some cameras and a basement studio. I want my LPTV!
It’ll be the MTV of the 21st century, David!
I can always borrow the stuff from work – one advantage of working in a faculty that teaches film & tv!
Actually, I’m thinking of getting into some podcasting soonish – I enjoyed it when I did it on election night for the Qld poll.
“Radiohead practically gave away their last album so they could switch to revenue from concerts.”
That’s not exactly what they did, and it didn’t really work out that way either. Their sale price per album plummeted, sure, but it was classic discounting – they got 1/3 the price per item and sold 5x as many items. With their near-zero cost per item that’s a big win. Plus the free publicity actually worked for them – the Metallica “we hate our fans” lawsuits got a lot of bad publicity and they lost fans, this one got people like me to actually listen to Radiohead’s music (and decide that it’s not my thing).
Radiohead are just the most visible of a huge mass of musicians who are not following the RIAA model. Very much the tip of the iceberg. The techdirt blog posts a lot of commentary on this stuff and some odd examples of late include twitter-arranged fan meetups, lots of “staying with fans” couch-surfing for less-known bands, a huge range of pay-more-get-more setups (pay $10000, the band will play a gig at your house, pay $20000 and you get to keep their instruments), all sorts of stuff. It’s not all new though, my housemate had The Herd play at her school formal just after “An Elefant…” was released by just emailing and asking (and paying, obviously). Complete with meet the band and all the rest.
Expect to see more changes as time goes by (this radical thought brought to you be early morning lack of coffee).
“It might mean an accelerating of the fracturing of the mass audience…”
Oh noes, that special water cooler moment is at risk. Nick Minchin please help.
I think it’s a mistake to compare music to film and tv, as the cost structures are completely different. A high end HBO series costs a couple of million per hour to produce. Even comparatively low cost Australian drama costs $500,000 per hour to produce and this is nothing to do with transmission costs. Some stuff is ‘cheap and cheerful’ to produce, but not high end drama or documentary.
I don’t know how HBO is going financially at the moment, but I do know that other subscription services such as Discovery and PBS in the States are doing terribly in the GFC. People don’t want to pay for content at the moment, when they can get it for free.
All this will change television production for the better, but as for the death for FTA, as Mark Twain said, greatly exaggerated.
Has Robert joined the liberal party?
Robert Merkel at Lavartus Prodeo is more measured in his response.
“Then again, if takeup of wireless broadband continues at its present rate, it might be Australia’s biggest-ever white elephant.’”
Robert, FFS get your facts right before you hand amunition over to the Turdbull.
Wireless broadband is whole orders of magnitude less capable than fibre.
Huggy
Now look at them ‘benders
That’s the way you do it
You put your opines on that LPTV
That aint workin’, that’s the way you do it
Git yer bandwidth for nothing and your clicks for free.
Bandwidth for nothin’
and clicks for free.
Mark@65 – no, I don’t think it effects the music industry much either. Sorry, I’m straying a bit off-topic onto one of my minor hobby-horses in response to David Rubie.
@66 – I’m sure they can see avenues for profit, but they’ll be working like buggery to keep competition out and make sure the barriers to entry for ‘content providers’ are as high as they can possibly make them. I’ll be very surprised indeed if we don’t at least see licensing requirements for ‘webcasting’.
d
I’m pretty excited about it. Fast broadband is very useful. I do wonder about the international backhaul cost and capacity though – if everyone is watching US-hosted content it’s going to thrash our local cache/mirror systems pretty hard.
Getting the fibre in there will be expensive, but to a fair extent fibre is upgradeable at the node. Since it’s worth paying for that to everyone who has fibre the cost tends to be reasonable just from economies of scale.
Huggybunny: wireless broadband of 2009, sure. Wireless broadband of 2016, who knows?
More to the point, I’m sure the wired solution will still provide higher bandwidth than the wireless solution in 2016, but will wireless be fast enough that nobody really cares?
We still aren’t anywhere near the theoretical limits of what wireless technology can do, if I crunch the maths correctly.
Guess I’ll need instruction in podcasting, then. (I freaked out when a friend of mine bought me a new bells and whistles phone, a headphone and mike and put me on Skype. The technophobe in me doesn’t take much to bring out, despite my love/fascination/obsession with teh Net.) I don’t even know how to set up my own blog, and probably couldn’t afford it anyway.And I WON’T buy a mobile phone.
I’m not quite sure how democratisation of distribution is going to improve content in a big hurry.
The high end TV series that we have loved over the years – Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire et al – were all budgeted based on concrete income streams. These streams, as comments above suggest, are fast evaporating, and the economies of VOD are completely liquid at present.
There will certainly be more content available faster in the future, but the quality of that content is a guessing game. Now I love Vasili’s Garden as much as the next person, but I really do want to keep seeing content at the level of The Wire!
Robert, perhaps you can alter the laws of physics in 2016 too.
Huggy
I think they’ll be wins and losses when it comes to content, via collins. There will be greater opportunity for niche production, which is an excellent thing. But, I think those higher budget shows will become much harder to make. I think, the thing is, no-one really knows how it will pan out yet. But labour costs are labour costs.
Vasili is a real man of principle, did you know? Returned back to community tv from from SBS because he didn’t like the direction they wanted his progam to head in. So back to doing it for free.
Robert, “who knows?” means nothing gets done. It is the excuse the Liberals have used for the last eleven years. And anyway what does it matter if two systems build up alongside each other for competition and different uses?
Yes there’s always an excuse to do nothing, even when the action involves upgradeable, superior technology.
Huggy: we’re a very long way off Shannon-Hartley limits with present technology, if I’ve done the maths right.
Leaves rather a lot of room for technological development.
“But labour costs are labour costs.”
Perhaps the cancerous spread of “deferred wages”, like we see in the film ‘biz’ :^(
d
Robert you have opened up a bolt hole for the libretards.
You can get (say) 60 GB/s with OFDM at 2.4GHz. Trouble is you are sharing the same “pipe” with possibly a hundred thousand other people and your rate will drop to bugger all. With fibre every-one has their own “pipe” you can get any speed you want basically- in every “pipe” in the system, The physical limts are way out there because there is no interaction between the “pipes”. So if you want 10GB/s you can pay x if you want 100 times that speed(for a website for example) you can pay Y. With wireless no matter how much you pay you will be traffic limited. What you are promoting is basically a really retarded statist position. Why you want to nobble your own website is a mystery. It’s slow enough as it is.
Huggy
“will wireless be fast enough that nobody really cares?”
The evidence to date suggests not. Every time we’ve seen a “more bandwidth than you could possibly ever need” solution it’s choked up with in a few years. Right now parts of Korea and Wellington have 100Mb/s internet and they seem to be using it and whining about speed. Also about overseas data charges, but you expect that.
Huggy: you can put more cells (and more directional cells) into a mobile network. The further point I’d make is that “good enough” solutions succeed in the marketplace over technically superior ones all the time. You know that.
moz: but what proportion of people are whining about speed, and how much of that is related to the speed of the backbone connection rather than the speed of the last mile connection?
And further I’d add that 40-odd billion dollars is quite a lot of money.
How much CSP generation capacity could you build for that?
“40-odd billion dollars” , over 8 or more years, much of it from the private sector. The kind of money pissed up against the wall, regularly, for high tech war toys.
…or, or, or how many RSPCA kittens could we save for 40 billion Robert? Or how many pies could we buy for Piers Akerman (answer: not enough)?
Fast networks are truly disruptive and I wouldn’t be surprised if our overall carbon output went down if (say) more people were able to work effectively from home, or new distributed corporations came into being, or students never had to darken the doors of a campus ever again.
Paul, Wordpress.com blogs, for example, are completely free: if you can get on the Internet in the first place, you can find a free blog host. I’d avoid Blogger.com as it’s utterly horrible, but Wordpress.com is pretty good.
One issue with the wireless thingo, Robert: doesn’t the penetration of wireless broadband require connection to some kind of wired backbone for the access points anyway?
Surely, this NBN is actually going to improve (dramatically) the possibilities for both wireless and wired data delivery of myriad varieties. Yes/no?
There’s a massive difference in cost in running a line to access points, and running them to just about every home and business in Australia.
But you don’t think there will be a massive difference in the service thus delivered, too? Or if that difference in service would be worth the difference in cost?
Agreed @ 80 Fine.
I knew he’d come back, but I had no idea it was his own decision that was the driver.
Love him a bit more now!
Robert, the “problem” is that as bandwidth increases so do the uses people find for it. In Wellington people started working from home which congested the network until they ramped up the price, because they didn’t initially have the node to node transfer capacity to deal with it. These days I believe that is solved and it’s no more issue between nodes than the 100Mb/s network is within the office.
For example, right now I can’t really use the various online backup options available because the network is not fast enough (and the cost would be awful… 3TB at $70/60GB…ow) but as soon as that becomes possible I will be quite keen to set up a deal with someone a long way away to do a backup swap – we each buy an extra few TB of storage, I store her backups and she stores mine. Of course, that requires gigabit networking to be practical.
More problematic is the work I do, which requires sending 10+GB virtual machine images about the place. So on a regular basis we use snailmail to ship media around the country because the internet is too slow. With 100Mb/s connections those would be quite practical. Which opens up new worlds in cloud computing too – we might just fire one of those up to Amamzon and run it there once it’s possible to drop 5GB of test data into a VM in the cloud then buy massive resources to do load testing on a new system. Downloading movies quickly is the least of it… I’d expect to see new businesses start up based purely on storing or manipulating large files.
“Robert, the “problem” is that as bandwidth increases so do the uses people find for it. In Wellington people started working from home which congested the network…”
Moz, have you got a reference for this? I ran a project a couple of years ago that touched on this and I couldn’t find any published evidence that the availability of collaboration software (specifically videoconferencing) had any significant effect on work-related travel. This is slightly different, but I’d like to know more about it.
d
Nick C @ 91,
Will checkit out. Thanks, muchly. (Thinking of doing a course at TAFE, if there is one.)
Darryl, I don’t a study, only anecdote. A friend of mine bought in very early and complained that his building was full of bandwidth-hogging geeks like him and that slowed the whole thing down. I think what annoyed him most was that congestion lasted well into the evening… because veryone else also liked to stay up late and use the net.
No need for a course Paul – if you can post on LP, you can write your own blog on wordpress.com. It’s very similar (just a box you type in and a subject line) if you keep it simple.
To me, working from home is not really the avoidance of work-related travel. Sure, I’m not commuting but since I have to go for a ride anyway I try to get out on the bike for an hour before work even when I work from home. So the avoiding travel part is where I don’t have to fly between cities just to meet someone. Working from home just means having a quiet office with no distractions instead of an open plan office full of yahoos. That works as long as everyone is in the office together at least one day a week, preferably two. Which is a bit unfortunate for those thinking of reducing the amount of office space… unless you have five teams each in on a different day you’re going to see a net increase in space used (counting home office space).
On work-related travel vs internet-mediated discussions I’d have to say that my experiences have been pretty dismal. I work in IT and we’ve had the full gamut, from big-screen videoconferencing rooms down to instant message tools. They are better than nothing and we have typically ended up using Skype (with video), IM and email rather than any of the more expensive tools (albeit decent headsets are not especially cheap). Perhaps when video walls become readily available we can do the “conference room with a window dividing it into two parts” type meetings, but for now it’s just tedious technology hassles and small screens at low resolution.
Having that experience I would be really reluctant to be involved in a project where the team is in more than one city. Management can be done over long distances and limited travel fills the gaps, but getting a team to work together when they don’t meet up frequently is very difficult.
Robert; Firstly, I spoke to the Radio Frequency experts here about broadband radio frequency Internet vs fibre and they all fell about. One of them pointed out that to get within an order of magnitude to the capacity of fibre the rf network would have to run at over 100GHz with MW’s of power driving it. Be like living (dying) in a radar dish. Like I said maybe you can change the laws of physics easier (let me know when you get the perpetual motion apparatus going).
Secondly; There will never be enough bandwidth, Moz is right on the money about this. Give people more bandwidth and they will find uses for it -fast. I could use some of the stuff that Moz speaks of right now. I would subscribe to a fast modelling service for thermal electric and electronic design and 3D CAD right now, instead I have to buy various expensive packages for each of the functions that I use about 10% of my time. All you are doing is providing cover for the techno retards.
Huggy.
Moz: give it 10 years at the most… or maybe 8, just in time.
Your large, flexible, cheap displays are just around the corner. Trust me.
Seriously, though, this is going to revolutionise almost everything… over time. It’s the most forward thinking infrastructure investment I’ve ever seen, and not just me. If it gets delivered competently, then it will form the backbone of our economy. No shit.
Clicked onto Wordpress and it was all about dowqnloading Apache etc which I don’t know if I have on my computer or have the capacity for, not as simple as I thought. Clicked off, very confused.
moz @ 96 – I don’t see anything in the plan which would lead to a reduction in the cost of data transfers – AFAICT the backhaul costs for the ISPs will remain the same. So although larger remote backups will be possible over your connection its not going to be particularly affordable. One ISP has been estimating a monthly cost of around $100/month for a 100Mbit connection – I’d guess with a cap of around 50-80Gb/month. Even with a great cheap connection to customers ISPs will still have significant costs getting the data around Australia and overseas. btw my primary offsite backup system is going to be putting a wireless NAS device in the neighbour’s house
moz @ 101 – I’ve mostly worked from home for the last 2-3 years and before that although I went into an office most days the rest of the team was spread all around the world (US/Europe/Asia). I’ve found it can work well if you use the right tools and the right time for the project – a mixture of conference calls, IM, IRC, wikis, bug reporting systems. Sometimes it can work better than having everyone in the same place – eg complain about something one day and wake up the next to find it fixed. A face to face meetup once a year or so can be very valuable.
I’m not a fan of video conferencing though quite like some of the emerging virtual worlds tools – fairly long way to go though but the GFC cutbacks are pushing a lot of money into this area.
Andos @ 103 – even large non flexible screens are getting so cheap. 24″ LCD monitor for < $500. Am seriously considering getting a second monitor for the home office.
Paul: you don’t need to run the Wordpress software on your computer at all. That’s only required if you want to host your own blog on your own server, but only nerds like me, and high-bandwidth blogs like LP, need to do. Wordpress.com will host a blog for you.
All you need is to click on the “sign up now” button on wordpress.com, fill out the form, and start blogging.
It’s pretty straightforward.
Spot on Andos,
The consequences will be amazing. I am absolutely gobsmacked by the technological illiteracy and Neanderthal stance of the Libtards, one expects it from the Natards and representatives of the liberal arts, psychologists, professors of philosophy, literature, art, mass media, economists and the like but surely not from those who should have our economic health, our cultural vitality and our economic survival as their prime imperative.
Like all the dicks who opposed the building of the Eiffel tower, the introduction of the wireless telegraph and television. “Like who needs a tower when we can all stand on boxes”. No Fucking Idea.
Huggy
Chris@105: you only have one monitor? Two is the acceptable minimum in my experience. Albeit I dumped my third when I wanted more desk space but that’s I think because my main display is 30″.
Yeah, working with remote people has advantages, and as with many things if the system is set up from the start to support it it can work relatively well. But the measure of a system is not optimal operations, it’s how it copes when things go poorly. I find that a slightly-broken remote team is much worse off than a similarly situated team in one office. That seems to be true for a range of problems, making me skeptical of the whole concept.
Bulk data transfers should be cheapish within Australia, and hopefully much cheaper within a city. Or at least I’m assuming that part of the NBN will be a significant chunk of cable running at least Brisbane-Adelaide if not all the way to Perth. In NZ the rail company did that at one stage because they owned a suitable strip of land and it’s not a huge amount more expensive to lay a 100 fibre cable than a 10 fibre cable, as long as you only wire in fibres when you need them. I presume that Australia is set up to prevent them doing that here, but there’s got to be someone with the access and interest.
Moz @ 108 – I’m jealous! Just a 24″ monitor for the desktop and a laptop here. But I’m having enough issues with getting good posture that I’m considering getting an external monitor for the laptop.
Yes, with remote teams its important that people on the team understand how to communicate well and things can fall apart if its not done well. Mind you if there’s an incompetent person on the team I’d rather they not be in the same physical location as me.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think the NBN is really aimed at the main trunks between the cities (perhaps some work there for regional areas). There’s lots of fibre already. International traffic certainly won’t be any cheaper as a result of the plan. And as people get larger pipes ISP will have to upgrade their capacity as people will expect to be able to fully utilise their links.
Overall I think its a pretty good plan, I just don’t think its going to make access much cheaper except where people can avoid paying the Telstra tax.
Well, moz, there’s only one cable on the West coast, apparently, although my hasty Wikipedia search may be wrong. From Jakarta to Port Hedland, and it’s basically an emergency link.
It has to go West, though. Think of the votes to be won in WA! Seriously, leaving out a trans-Nullarbor link would be suicide for a Labor Government. Perth would also be an excellent place for a high capacity link to Singapore, which would only be reasonable if the backbone went to Perth.
I still say that if the Libduds try to stymie this initiative, the survivors of the Great Lynching will be slung out of parliament so fast, they won’t have time to lodge their dole form at the Canberra Centrelink office!!
I’m startled that so many people seem to believe that because something has been announced, therefore it will happen. This seems to fly in the face of virtually all recent experience concerning public works in Australia. If NSW had even half the projects announced by various Labor governments over the years the place would be unrecognisable.
Some kind of national broadband network will probably be in place by 2016, but I doubt it will resemble the announcement too closely, if at all. I would also be very confident the quoted $43 billion (already up from $10 billions two years ago) will comfortably top $100 billion.
I doubt the $100 billion figure (at least in 2009 dollars), Ken.
The revenue you’d need to generate from the network would be well in excess of what you could possibly hope to extract in usage fees.
“Leaving out a trans-Nullarbor link would be suicide for a Labor Government.”
There’s already a lot of Fiber running to Perth. NextGen, Telstra and Optus all have their own infrastructure, which it seems would be silly to duplicate. Aarnet also runs links from it’s two PoPs in Perth back to Singapore.
d
Thanks, Robert. Will try. Probably tomorrow.
I guess we wouldn’t be too concerned, Robert, if the $40 billion was going to be invested in nuclear power.
Alternatively, adrian (and Huggybunny), how about $40 billion spent on subsidizing renewable energy, with the goal of shutting down all Australian coal-fired power stations not using CCS by 2020?
You could get a pretty long way towards that goal for $40 billion.
Robert at least I acknowledge my figure of $100 billion is a guess; I wish the person who came up with $43 billion would be as honest.
Nobody will have a realistic clue about the true costs until they call tenders. If they are cost plus type contracts, we might never know.
Robert, I would absolutely love to see that sort of money poured into renewables. It would make a huge difference, and would also let us hit multiple options immediately and see which actually scales properly. Until we see GW versions of CSP/ hot rocks/ hot salt storage/ solar towers/ magic pixies pedalling bicycles we can’t really know which ones work. Planning to build at least one of each ASAP (and actually doing so) then reviewing the performance is the only wy to find out. We don’t really have the time to do that with current $5M/year level of funding…
Jane@111. Maybe Lib/Nat will split over this issue if you believe the following report and quote.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25306321-5013871,00.html
But Senator Joyce said the Rudd blueprint mirrored a Page Research Centre proposal released in 2005. “How could we disagree with something that is quite evidently our idea?” he said in a statement released jointly with NSW Senate colleague Fiona Nash. “This delivers a strategic infrastructure outcome.”
joe2 – it is pretty amusing that the Labor party in opposition criticised the last liberal government for proposing that the hard to get areas would be serviced with wireless broadband – and then when elected change their minds and do just that
Ken @ 118 – no doubt there will be big cost blowouts and I’m a bit skeptical that the infrastructure company will make a profit. But I’d rather they spend the money on broadband infrastructure than use it on more roads, stimulus payments or tax cuts.
Bill Gates – Who needs more than 64K of memory?
Minchin – who needs 100kb broadband ?
Robert – let them eat wireless
You keep really intelligent company old chap.
Nothing at all will happen about renewable until the icebergs hit the southern coast.
Give us fast broadband and we can watch our demise in glorious high definition broadband.
Huggy.
Huggy: to which I would point out the success of 115 volt AC power, netbooks, and 128kbps MP3s, and the market failure of Concorde, Laserdisc, and the Commodore Amiga.
People don’t always want the fastest, best, brightest solution. Sometimes, good enough and cheap is good enough.
Not necessarily claiming it to be the case here, but the assumption that people will automatically think the services that FTTP can provide are worth paying for is a pretty big fat assumption.
Robert, he problem is that your wireless solution will not work in cities or high density suburbs. As the number of users rises it rapidly degrades. Fibre to the node of your nuclear powered wifi network in your gated community will work fine but for the teeming masses in the cities it will not work at all. For the average suburbanite the speed will be pathetic – my network expert says it will be slower than ADSL during peak hours. On the other hand fibre to the user has almost no speed limitations at all and traffic congestion is not a problem.
Now a word about the importance of speed in communications: Moz has identified some of the low hanging fruit, he understates the importance. The changes will be enormous, no it’s not about TV or porn it’s about productivity.
Huggy.
who you callin’ big and fat?? but you can call me ‘pretty’ any time, honey
Robert Merkel wrote:
Nobody asked for copper to be run everywhere – it was the only viable solution.
I put it to you that, just based on the physical properties of fibre, the only viable solution that won’t require major work in the next 50 years is fibre optic.
And yes, it’s the Rolls Royce solution and Nick Minchin can fulminate all he likes, but he can’t refute the physics.
BTW Robert 115Vac power is rapidly being replaced by 230V in the US. It is now totally inadequate. They do it by introducing another “phase” of 115V. Thus they are able to run bigger stuff on 230V and smaller stuff on 115.
Huggy.
Robert, not much use in questioning the cost-effectiveness of the current proposals in the presence of an uncertain technological future, or whether the money (or a proportion of it) might have more important social uses, or whether it is equitable to ask (force) the average internet user in Australia with relatively basic needs to effectively subsidise Huggy’s techie needs – LP is a often a world where resources aren’t scarce, budget constraints don’t exist, and regressive policies are only bad when they favour things that LPs don’t like or care about.
I haven’t made my mind up about the policy. I of course like the idea of restructuring the telecommunications sector to address the mess created by Beazley et al, but I too wonder whether it is the most cost-effective option.
There is the continuous need to compare any big infrastructure project with the snowy river scheme – but not all “nation building projects” end up being either economic or socially useful. They each have to be assessed on their merits.
And on this proposal, not being an expert in the area, I’m not qualified to judge. I’d say that I will reserve judgement until the government publishes a rigorous, independent social cost benefit analysis of the current proposals. However, we all know that won’t happen.
KR set himself for this course years ago and we are about to pay for his ambitous goals. We will all just have to hope that his vision is the right one.
Evidence based policy? Kevin’s got a date with history!!
joe2 @120, this could be a viable scenario, particularly as it’s getting a thumbs up in regional areas. However, I also think there will be plenty of grumbling over being stuck with an inferior 12mps for the horrendously expensive satellite and wireless options or even worse dial-up because a town has less than 1,000 inhabitants. They may have to re-think.
I’m wondering which way Fielding and Xenophon will jump when they get to vote on it. Frankly, I don’t think they’ll dare to give it the thumbs down, because the voters will likely crucify them.
Reading Malvolio’s desperate rabbiting in the link you provided made me laugh. I’d like to know why this clown thinks super fast to broadband is unpopular and inferior to the crap now on offer. The Libduds just get further and further out of touch with what people want. He has proved a real dud, and I still have a sneaking suspicion that he’s really an ALP mole sent in to wreak havoc on the Libduds.
Robert
90% of what? Homes eh rental etc…this is 18% Mr T poll dancing pre budget jiggery poky; of course we await the rules & regs post budget; meanwhile…
I note Singtel Optus are cock a hoop as any LKY 1 party 1 state slipper would be; but lets see the detail first and if the norty Telstra (and all those mumsndadsnfamilies investors) regulation ramp it up trade off begins to unravel as the ‘economy’ recovers.
It seems that most of the conservatives have been blindsided by this announcement. The best they can come up with is blather about how wireless broadband would be sufficient. Aside from the fact that this position reveals for all to see their total ignorance of basic physics and thermodynamics (yes thermodynamics) it also reveals the myopic vision of the true conservative. There is to be no change. All information must be passed through the Platonic filter of the high academic elite. We are to be preached to via the pulpit of the elite, the high priests will speak to the unwashed masses through the narrow tubes of their own prejudice.
That the tubes should be made wide enough to allow the grubby proletariat access to all the tools and services that are now the province of the academic elite is an unthinkable situation.
The smell of threatened privilege is wafting across the land.
The hairy palmed wannabe professors we are going to have to learn to share – get it?
Huggy
Paul Burns @ #115,
from what you wrote earlier I suspect you may have just typed “wordpress” into a search engine and ended up at wordpress.org, which involves downloading the core files to host on a server that you pay for via a web hosting service. You don’t want that.
The free blog service at wordpress.com is just a simple sign up service, with all the files hosted on their servers. This is the one you want to check out. It’s easy.
Thanks, yigtog. Have signed up. Now waiting to hear from them.
RuddNet by swap, not cash?
Optus may swap fibre-optics for broadband stake
Nor is Optus likely to be the only one. As Mr Krishnapillai (Optus) says:
In other words, a great deal of RuddNet’s basic delivery system – fibre-optic cabling & satellites – and established customer bases are already in place, currently owned by Telstra, Optus and other telcos. If they & the government are prepared to negotiate a fair, fast “swap my infrastructure for a comparable stake in RuddNet Pty Ltd”, both proposed cost & delivery roll out time have been greatly overstated. In fact, much of it will be in place before the next election.
As for monthly cost … When Internet was a pup, I paid $750 py for my initial “uncapped” dial-up private internet connection; by 2003 $49.99 pm; later $24. Would I pay $100-200 to access all FTTH offers, inc the world’s TV on my computer (no need for fancy TV sets, “cable TV”, movie hire, newspapers etc etc etc)? Dumb question!
Labor Outsider: I’m reading Paul Krugman’s “The Return of Depression Economics”. It’s a revised edition just put out by Penguin. As is my habit with books of this kind, I turned to the last chapeter when I got about 50 pages in. That chapter is one of the best things I’ve read on the economic mess we’re in.
You seem to me like a thoughtful, intellegent sort of person but your economics seem stuck in the ’80s and ’90s. I’d really encourage you to grab a copy.
P.S. I hope that didn’t sound smug or insulting – it really wasn’t meant to (I’m as much a dolt on economics as the next person). I genuinely hope you and everyone at LP grabs a copy.
The only thing that is likely to get us out of the deep trouble we’re in is if governments fill the gap in private demand. Problem is, as Krugman writes, the people who know better and should be pushing wholeheartedly for maintaining aggregate demand lack conviction.
25,000 jobs can provide a lot of stimulus to the economy. And as with the other public works, the spending is about as evenly spread across the country as you can get.
Robert, the very premise is absurd, as is the notion that web traffic will remain constant. And of all people who should know better than to scaremonger or rain in the parade, Malcolm “OzEmail” Turnbull is it. More.
Lemme at those tools and services; I’ll buy the wannabes some razors and suck up the stench of threatened privilege. Ahhh! like the odour of a bbq in full flight on a lazy Saturday arvo.
DeeCee, I’ll second and third that.
Ginja – that is pretty condescending! I am a professional economist that is already well aware Krugman’s views on the role for government at the present economic juncture. You have missed the point of what I said. Even if we take as given that government needs to fill some of the hole in private demand, that does not mean that long-term infrastructure projects should proceed without cost-benefit tests. Projects have to be assessed on a case by case basis. This one might pass such a test and it might not – but you can’t arrive at a conclusion by simply counting up the jobs it will supposedly create. You also have to be careful about making simplistic analogies between the current economic situation in the US and Australia, or the US and anywhere else for that matter. Krugman may be a brilliant man, but he is not the font of all wisdom on matters economic. You will get a more nuanced perspective if you read him with a more critical eye.
Fair point, Labor Outsider – it’s hard not to sound condescending or pompous even when blogging.
I just finished “The Return of Depression Economics” – brilliant and terrifying read. Have you read it? Be honest.
True, Krugman’s fallible like the rest of us, and I’ve heard people dismiss Krugman – though I’ve yet to pin down the reasons why. I understand the Right’s reasons – they started attacking him once he became an unabashed liberal, even though, awkwardly, some right-wing intellectuals once praised him. But what are your reasons?
I often wonder how much the centre-Left really reads the centre-Left. Perhaps it’s capitalism imploding around us, but lately I’ve found myself reading all those dusty old secondhand John Kenneth Galbraiths I bought years ago but never got around to reading. After all, I had the gist of Galbraith nailed down, so why bother? I have the sense that many on our side don’t bother to properly read the likes of Krugman or Galbraith, that they’ve been subtly influenced by the Right’s tactic of automatically dismissing anyone not on the Right as “discredited”.
The thing that impresses me about Krugman is that he was once considered a moderate (read neoliberal-ish) and seems to have changed his views on the basis of evidence.
And like Galbraith, is Krugman now dismissed because he’s admired by plebs like me and can write an intelligible sentence?
I just hope it comes to fruition. I’m with Bigpond paying $60pm for a lousy 256/64kb 12GB DSL liberty plan and lately in the mail, they want me to grab a NextG modem (wireless) with faster speeds and a limit of 5GB plus extra if I go over for a similar price.
This is what Telstra was going to roll out instead of a decent NBN plan, what a laughing stock.
If I have a faster speed, I need a higher download limit, it is inevitable as I will be able to peruse video content much faster.
Indeed the Page Research Centre did propose something similar, as I blogged on the issue when I ran one and the original Age article that mentions it can be found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/03/18/1111086011839.html
A second comment caught in spam filter.
There are a few of the rather remarkable consequences of a fully implemented fibre to the home service.
1. The end of the microsoft pc software business (hooray)
2. No need for any resident software on mac or pc except for the operating system
3. Access to supercomputers that are formed by networking subscribing computers
4. Access to computationally intensive applications such as powerful modelling programs and 3D CAD for any-one who needs it at vastly reduced cost
5. The end of broadcast TV
6. The democratisation of the media
7. The complete end of the copper wire telephone network
8. The complete integration of electricity systems into the home.
The list goes on and on. In short a total revolution that cannot ever be supported by “broadband”. Well the only way you could do it would be to install waveguides to every home.(Sort of like fibre optics except slower and more costly). Oh and did I mention that a National system of broadband service with the same speed and capacity as fibre optics would require about 2 GW of extra power stations to be built?
Huggy.
I don’t think you’re the common case for how much people are willing to pay for an internet connection. Remember content will in most cases be an additional cost unless you’re willing to break copyright. Good to see in the news that Labor are looking at the cost of international data (and a bit at interstate data as well) – high speed connections are not much use if you can’t afford to use them.
Huggybunny @ 144 – agreed that software as a service is the way we’re heading. With a good enough network most people who just want a web browser and a word processor may not even need much of an OS at home – back to dumb terminals again
I’m getting increasingly skeptical over the costs though – but hey if the government wants to hugely subsidise something I like to use who am I to complain 
Yeah, but what cap are they going to stick on this? 50GB-80GB sounds like a lot at first, but not when you consider it as a replacement for TV, radio etc. You can get uncapped internet at a reasonable price in most other countries but in Australia we have to have these piddling little caps and we’ll probably still have them with RuddNet.