In Friday’s edition of the Australian Financial Review there is an article entitled Telco players round on Abbott.
The Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association (AMTA) which includes Testra, Optus and Vodafone, has writtem to the three amigos, Abbott, Robb and Tony Smith asking them to clarify their plans for the mobile phone spectrum. It seems they let slip that they were planning to use some of the mobile spectrum to deliver wireless broadband.
This spectrum is worth billions of dollars and is used for things like aircraft navigation as well as mobile phones. Apparently Robb and Smith were unable to answer questions on this matter at the launch. What a surprise!
Furthermore, business leaders at the Trans-Tasman Business Circle forum in Sydney openly attacked the policy. Bank of Queensland’s David Liddy:
“I don’t think we can afford to compromise if Australia wants to establish itself as a leading financial centre in this part of the world.”
Telecom New Zealand director and Sky Entertainment Group chairman Rod McGeoch:
“I just can’t believe… the opposition could have settled for a 12 megabits per second outcome.
“What’s happened…is an unbelievable abrogation of consistency of policy on access to infrastructure.”
For earlier discussion on LP see here and Kim’s Quick links post.
PS I couldn’t resist picking up on Julia Gillard’s pronunciation of Mr Abbott’s name. I think technically she lacks mastery of the glottal stop.
I heard some moron talking yesterday about the “private sector’ providing broad-band “solutions” through “market mechanisms”, “wireless” and all the rest of the fluff.
How did the “private sector” go with the railways? Er bankrupt. The Snowy (What??).
The power supply network? Er we bailed them out fixed it all up and sold it back at a huge discount. Water, Sewerage, the road network ? There has never been a successful “private sector” driven innovative infrastructure program. Look to the 19th century and the screams of the Capitalists and middle classes when they introduced public sanitation and water supply programs. Same arguments I hear from some denizens of this site when faced with FTTH. Basically that it too good for the unwashed proletarians and who cares if they get Cholera and die, us middle class will be OK in our gated communities. (Oh sorry that was the 19th century mantra)
Broadband FTTH will totally transform our society, mostly for the good.
Who should oppose it?
Shopping centre owners
Microsoft
Video stores
“Free” to air TV networks
Cable TV owners
Newspapers
Christians
Motor vehicle manufacturers
Garages
Petrol stations
Public Transport owners
Used car salesmen
Traffic policemen
Airlines
Department stores without a net merchandise division
Car park owners
Thousands more……
Who should support it?
Any-one with a shred of scientific understanding and a modicum of history and a socially progressive outook
I am amazed to see otherwise intelligent commentators oppose FTTH; they try to pretend that wireless will do the same thing and thus expose the awful yawning chasm in their understanding of basic physical principles. Listen guys CP Snow never said that you had to stay on the side of total scientific illiteracy. Abandon the dark side and come over to the light.
Huggy
Here’s a good one from Lord Sedgwick of Strathmore: “I’m not a tech-head, but we’re offering 12 meatybites and up“! (Here’s a larger version – I’m going to print it out to pin up in my workplace on Monday!)
Link what Abbot is saying about national broadband with his promise to stop the computer to school program as soon as he gets into power and we are getting the image of a man who just doesn’t understand the 21st century. It is the connection between these two positions that are so frightening.
An affordable high speed wireless network is going to be very important in the future – though it requires a good fibre network backbone. I wouldn’t leave it to the major telcos though – they have a major incentive not to roll out decent wireless because it would allow for widepsread use of voip which is a lot cheaper than mobile voice calls.
I think the government should investigate reserving spectrum for a public mesh network. There may be some resistance because it’d be rather hard to control and regulate, but has the potential to be a huge game changer. Cheap, high speed access over a large area whether you’re at home, on the bus/train, walking to the shops etc. And I think it something that could be fairly easily built on top of the NBN.
This article wireless greed (ZDNET) is a fabulous read for those who like comparative technical discussion of the proposals of the two parties.
Fran @ 5 – the article makes a good point that wireless (especially wifi) is complementary to fixed broadband, not a replacement. With lots of fibre nodes being rolled out into the suburbs though it’d be great start to have a WAP installed on each node for public use.
For the first time, telco policy is seen as a prism through which to view wider Liberal incompetence. People seem to give telco the benefit of the doubt, which only privileges companies because there is no non-corporate advocacy for the telco realm.
An interesting article….for semi-tech heads
http://www.zdnet.com.au/election-rant-1-wireless-greed-339305187.htm
Edited by Huggy: note “most of the educated opposed it”
It is my contention that the impact of a really fast FFTH network will be similar to the impact upon human health and well-being that accompanied proper water and refuse infrastructure
Huggy
I imagine the Telcos aren’t the only business folk who are unhappy with the current Liberal leadership. More than a few of TA’s policies are anathema to business. Construction companies know Labor’s stimulus has kept them afloat and high-tech companies know they need fast broadband. This isn’t to say that Labor is now the party of big business, but business people aren’t idiots. I’ve seen drunken sailors with better claims to being sensible economic managers than the Liberal Party at present.
Big business will also be unhappy with Abbott for igniting a debate on population size and then letting it get out of control.
Tell me though HB — what was the business case for sewerage?
I mean, would people really use the service? How would this increase profits? Surely it would have been just as good to have trucks with open trays drive around and have people dump their sewage from windows? Wasn’t this just an excuse to impose taxes on the poor and to drive the country into massive debt? Wasn’t this just a wasteful subsidy? Damnable socialists!
The lines write themselves, don’t they? And they are just as full of shit when uttered now.
I was about to shut down the computer when I thought I’d have a quick look at this post. I became rivetted when I came to the “glottal stop”. As a child the glottal stop was drummed into us unceasingly (as was pronunciation of words like “vulnerable” – now corrupted to “vunerable” along with many others). It was a long time before I realised the importance of listening to what was being said, rather than how it was said. Content, context and inflexion is king (or queen as the case may be) in conveying meaning not the correct use of a glottal stop. Although I must say I do have some pride in my ability to clearly articulate in speech what I’m saying – even though this sometimes deserts me on the internet.
Fran, I guess the business case for sewerage was the need to keep workers alive and to grow the population. Prior to proper sanitation in the 19th century the infant mortality was about 90% in many cities.
It totally astonishes me that otherwise moderately intelligent people cannot see the massive benefits that will accrue from a serious broadband rollout.
The stuff about wireless sufficing is total bullshit and smart businesspersons and tech heads know this.
The wireless freaks simply do not know what they are about or they are lying. They would have had us carting our shit in hand trolleys down main street and into the nearest river 150 years ago. (Actually that rather sums up the mad monks position)
Huggy
I think that a significant part of the business case for proper sewers – in the UK at least – was the Great Stink, which grievously affected the MPs of the day.
I must admit that when I started thinking about this, I had assumed that the Prince Consort’s death due to (allegedly) typhoid was closely associated with the Great Stink. Turns out it wasn’t – I was out by four years or so.
That said, I must say that the Beeb’s Seven Wonders of the Industrial World is one of the stellar bits of TV of the last decade plus.
helllllllllllllllppp mods sorry so sorry
[That better, Fiona?]
$43 billion sounds like a very big number, but consider this. First, the annual sales of Telstra are $25 billion.
Secondly, Telstra has spent, I’m informed, $20 billion on capex in the last 5 years. Lord knows what on becasue while they were doing that profits went down by 12%.
The NBN could be the making of Telstra as a company. They get $11bn for rental of their infrastructure while NBN is being rolled out and they get to act like a proper service company in a market that will be growing quite dynamically.
I hope all those mum and dad shareholders remember who sold them Telstra as the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Fiona @ 15, your second link doesn’t work. Is this what you were after?
Brian, this is what I was trying to link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/seven_wonders_01.shtml
and thank you.
Oh dear, Broadband Stamps! Don’t let the Tories know about that one. They’ll love it.
Oh Helen, let me change hankies first!
Brian – the NBN/Telstra deal has the potential to both save Telstra and save us from Telstra
Chris, that’s exactly right.
Good one, Helen!
Fiona, I think I’ve fixed it @ 15 now. But in my first attempt I inserted it where you had the first link. So now you’d better check the first link to see what I put back was what came out.
Cheers.
But they’re not mutually exclusive. They’re not even separable. (This is much more true in writing than it is in speech but I’m guessing you’re talking about both.)
Depends. I have a very hard time understanding what anyone under 20 is saying, not because I don’t follow the meaning but because I can’t hear the words: they appear to have eschewed vowels. Thy ll tlk wth thr mths sht.
I think in the case of Mr Rabbit the problem is Gillard’s drawl — she tends to draw out a lot of the draw-outable consonants and the terminal ‘r’ is a common one. Someone with a more clipped accent could forgo the glottal stop without (quite) saying ‘Mister Rabbit’.
Brian @23, thank you – perfick.
PC @ 24, re Ms Gillard’s drawl, you are spot on. Not sure whether I’ve already mentioned this elsewhere, but I have noticed for months now that quite a few journoes have also been perilously close to lapinising Our Tones…
Peter Martin has posted in strong disagreement with the need for the NBN – well certainly its current form.
I found his reasoning a bit unformed – prone to the “its only going to offer better youtube perving” view of things. Apart from offering tertiary industries sector in Australia the first significant opportunity to engage in the global economy in REAL TIME, it is, as other people have commented, THE infrastructure that is appropriate to our economy and technological fit now. Marking NBN supporters as hollow callous Rand people is rather baffling. I thought he misunderstood the application of opportunity cost in this context.
Helen@20: That’s appalling! No market incentives for telcos to cheapen and/or improve their services; instead it’s a bribe for consumers to use their idea of broadband. To wit: ‘enough bytes to surf the Web and send e-mails to family members.’ It’s FAIL on so many levels!
Fortunately, I doubt it would get any traction in Oz – especially in rural seats. So many people can’t get broadband for love or money in the bush. What use giving folk unusable vouchers? It’s just insulting.
Bernice @ 26, I think the probelem is that with a paradigm shift you can’t do a cost-benefit analysis. We should take some confort in the 6-7% return found by the study, which I gather was based on known knowns only.
The alternative is to sit back and watch world’s best practice to some other country. And then become late adaptors.
Martin often goes one out on issues and he’s not always right.
You are right, of course, PC. It is possible to finish “mister” and begin the “a” sound without the silent consonantal explosion of a glottal “a”, if that’s a proper way of explaining it. It’s 50 years, would you believe, since I studied phonetics.
Just caught Mr Rabbit on Insiders this morning. One of the things that struck me was this: In the same conversation where he decried spending $43bn on NBN once, he was OK with spending $4.4bn per annum (and rising) on PPL forever. Of course, this glaring inconsistency went unchallenged. Bizarrely, he also got away with double counting on NBN. He said it would cost $5000 per household. Even as a ready reckoner, this is obviously wrong because the cost is spread across households AND businesses, including those whose customers are outside Australia. This investment (the $43bn)(and the recurrent service costs) will be recovered ultimately by user charges, yet Rabbit tried to say that each household would pay %4000 and then have to pay to use it. This guy really is innumerate. Again, unchallenged by the talking heads.
On the slightly amusing side, Rabbit, referring to optical fibre said he wasn’t sure if Australia should follow a “high fibre path”. Presumably he thinks the NBN is based on some sort of consumable roughage. Maybe he thinks NBN stands for National Broadbran Network.
It was the unfairly derided Whitlam who got the Western suburbs of Sydney sewered – Perhaps someone should ask TC whether he thought this was another example of Labor wasting money on commercially unsound activities that did nothing except improve the quality of life of the working classes. Preferably in front of a Western suburbs audience.
Yes, Fran, the ignorance of Abbott and his interrogators was depressing. How can Abbott get away with saying the the 10 times increase in speed is incredulous when the very nature of the thing is that it is scalable?
Another feature of the plan that escapes notice is that NBN earns money from the time it connects the first customer. It isn’t a case of rolling the whole thing out and then waiting for the customers to come.
The proponents of the NBN have a serious problem. There are a lot of vested interests who will temporarily lose income. They cannot really share the prospects for the NBN or there will be a mad panic in certain circles.
A good example from recent history is the film based photographic market. If you had a photo-development business you either brought in printers etc or you went out of business altogether, even after you installed printers for digital images you were in trouble yet, because most of the images are circulated on the internet, and low cost photo printers for the home emerged.
Multiply this example by many thousands and you begin to get an idea of the impact of the NBN – see my totally incomplete list at 1 above.
A really fast low latency FTTH (and business) will totally transform our working life , our social life and our political life.
That is the prospect that terrifies the reactionaries.
Those reactionaries who wish to appear “progressive” proffer wireless as an “alternative”, it is no such thing, they should go off and learn a some basic physics and then recant gracefully.
Huggy
Reading this thread reminds me so, so much of the claims that were being breathlessly made about the original moves to put fibre in as the backbone in the mid to late 1990s. “It’s going to transform our lives”, “The internet is the solution to all our problems”. “If we just do this, then the internet gets a lot faster”.
Sorry, guys – it might be scalable, but that is only in raw speed. Our ability to consume what is coming down that pipe is not.
Why does it really matter if the ping speeds from the US drop from 250 to 200 (in WA – the improvement will be even more marginal in the East)? How can it possibly help if that movie we want to see in HD takes 30 seconds or 30 minutes to download? It’s a 2 hour movie.
.
As an example – Huggy, for the majority of us with good DSL access how, exactly, is a (slightly) lower latency and massively increased bandwidth going to “…totally transform our working life , our social life and our political life”?
I can (and do) already use video conferencing from home on my existing connection. I can download really big files more than quickly enough. Youtube streams well. I run an email server from here, along with a website. How is this going to be improved by having a gigabit connection to my home? Seriously?
As I have said before, there are some problems with the existing infrastructure. These need to be dealt with – and fairly quickly. The pair gain systems need to be replaced. Rural areas need improved access to broadband. No argument.
The question then becomes – how is this going to be done quickly? Tell all of the participants in the market that their existing infrastructure will all be throw-away technology in the not too distant future? Great way to encourage investment right now, isn’t it? While this roll-out is happening, it means that most improvements to the current system will be put on hold.
This system will cost an awful lot – no matter how funded. If we all take it up then it is still very expensive (even if this is the first IT project I have ever seen come in on budget). If most of us look at the price and baulk, deciding to stay with a perfectly serviceable 8 to 24mbps connection (or, in some areas 100mbps cable), then it gets even more expensive for the rest.
I can’t see myself as a luddite, but this is totally mad. Really. If you have to spend the money, do it helping people that need it. I don’t need to get that movie that fast – I can’t watch a movie in 30 seconds.
Andrew,
The internet at present can do all the things you list and at a respectable pace. No argument. However your position is simply that of the “faster porn-so what school”.
Let me list some of the attributes of really fast high density data access.
1. No need for any but basic software on the accessing computer.
2. Really powerful tools at the supercomputer level will be available to any-one a low cost on a by the hour basis
3. The ability to drive machines of all types in real time from any-where.
4. The university will be totally transformed from a place of learning to a site for learning where students most likely follow the (5) model below.
5. Most office workers will stay home or attend a linked site that is located within their community. This will become the standard model.The day of the large central office in the CBD will end.
6. In general there will be no need at all for centralized workplaces, even mine machinery will be operated from off site (trials of this are underway right now).
8. Supermarkets and department stores will vanish to be replaced by advanced ebay type setups with 3D product display.
I could go on but I think you might be getting the picture by now.
Huggy
I’m still breathless with admiration of Fiona Reynolds’ comment at #25 and her (I assume) newly minted transitive verb ‘to lapinise’, which I assume means ‘to confer rabbitude upon’.
Respect.
Praise from PC is praise indeed. Thank you. Further, you have divined its definition with exquisite precision.
huggy,
1. Software as a service works now, over DSL. I use it on occasion, but as Office is not one of them I don’t use it a lot. It does work now. Google Apps anyone?
2. I do not need to use a supercomputer currently, so I do not use one. I suspect that the overwhelming majority of Australians are in the same boat. If I wanted to, though – Google lets me do it over even dialup connection. Pair gain would do there.
3. I maintain my parent’s computer (using teamviewer) in the UK now. Is that what you mean? The problem here is latency, something that even a petabit connection to the home would not be able to fix.
4. How is this different from existing DSL / cable?
5. I have heard that so many times. People still want and need the interaction to work best. Working from home works for a few, not most. Again, though, why is DSL not good enough for this? Is it really worth $43bn plus to find out?
6. Trials are working. Correct. How will getting everyone to pay for 1Gbps help?
8. I already shop over the web – and I prefer to go to the supermarket or, better, the local markets to see, feel and smell the food. Smell-o-vision does not (yet) exist over the web.
.
To be even more clear, I believe much of this will be useful and I think that this sort of broadband will happen – but to spend huge amounts of money to put in the ground fibre that will spend the vast majority of its time dark right now seems, to me at least, to be a huge waste. If you are determined to waste money, I am sure we could find better looking waste than digging trenches everywhere.
To throw away our current, perfectly serviceable system and to effectively stop any further investment in it while we wait for a government system rollout seems even less sensible to me.
Fiona,
to the praise offered by PC, may I add mine for your endorsement:
” I must say that the Beeb’s Seven Wonders of the Industrial World is one of the stellar bits of TV of the last decade plus.”
My daughter gave me the DVD last Christmas. It’s excellent.
Huggybunny & Andrew,
I’ll interrupt with my 2c:
1 & 2 – Software as a service is already here, and for most people ADSL2+ speeds are more than sufficient. With 100Mbs/Gigabit speeds its possible we’ll be able to do more – eg using remote servers for processing videos is one example
However, (and these point applies to many of Huggybunny’s other ideas
- the upstream speed for the NBN seems to be set at 8Mbs at the moment – ISPs are not offering symmetric links. I don’t know if this is a physical limitation or cost limitation for the NBN/ISPs. 8Mb up is way better than 1Mb up from ADSL and will allow for more remote services, but its still a real limit on what applications an even 1Gb link can be used for.
- cost of bandwidth. Assuming 50c/gigabyte (which is pretty cheap – probably more like $1/Gig), a 100Mb/s link running at full speed will cost you at the moment at least 30c/minute in data. A 1Gb/s link will cost you about $3/min running fullspeeed. Bandwidth is only going to get cheaper, but its still an important consideration for high bandwidth applications.
4 & 5 – I work from home fulltime and have been involved with remote training/online programs. IMO at the moment the real barriers are normally not bandwidth (as long as people have decent bandwidth). Latency can be a real problem, though often dominated by factors that are not going to be be fixed by the NBN – eg going large distances. The social issues – wanting to be in the same physical space as fellow workers – is the main reason that people who can work from home but don’t do it fulltime – at least amongst people I know.
8 – I think the NBN speeds will help, but as Andrew points out there are other limitations. FWIW I do the vast majority of of my shopping/payments now online (groceries, fruit & veg, electronics). All on a ~8Mb/s ADSL 2+ link. Bigger images, even immersive 3D (I’ve worked on those) would be an improvement, but there’s bigger blockers than bandwidth for them to be game changers at the moment.
Not mentioned by Huggybunny but probably quite important is that its going to be absolute torrent heaven for a huge number of people to have much bigger up/down pipes. Hopefully the movie/tv/music/book industry people will keep their lawyers away – they have a lot to lose.
Andrew R@38 #2:
I use a supercomputer when I do banking stuff online. True, it’s mediated before I get to the site and the security is tight enough to keep lugs like me out, but it still qualifies and may be an indication of the sort of thing fowk talk about when they talk about supercomputers.
Andrew E,
The “supercomputer” you are probably using is either a series of small unix boxes or one of the old IBM or HP “big iron” boxes that many banks still use for their core banking systems. These are not supercomputers as they do not need the processing capacity that those have. They are basically big database boxes, just keeping track of numbers.
In any case, you can use those over dial up, as many of us used to do. The only call for a big pipe to use those is if you really want to see the advertising (in adobe flash) that comes with them at really high speed.
Again – if you want a supercomputer to do the work for you all you need to do is upload the program and set it to work. Unless you have multi-gigabyte databases at home that you really want to have processed on another computer there is no need for a gigabit connection.
All of these uses are very specialised – the chances that an average punter is going to be doing this is close to, if not actually, zero.
Andrew Chris,
I agree about the need for social interaction, that is why my model posits a large number of geographically dispersed groups working together, as in different sections of a large office except that they could be hundreds of miles apart.
The arguments you are advancing are akin to the opposition to water reticulation.
In Jakarta they deliver household water in galvanized cans on hand trolleys.
Let me tell you that the residents really like the idea of reticulated water.
You guys can keep your hand trolly.
Huggy
Lucky you, Ambigulous @39. My daughter hightailed to Perth with the household copy – giving the specious excuse that, as an engineering student, she needed it more than I did.
Daughters, eh?
huggybunny @ 43 – Whilst I disagree with some of what you’re saying are the benefits of the NBN – eg by social interaction its often members of your immediate working team you want interaction with, not random people. For the more practical big near term benefits of the NBN you might want to actually look in another direction – 93% of households having an always-on internet connection.
Just for the moment suppose that the government threw in a few more dollars and paid for everyone household to have a box which provided an always on internet connection that the householder did not have direct access to but was low bandwidth (64kb/s would be ample) which used the NBN infrastructure.
For starters you could get rid of nearly all the meter readers wandering our streets. The meters could just upload consumption data to the suppliers. You can do demand based pricing for households for utilities; you can have smart devices which alter consumption based on cost/demand. Eg turn on your dishwasher in the evening and it starts its work when electricity reaches a low price you’re willing to pay (say 2am).
Chris,
That could easily be done without the NBN. It happens throughout much of Europe now.
For a start, paying meter readers is a lot less expensive than $43bn.
.
Huggy,
As someone who grew up in Jakarta in the 1970s I can tell you that they had piped water then. Not entirely safe, but it was there. Kalau minum air itu akankah saudara sakit.
If you are trying to equate DSL with a hand trolly [sic] then I suggest you may be running out of worthwhile arguments.
Andrew @ 47 – I think there’s a significant level of difference to what you can do when a lot of people have always-on internet access – and in truth many turn it off when its not being used – and when everyone (well 93% of the population) has it and you can assume its on. I agree its not worth $43bn dollars just for smart meter readers and smart appliances. But the benefits are going to be lots of small things rather than one big thing. I’ve no idea if they’ll add up to the cost, though from a selfish point of view I know I’ll get money’s worth out of it.
Chris, most of the stuff about smart metering that you mention is already being trialled all over the world. Does not need broadband. Neither does remote meter reading, in fact in some jurisdictions they read wireless meters by driving a van down the street.
The point is that a properly implemented fiber optic network is capable of transitting vast amounts of data in a very short time. It will take time to grow and time to build all the new server farms,time to write all the new software and time to adapt.
What we will see will be a revolution in the way we live our lives. Think the advent of the motor vehicle and public transport. The effects of FTTH will be just as far reaching.
Like any change it will have potential downsides (1984 type scenarios), just as roads make car accidents inevitable until we get really smart cars..
I could go on but I have been overcome by optimistic Utopian stupidity.
Hugg
Chris,
What is DSL, other than “always-on internet access”? Very few people actually turn their router off when they are not using it. If you really want to do that, again (and for an awful lot less than $43bn) you could simply hand out basic modem routers to those who do not have one and want to take advantage of the timed payment scheme.
The situation is getting silly (IMHO) if you are spruiking a huge amount of expenditure on the basis of some unknown possible future benefits that may or may not occur but could also be delivered today for a lot less expense. You may get your money’s worth out of it, but will you also get everyone else’s money out of it?
Andrew,
Not all of Jakarta. You make my point exactly , thanks.
Summary
Jakarta’s water supply system is highly fragmented. As documented in this report, the formal water supply system reaches less than 50% of the city’s inhabitants, and is spatially concentrated in higher income areas of the city. The majority of Jakarta’s residents make use of a variety of different water sources– bottled water, vendor water, shallow and deep wells, public hydrants, network connections – to meet their daily water needs (Bakker 2003b), often relying exclusively on water abstracted and delivered outside of the network (Bakker forthcoming, Surjadi et al 1994, McGranahan et al 2001). Indeed, a significant proportion of households with connections to the networked water supply system continue to rely primarily upon other sources of water supply given low water quality and intermittent network pressure, and non-networked (or so-called ‘informal’) water services thrive in areas where networked connections are available (Susantono, Bakker).
http://waterwiki.net/index.php/Disconnected:_Poverty,_Water_Supply_and_Development_in_Jakarta,_Indonesia
Huggybunny said:
I thought you were pushing for people to do less driving
And the van definitely doesn’t push real time pricing/demand data back to the houses so appliances can make intelligent decisions on how much power they should be using.
Andrew – I know a few people who turn off their adsl modems. Unless you run voip there’s not much reason to leave it on. As I mentioned before I think there’s a big difference between a lot of people having always-on, and everyone having it. And I’d see this as out-of-band from someone’s ISP connection – it doesn’t matter if people turn off their modem or fail to pay their ISP bill, misconfigure their router etc, its always on with pretty much the same reliability as having power.
Although I pay quite a bit of tax, I don’t pay for everyones. Whether they get they’re money’s worth out of the scheme is a different matter…. Its pretty much a done deal (Labor is in easy) so might as well look at the bright side! Lets hope Conroy doesn’t filter the NBN to death.
As an aside – did anyone else see the TV footage with Gillard/Conroy turning the NBN on in Tassie with a big blue button? I burst out laughing when I saw that!
Huggy,
You are welcome. I note, though, that the waterwiki does not show how DSL is like a hand trolly. Perhaps I am just not looking in the correct area. Do you have a link for that?
To me, DSL (and cable) have a lot more to do with high pressure, clean piped water, with the NBN being the equivalent of building a private dam and meter think pipe for everyone. Possible, but way over-engineered.
I’m sure, though, that you have a link to make your point.
.
Chris,
The point I was making is that, whether we choose to or not, we will all be paying for those who choose to get it. At the likely cost I can assure you I will not be one of them, even though I am a heavy internet user and run a server at home. Cable works fine for me.
To me it is just a pity for the lower socio-economic groups that this new piece of middle and upper class welfare will hurt them. Still – many here seem happy with that.
Sorry – should be meter-thick pipe.
Andrew, I think people are a bit tired of going over the same old.
I’m hoping to do one more post on the issue in the next day or so, but just a quick comment on the costs.
Mister Rabbit has been saying that the NBN will cost $5000 a family. If you take $43 billion and 10 million households, I think it’s actually $4300. That’s over 8 years, which on the back of my envelope works out as $10.30 per week or so per household on average (not per person or per taxpayer).
The trick that once it’s done, it’s done. Then it becomes easy to keep up with the rest of the world. The other way you are dealing with an ungodly mix, where people will periodically need to buy a new reception box, and there are always going to be limitations on the spectrum available.
People will be able to set up any kind of business anywhere, subject to local planning laws and not becoming a nuisance to neighbours. With a decarbonised grid and electric cars, you can save on very costly urban consolidation which would otherwise be needed to attain net zero emissions.
There’s a pretty good summary of the bandwidth available (currently) on the NBN here:
http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/cornered/41129-nbns-1gbps-not-news-just-clarification
Basically they run 2.4Gb/s to the node, and then individual fibre to the homes from there. So theoretically you’d actually be able to get 2.4Gb/s to the home, though the NBN set as an administrative limit now of 1Gb/s (formerly 100Mb/s) as to what ISPs are allowed to offer.
However from the node its a shared 2.4Gb/s pipe. With the former 100Mb/s link you’d need at least 24 homes pulling 100Mb/s before you saw a lower rate. I don’t know how many homes they connect to each node but perhaps 100Mb/s was chosen so the 2.4Gb/s pipe could never saturate. More likely they used some level of overcommit. With a 1Gb/s limit it’s obviously much easier to saturate the 2.4Gb/s pipe, but I would guess would still be rather rare.
Anyway in the article they right call for both the Libs and Labor to be clear about what are peak capacities and what are guaranteed. Wireless would probably have more problems under heavy load (I think).
Brian said:
Or put another way, assuming Australia’s population stays at 22m for the next 8 years, it works out to $0.66 per person per day. I’d be pretty happy if that’s all our 22million people were spending getting drunk or getting obese.
Of course, this assumes the network stays as a public asset and stops delivering after 8 years, rather than being fully rolled out. In fact, the network will deliver the bulk of its benefits over the remainder of the century, spreading the debt service and recurrent costs over a far larger pool of beneficiaries than exist now. It will have applications we can’t even conceive now. And it’s especially useful to us now precisely for the same reason it seesm expensive comparwed with S Korea and Singapore — that we are scattered over such a wide area and are on the fringe(rather than the centre) of the major OS markets we deal with.
AR said:
No, it won’t, for the same reason that so many other things that started off being pitched at the middle class ended up being of use to those further dwon the demographic. But since you are bothered, I wonder what you think of PPL, whioch, at least as Abbott has it, will prove much more expensive and be be much more like MC welafrea than this — and worst of all — never deliver commensurate benefits to the lower demographics.
Brian,
I would agree – this is the same tired old stuff. I just do not see why we need to spend $43 billion to give us something that is (at least in usability terms) no better than what we already have. There are some gaps in coverage currently and those need to be fixed. But by replacing the current system with something that will cost an absolute bomb and will give us functionality that we are not going to use until there is some technology that actually requires it I just see as an enormous waste.
While it is being built there will also be no incremental improvements to the current system – leaving us in a hole for the next few years as well.
Given the increased cost over the current system and the now massively accelerated depreciation (btw – this I think will increase tax write-offs) of the old system this is costing a lot more than just the installed cost of the new system.
As for the environmental benefits – the energy to create all that fibre, the switches, routers and a lot of other devices just to see them spending most of their time dark because we do not generate enough content and the submarine cables that send us a lot of our content will not be upgraded yet – again, I can’t see what they are.
The current system (with some additional work) can do all of the things suggested here. We may well need it at some point in the future. I can’t see why we would want to do it now.
Fran, I suspect that if you costed the Labor and LNP approaches over, say, the next 20 years, the NBN would come in cheaper by a fair margin. In terms of value for money the gap would widen further.
Someone with the requisite information should work it out and let us all know.
Fran,
Nice paternalism there. You seem to be saying that if the money is not taken off the people they would be spending it on “getting drunk or getting obese”.
You really do have a dim view of your fellow human beings, don’t you?
What, btw, is “PPL”?
Brian said
Certainly, if the coalition were to be compelled to deliver the level of service to all customers they are claiming in the areas they say will have minimum speeds of 12Mbps then the cost of the towers alone plus the backhaul wiould easily exceed the NBN. But this is smoke and mirrors where one pretnds that if one can in theory get between 12Mbps with no latency one does get it in practice. Also, when the service needs to be upgraded (as it certainly will), virtually all the costs now being borne will have to be borne anyway and the existing value of redundant hardware and installation of the coalition’s option will simply be forfeit.
AR said:
It’s nothing of the sort. I’m nobody’s metaphoric father.
I’m not saying that at all. I’m merely putting the claim that spending money on this scale would be the road to ruin into appropriate perspective. Poeple can still get drunk and obese if that’s their inclination, but the fact remains that these lifestyle choices are far more costly and risky than NBN. If the NBN encourages to be slightly less drunk and obese to make ends meet in their budgets as well as around their waists, then they are certainly better off.
oops [people][encourages them]
PPL = paid parental leave
Fran,
Again you show little understanding. I would suggest you look up the concept of “time value of money”, add in the observed fact that IT equipment is getting cheaper (not more expensive) over time and perhaps do a little look at what “latency” is to a network.
The laws of physics tell us that “no latency” is simply impossible.
.
Brian,
You seem to be implying that money has no time value as well – and that IT equipment is not getting cheaper. Surely you have not missed this.
Fran,
I will leave the finer points of grammar to a pedant. If you want to make an issue of it, perhaps we can discuss your typos above.
.
On the main point, you are right – these are lifestyle choices. It may me a little poor as a simile, but since you used it – at the moment, the NBN is equivalent to the government telling us that booze and food are for our own good – so drink and eat to excess. The NBN is way more than we need at the moment, so why are you encouraging the government to cram the booze and food down our throats?
.
My answer is simple – I have an existing internet connection that more than satisfies my need for an always on high speed connection. Why do you insist I need to spend a lot of money to throw it away to be replaced with another one that is, in practical terms, no better?
Oh – and PPL is a little outside the scope of this thread. I recently received a ticking off here for straying from the point, so I will not here.
AR said:
It is, and I didn’t really want to thread hijack but the point is a valid one. A party cannot say that NBN is wasteful and PPL is not and yet be taken seriously.
I don’t seek to make an issue of it. We all make errors. I thought yours was intentional: “take money off” is low-SES vernacular — and thus part of your point about me being “paternalistic”. I was playing along.
Sorry … that doesn’t sound plausible as analogy. Perhaps you will need to develop it.
It’s just possible that your needs may not be the same as those of the majority and that you may end uip getting benefits from others having access to this that you haven’t considered and will draw upon whether you consider it or not. Some things have to be rolled out at scale to get the maximum community benefit. Personally, I wouldn’t be buying submarines or JSFs, but there you go — I get no choice in it. I see a negative benefit in building massive sports facilities but again, nobody takes a poll on these things. When you live in a community, it’s a package. You maynot get much marginal benefit out of an NBN but enough people will to make it worthwhile building.
I very much doubt optical fibre cable will get a lot cheaper over time. I also doubt that the cost of laying it will fall significantly. You also need to consider the use value of having it by 2018 (as opposed to much later). To make a simple comparison, had Australia not faced “capacity consraints” in the first years of this millennium, more high value minerals would have been shifted. Accordingly, if the skilled people, the transport and port infrastructure had been in place, then the income would have been greater. You’d have had to take that decision much earlier than the price spike though. In the late 1990s, the capacity was adequate. Now it isn’t.
What was your point on latency?
The cable is pretty cheap compared to the cost of laying it. Where you could save big $$$$ in some areas is doing at the same time as other big trenching works. Eg. there’s various programs around to underground power cables in suburbs and if you could do it at the same time I bet you’d save a lot of money.
btw I think Andrew’s point about latency is you can never even in theory get zero latency. Speed of light is a real pain, and in fibre light goes slower. Then there’s overhead latency with the electronic bits at either end.
Chrios said:
I agree and in fact I asked that very question recently here. Doing it alongside gas, water, road grading etc and maybe undergrounding powerlines, removing telegraph poles, using LEDs (perhaps at near ground level) instead of streetlights …
That would save some money for sure and the savings could be spread across all those usages. Given the overlaps in the beneficiary class, the NBN then looks even cheaper.
Fran,
I have not raised PPL, so let’s leave that, huh? I am not the Liberal Party and make no claim to speak on their behalf.
On grammar, but it looks to me like you did make an issue of it by raising it – but let’s put that into the irrelevant basket and move on again.
.
Again – you used booze and food, so I was trying to make the point in your terms. If you do not follow, up to you.
.
Keeping the irrelevant (again) submarines and JSFs out of this perhaps you can suggest a good reason why someone would need a 1Gbps connection at home? If, OTOH, you claim that no benefits need to be shown other than the possibility that someone may actually need to download a movie in 30 seconds then perhaps I can claim we all really need an MRI scanner at home on the off chance that I can’t get to a hospital and I really need a scan?
See? The whole thing is pointless expenditure without a real reason for it? If you really want to spend that much money then build some universities or hospitals or use the money to spend on schools for the disadvantaged or anything that has a real use.
Blazingly fast internet, when fast internet is already available, just is not (IMHO) a good use of the money.
Even better, perhaps, would be to use it to reduce the tax paid by the poor. Perhaps uplift the tax free threshold. Anything other than a pointless lift in the theoretical maximum speed we can get down our internet when there is no actual content that can use the added speed.
As for the cost to lay – correct, the actual fibre is unlikely to get much cheaper (although it might). Most of the hardware cost is in the other stuff I mentioned (and you, conveniently, seemed to miss).
Fran @ 70 – the deal with Telstra has changed things a bit since they’ll be reusing existing conduits where possible. I’d hope in other areas they would be trying to work with other utility infrastructure providers, but I haven’t heard anything about it all.
Chris, we have Telstra cable here, but it’s strung along the light posts. I know that because one day a truck ripped it clear off the facia board on the front of our house.
I’d wondered whether Optus has any useful infrastructure.
By the photo, it looks a nice place.