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How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

nytimes.com

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Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#91

Post by shard972 »

flukus wrote: post #28
shard972 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To say they changed it for no reason is omitting the state of the roll out at that time. The budget was already blowing out beyond 2x the cost, they were behind on their revised down goals, they missed wireless numbers by 90%. The only positive thing they could tout at the time was pass by numbers which ignores the hardest part of the roll out, connecting fiber to each and every house. You can argue that the last mil…

> The budget was already blowing out beyond 2x the cost According to partisan figures that were often repeated but never justified. I don't doubt it would have blown out, world class infrastructure would have been worth it at twice the cost. Instead we have the current NBN who's costs have blown out just as much to delivery 20th century infrastructure.

> According to partisan figures that were often repeated but never justified.

I mean if you pretend that the $30~ billion paid to telstra had absolutely nothing to do with the NBN then yea you can avoid the 2x figure but I still have no idea how you can say the two things are completely unrelated.

> Instead we have the current NBN who's costs have blown out just as much to delivery 20th century infrastructure.

How? It's fiber for over 95% the connection with plans already been tested to allow people to complete the line to their house with fiber if your willing to pay for it. That's a lot better than what was available in 20th century.

I don't see the big problem with having the government do the entire backbone and lines close to the houses and allow people to fund the final hop if they want to.

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#92

Post by voltagex_ »

spangry wrote: post #51
stirlo wrote: post #30

The biggest issue with the whole project wasn't the abandoning of FTTP and move to MTM but the locking in of 2010 prices for the foreseeable future via a ridiculous CVC charge that only existed to turn a profit. The founder of one of Australia's largest independent ISP's Internode (and later NBNco board member) Simon Hackett put it very well in 2011 where he showed locking in a arbitrary $20 charge per megabit hobble…

Yep Hackett called it right. He put his money where his mouth was too: he sold his ISP to iiNet/iiBorg (who were subsequently consumed by TPG) and got the fuck outta dodge. It's a pity; Internode was possibly the best ISP in the country.

Internode's sort of okay still. TPG routes are slower though. I have unlimited FTTP NBN, static IPv4 and a v6 /56 for $110 a month.

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#93

Post by shard972 »

imron wrote: post #46
shard972 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To say they changed it for no reason is omitting the state of the roll out at that time. The budget was already blowing out beyond 2x the cost, they were behind on their revised down goals, they missed wireless numbers by 90%. The only positive thing they could tout at the time was pass by numbers which ignores the hardest part of the roll out, connecting fiber to each and every house. You can argue that the last mil…

And now the budget is still blowing out, only we have shitty infrastructure that's going to be obsolete almost as soon as it's installed. The Liberals messed this one up (note to Americans, in Australia the 'Liberals' are the conservatives).

> And now the budget is still blowing out, only we have shitty infrastructure that's going to be obsolete almost as soon as it's installed.

How will to be obsolete? Everything upto the node is fiber so if it was made obsolete it also would have been obsolete under the original plan.

If your talking about the copper, we aren't digging it up and replacing it with copper. It's just going to stay there a bit longer until it gets upgraded by the user themselves or possibly a another roll out down the line.

What part of the roll out gets wasted? The cabinets they roll out can still handle FTTP, so I don't know what you think will become "obsolete".

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#94

Post by eng_monkey »

benjoffe wrote: post #86
fit2rule wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Seriously it is time for a citizens revolution. We need to take the country back from these idiots. Nothing can be done until Australians demand Constitution reform. This is the crux of the problems with Australian politics - its Constitution is absolutely atrocious.

Which parts of the constitution do you think are bad?

E.g. it does not explicitly outline the right to freedom of expression. It is sort of implied within Government, but not necessarily.

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#95

Post by pjc50 »

tray5 wrote: post #80
andrewstuart wrote: post #47

If you posed the question "Who in the world would be the worst possible person to decide on how to construct a nationwide high speed computer network?", the you might come up with a list that included Tony Abbott. I genuinely believe that Tony Abbott really didn't even understand what purpose the Internet serves, apart from email and playing games - he saw it as some sort of frivolous discretionary spend - definitely…

>Seriously it is time for a citizens revolution. We need to take the country back from these idiots. Couldn't agree more. I've yet to meet a single fellow Aussie that has anything but disdain for politicians from any party. Labor, Liberal, Greens, One Nation doesn't seem to matter, they're all a pack of self serving con artists, and unless the major political parties take a serious look at themselves over the next fe…

Can I suggest that if all the politicians seem to be bad, the problem might be located somewhere else? Namely the Murdoch-dominated media?

He's been bad enough in the UK, but it seems like he has even more control in Australia.

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#96

Post by eng_monkey »

grizzles wrote: post #79

I have a personal perspective on this. Around 2014 or so, I + some of Australia's top physicists designed and quickly prototyped some tech to lower the cost of the NBN rollout bigtime. Our approach revolved around self install fibre + a far greater use of wireless. I contacted 15+ people in senior leadership at NBNco, all of whom are still on my LinkedIn. No matter how hard I tried, we couldn't get a meeting with NBN…

I feel your pain. It is extremely difficult in Australia to get interest in anything related to innovation. I have had surreal experiences when dealing with companies and particularly Government. They will do anything to boycott something that resembles change, particularly if it affects the the way they work, or of course that might expose their incompetency.

Australia is not a place to live unless you work in health or in a trade. Scientists and engineers (engineering is not even understood in Australia, usually being associated to things like infrastructure or maintenance) are screwed.

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#97

Post by IntelMiner »

nnethercote wrote: post #90
andrewstuart wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but they didn't win. Instead they squandered government on in-fighting and backstabbing. Truly Kevin Rudd can be credited with remarkable vision for proposing the NBN in the form that he did and it is a great pity it did not come to conclusion. Labor/Rudd/Gillard/all the shadowy Labor background figures gets the blame for the "true" NBN not happening because they just could help themselves fighting and grasping a…

Er, what? Labor came up with the idea of the NBN and started it. The Coalition then stopped building it properly and switched it to the watered-down version when they gained power. The Coalition deserves the blame here.

Labor losing the election while the NBN was still ramping up allowed the coalition to ride in and dismantle it while it was still vulnerable

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#98

Post by dalbasal »

andrewstuart wrote: post #47

If you posed the question "Who in the world would be the worst possible person to decide on how to construct a nationwide high speed computer network?", the you might come up with a list that included Tony Abbott. I genuinely believe that Tony Abbott really didn't even understand what purpose the Internet serves, apart from email and playing games - he saw it as some sort of frivolous discretionary spend - definitely…

I recently listened to a Tyler Cowen interview where he (briefly) mentioned trying to measure consumer surplus of internet services, part of the wider difficulty economists face in trying to quantify the value of the internet to people. He likes to play the contrarian.

The default method of measuring consumer surplus is measuring (using econometric black magic) the difference between how much people would be willing to pay for something and how much they actually paid. IE, if you would have paid $17 (but not $18) for a burger but it only cost $12, you accumulated $5 of surplus. By this measure, the internet (home usage) is not very valuable. If prices of (eg your mobile data plan) go up by $15, many people would pass. That implies the user surplus (for those people) is less than $15. Overall, the traditional economics analysis of personal internet access looks similar to cable TV or other "frivolous discretionary spend."

I don't really think you can sum up the internet in this way. The broader cultural impacts of internet access seem far more interesting than cable TV, to me.

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#99

Post by davidgerard »

The actual answer: it was directly sabotaged by the Liberal National Party (the conservatives), at the bidding of Rupert Murdoch, who really doesn't want Australian internet not to suck.

Basically, Tony Abbott got in in 2013 and the shitty version of the scheme was put into place.

Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout

#100

Post by verytrivial »

An entirely predictable shambles. This money should have been spent on Australian skills and content, not on installing damn cables and routers. Let the market decide how to meet demand for content delivery -- education and social investment are far better places for governments to place these sorts of long bets. I saw this coming a mile away and have a long list of poo-pooed complaints on social media to this effect.
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