In the UK we mostly have FTTC and copper to our property. I'm in London admittedly, but I get 220Mbps/20Mpbs solidly, so copper isn't all bad if you have fibre running to a cabinet that's close to you.
How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
131–140 of 188 posts
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#132I 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…
Do you have any promo/marketing material you can share? I find the concept of self-install fibre (trench and all!) pretty wild and to be honest, practically ridiculous. I'd love to know more about what you had in mind.
Sorry, the company doesn't exist anymore. Our marketing didn't focus on the self install angle for residences, but it did for business. In either case, it's logically no different from hiring any worker to do it.
Basically our pitch was, you can reduce the install cost to whatever the minimum wage is. Deploying the physical topology of an NBN can be designed to require 100% unskilled labor. Maybe the problem was that it would create too many jobs. *joke
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's very easy to argue that. Thousands of people to train, thousands of connections to plan, thousands of pits to retro fit, asbestos to handle. Business to be created, processes, negotiations with Telstra.
The biggest problem was not going fibre to the pit. It would have saved one of the most expensive parts of the operation - the lead in to the house.
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#134If 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…
I think there's lots of contributing factors. Not just the politicians. We should remember a lot of what the politicians say and do is driven by what will help them get re-elected -- i.e. by what the populace in general thinks is important.
(I am not saying "oh it's not the fault of the politicians, it's the fault of the populace" -- see my opening sentence that I think there's a lot of contributing factors. And each of these can go several layers deep).
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read it as a statement that the problems faced by remote aboriginal communities are structural and obey institutional inertia; that they are hard problems. We have a history of well-intentioned reformers coming in and making everything much worse: the stolen generation, the NTER, laws against alcohol consumption that cause even more destructive patterns of behaviour, etc. I've known men and women who trained as pol…
Thanks, what an intriguing level of detail to draw from the cartoon, I have to admit I never read even the slightest amount of that from it. To me the cartoon is staggeringly racist. Clearly, deliberately, outrageously racist. And I am deliberate in my use of the words "deliberate" and "outrageous" because personally I believe in Australia that the proprietor of this particular newspaper makes his money by manufactur…
> Thanks, what an intriguing level of detail to draw from the cartoon, I have to admit I never read even the slightest amount of that from it.
When I saw the cartoon I thought it was clearly political satire. When have political cartoons not been heavily dependent on context and difficult to understand if you weren't familiar with what had been happening during the week?
I've heard/read a fair amount of support for and against the cartoon. Some support for it has apparently come from people who have actually gone up to remote aboriginal communities. Some people think that it's a truthful depiction of the problems that are happening up there.
Most of the coverage from the fallout of publishing the cartoon, seemed to me, to be about how racist it was. A lot of outrage. Some stuff about 18C. More outrage. Panel shows with a token aboriginal. Yet more outrage. I honestly don't recall anyone examining what problems indigenous communities actually have. So I guess the cartoon was a failure; it used racist, racial stereotypes and no positive outcome came from it.
We're seeing more and more silliness being imported from the US and UK. Ayaan Hirsi Ali cancelled a talk because of security fears recently. She's been here before and given talks. What the hell changed? I think just this Thursday there were students planning to protest a screening of the Red Pill that was organised by other students at the University of Sydney. Everyone wants to live in an echo chamber. I don't know how we move on from this.
I want to stay on topic. Damn the LNP for screwing up the NBN. I will not get the shitty version of it in my area until 2019.
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#136If 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…
For HNers wondering who the hell Tony Abbott is, he's basically the Australian equivalent of George Bush (Jr): conservative politician and former prime minister who's, let's say, not known for his grasp of the finer details of policy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Abbott
He ate an onion. Raw. Skin and all. https://media.giphy.com/media/68HJUosvhSSI0/giphy.gif
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#137The 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…
I live five minutes' walk from the Melbourne CBD, and we have no indication NBN is going to be rolled out here any time soon.
I did say patchy.
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#138The 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…
I live five minutes' walk from the Melbourne CBD, and we have no indication NBN is going to be rolled out here any time soon.
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Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any promo/marketing material you can share? I find the concept of self-install fibre (trench and all!) pretty wild and to be honest, practically ridiculous. I'd love to know more about what you had in mind.
Sorry, the company doesn't exist anymore. Our marketing didn't focus on the self install angle for residences, but it did for business. In either case, it's logically no different from hiring any worker to do it. Basically our pitch was, you can reduce the install cost to whatever the minimum wage is. Deploying the physical topology of an NBN can be designed to require 100% unskilled labor. Maybe the problem was that…
Ahh, that's fairly different to regular punters doing it themselves. If you pitched it as a self install method vs a cheaper way for contractors to do fibre installs (the #1 reason the Libs gave for the MtM), I can see why people were confused.
Re: How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout
#140The 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.
Interesting with Sydney. Highest density of fibre into the country and the reason google has their Aus HQ there. Be interested to find out just how much of Aus capitals w/o NBN access.