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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

#111

Post by d_t_w »

fit2rule wrote: post #73
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. Nothing can be done until Australians demand Constitution reform. This is the crux of the problems with Australian politics - its Constitution is absolutely atrocious.

Neither Britain or New Zealand have written constitutions, I'm not convinced that Australia's is the problem at hand, though I guess it could be that a poorly written one is worse than none at all.

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

#112

Post by robryan »

jpatokal wrote: post #61
bootload wrote: post #59

The NBN is a tale of geography. If you live in the CBD mainland capital city you will get good coverage. Even that it's patchy. If you live more than 30km out access get mostly worse. If you live in the bush, the best you'll get is crappy satellite or your own jury rigged antenna to the nearest town. If you were lucky enough to a) live close to the city b) have telephone poles c) live near a telephone exchange and we…

Err, no, you don't? Most of central Sydney is on ADSL, NBN has been rolled out primarily in new housing developments way out in the boonies.

Yeah very strange how they have done the rollout. Surely they would have been better off rolling out to densely populated inner suburbs first. Cover the most people and get those most likely to take up the service initially.

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

#113

Post by juststeve »

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…

yeah nah, she'll be right mate, why don't ya have another stubbie and watch the footy.

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

#114

Post by cyphar »

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.

Rudd was promising the NBN since I was in primary, and it didn't happen after two terms. The insane amount of in-fighting in the last two years before the election didn't give me much hope.

I mean, ultimately I voted for the Pirate Party, but you can't blame people for not having faith that Labor would achieve in their third term something they'd fail to achieve in the previous two. Keeping someone in power despite not fulfilling their promises is how you get Howard.

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

#115

Post by i336_ »

boyter wrote: post #109
i336_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-_- Wow :( This is insane. We're getting laser beams, and they're literally going to be worse than cable! I wonder if NBN Co would agree to do a FTTH setup if I covered the fiber and installation. Hmm. They might, but then I could be stuck with a $200+/mo Internet bill... Shakes head ...this is just infuriating, how completely this has been mis-sold and bungled.

There is a technology choice program to upgrade to FTTP which was promised to cost less than $5000. A quote costs a non refundable $600 and the estimates I have seen have all been in the tens of thousands of dollars. About 20 people have taken the option so far.

Aaand now I'm even more depressed and kind of infuriated.

I'm just looking for personal-use Internet, and I wanted to join all the cool people with their 1Gbps for $40/mo or whatever they have.

I don't even need a guaranteed SLA, I'm fine with consumer-grade "fair share" bandwidth QoS and stuff.

Seems to me that the NBN Co is merely a sort of centralized rebranding that doesn't really create a competitive advantage.

Can someone help me understand why Australia seems to be so unbelievably backward in terms of advanced technology? I mean, I know there are some decent tech projects here: the CSIRO's antenna array is fairly crazy, I remember seeing SuSE when the news was doing a thing on NOAA about a decade ago, if you ever see a tram's info dashboard reboot you'll see it's based on Ubuntu, the rail transport project being built near where I live is completely driverless, and NSW's existing/legacy rail network is so heavily fiber based, if you look carefully at stations you can see there are fiber drops where you'd usually expect RJ45 (!). That's just what I've seen, but it shows that competent installations exist here.

But the thing is, I reiterate the above because I need reassurance that Australians actually have brains (I say that as one), because the "IT tax" and the Internet situation here and related issues are all just monumentally stupid and frankly an embarassment.

The government doesn't isn't making the bold changes needed to get a Silicon Valley in here fast enough, if you ask me.

(PS. With the fiber drops w/ Transport for NSW - this was easy because the fiber can run alongside the tracks; and I figured out fiber is being done to get infrastructural latency to zero.)

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

#116

Post by nl »

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.

The parent is saying that the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd battles lost them power. It's a narrative which probably has some truth to it.

It's also worth noting that Labor was slow rolling out the NBN. They did have 6 years in power, and didn't get NBN in the hands of many people at all.

Yes it was a big project, but it's hard to argue that more speed was impossible.

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

#117

Post by cyphar »

fit2rule wrote: post #73
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. Nothing can be done until Australians demand Constitution reform. This is the crux of the problems with Australian politics - its Constitution is absolutely atrocious.

The fact we don't have a Bill of Rights (or even an equivalent to the First Amendment) is ridiculous. But on the plus side we stopped with the ridiculous gun-toting crap 20 years ago, so some parts of our constitution are more reasonable than other countries.

One of the more worrying issues is that the Governor-General (and thus by proxy the Queen of fucking England) has vito power over our laws.

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

#118

Post by nl »

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'm sure your technology is great, but I suspect you aren't seeing it through your (potential) customer's eyes.

If you seriously don't understand why that solution could never have been politically feasible then to be honest it isn't surprising you were ignored.

Additionally, did you really suggest that people should be able to dig their own trenches and plug fibre in themselves? You do realize that does nothing to make you seem credible, right?

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

#119

Post by victorhooi »

bootload wrote: post #59

The NBN is a tale of geography. If you live in the CBD mainland capital city you will get good coverage. Even that it's patchy. If you live more than 30km out access get mostly worse. If you live in the bush, the best you'll get is crappy satellite or your own jury rigged antenna to the nearest town. If you were lucky enough to a) live close to the city b) have telephone poles c) live near a telephone exchange and we…

This isn't necessarily true.

I live in a new housing development (Zetland - Postcode 2017).

I tried to get NBN installed last week with Internode, one of our ISPs.

They said it was possible, they told me to be at home - I took half the day off WFH - then they ring me halfway saying, whoops, it's not actually connected for your building...err...we'll get back to you about the NBN.

I'm still waiting to hear back.

My parents are told it will be available between April-June 2017 - yet apparently they haven't even started planning it for their area yet. So they somehow hope to design, plan and roll it out in the next 30 days? I call bollocks.

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

#120

Post by imron »

shard972 wrote: post #93
imron wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The FTTN part won't be obsolete, it will be the copper cables limiting speeds and making my Internet connection drop out when it rains.

By the time the rollout is finished, they're going to need to upgrade to FTTP anyway.

They should have done it properly once. It would've been easier, cheaper and technologically superior.

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