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How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

bbc.com

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Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#81

Post by eggsampler »

aplummer wrote: post #73
zmmmmm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is biased is citing premises passed at an really phase in a project which deliberately planned to roll out difficult sites first. Of course there were not many premises passed, that is meaningless without context.

It wasn't though. The rollout follows political seats exactly to the street. In Brisbane this means that it followed the border of marginal ALP seats that cross the river and back again instead of doing adjacent houses. It's also not meaningless 5 years into a project that was announced 7 years prior.

The rollout didn't follow political seats. Numbers showed initial rollouts followed 67 labor, 61 coalition, 6 others. Anything more recent than that is really only attributable to the new NBN's MTM direction.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-29/government-announces-n...

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#82

Post by montecarl »

ioquatix wrote: post #72
ggm wrote: post #30

First common mistake: Yes, Australia is geographically huge. No, it is not sparce. it is a highly urbanized economy in terms of geographic concentration of the population. Therefore, the oft-quoted extreme expense "oh, its so much more expensive to do it in OZ compared to ..." is bullshit: its not. There are of course some very expensive locations to service, but thats a USO problem. Overall, the cost of deployment o…

I'm glad it finally happened in NZ and as you say, it's awesome. I'm rocking 1000/500 - the biggest limitation is international throughput and latency which I suppose they are working on and improving all the time.

We need to get the physicists (general relativists?) working on upping the speed of light. Seriously though, how much larger is your latency than speed of light limitations? 2x?

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#83

Post by adventured »

owengriffiths wrote: post #4

This article didn't mention what Australians are choosing to do when they have a range of speeds. According to the figures NBN released 80% of customers aren't even paying for the top speed they could. Similarly, this piece from Vox notes that fast internet just is not nearly as valuable as proponents claimed. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/only-17p... https://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/17/132…

That happens in most countries. Consumers don't go with the most expensive options.

Romania has among the fastest Internet speeds mixed with the cheapest cost per mbps, yet consumers there frequently don't choose their fastest options because they can make do with less and save a bit of money.

Per Akamai's Q1 State of the Internet report, Romania doesn't make the top 10 in average mbps. Yet their % of connections above 10mbps is #8, and above 15 mbps is #9. Despite how inexpensive a faster connection is in Romania, people are often choosing not to bother with the fastest options. Despite that, Romania is still much faster than Australia - people there aren't choosing 5mbps options. If you hypothetically give a consumer a choice of a 100mbps connection at $50, and a 50mbps connection at $25, you're going to see a lot of people seek to save some money where they can (which doesn't mean they don't still want very fast Internet in that #2 price slot).

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#84

Post by rangibaby »

ggm wrote: post #30

First common mistake: Yes, Australia is geographically huge. No, it is not sparce. it is a highly urbanized economy in terms of geographic concentration of the population. Therefore, the oft-quoted extreme expense "oh, its so much more expensive to do it in OZ compared to ..." is bullshit: its not. There are of course some very expensive locations to service, but thats a USO problem. Overall, the cost of deployment o…

> The NZ model, by comparison is gold: structural separation. Crown holdings for the fiber. A pot of money, re-circulating to deploy to the cities, each region re-fills the pot to move to the next town. Far simpler. And.. fibre to (most) homes.

Only after A LOT of pain. Broadband uptake was pathetic in NZ until Telecom, formed out of the NZ Post Office and sold to overseas buyers in 1990, was split up into retail (Spark) and infrastructure (Chorus) ten years ago. It's smooth sailing now, but it could have been so much easier.

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#85

Post by jakelarkin »

ioquatix wrote: post #72
ggm wrote: post #30

First common mistake: Yes, Australia is geographically huge. No, it is not sparce. it is a highly urbanized economy in terms of geographic concentration of the population. Therefore, the oft-quoted extreme expense "oh, its so much more expensive to do it in OZ compared to ..." is bullshit: its not. There are of course some very expensive locations to service, but thats a USO problem. Overall, the cost of deployment o…

I'm glad it finally happened in NZ and as you say, it's awesome. I'm rocking 1000/500 - the biggest limitation is international throughput and latency which I suppose they are working on and improving all the time.

hmm apparently the Southern Cross has 3.6Tbps of capacity which I could see being a constraint on throughput if that's the bulk of bandwidth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Cross_Cable

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#86

Post by prawn »

vacri wrote: post #35

So here's my tale of what happened: Party A was in power, and having infighting problems. Party B was headed by an absolute arse of a man, who used the tactic "Say No! to EVERYTHING". Didn't matter how benign or banal, the opposition party would say no. A flagship policy like the NBN was particularly focused on - and if you look at interviews with the opposition communications minister at the time (now our prime mini…

"Enterprises can already dictate their own network backbones, but small-to-medium businesses cannot."

Before that election, I can remember having an argument about the need for the NBN with a friend who works for a very large company. He argued that the internet in Australia was fine because their teleconferencing video in the boardroom worked well. I told him that not only would they have had a very specialised connection, that in the very near future, households would see multiple, concurrent, hi-res video streams, and that business demands would be high too.

We're a home of four. It's not uncommon for the kids to be streaming Netflix while I work (with a basketball stream running), and my wife uploads large photos and streams a TV show on her phone while she works. We're still a year away from getting NBN and our internet absolutely crawls.

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#87

Post by brad0 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #79
gtkspert wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you get your cheap 4G/LTE? Best I can find is prohibitively expensive, especially if I wan't to stream 4K content...

I use amaysim’s 50GB data pack, at $65 for 28 days, and on the Optus network. In the country town of Stawell (a few thousand people), I get roughly 23/12Mbps. I’m moving to Navarre soon (about a hundred people), and get about 45/15Mbps there. For me, living by myself and working from home most days, it’s substantially better than ADSL2+, as it’s faster, more reliable, doesn’t lock me into any contract, allows me to u…

Hey Chris, I just moved from Ararat. I never would have expected to see another regional western Victorian on HN!

For reference, Stawell has a population of 6,000 while Ararat is about 8,000. The towns are approx 30 minutes drive distance away. The world is smaller than I thought.

In Ararat it’s almost better to go with 4G. While you get decent caps (1000G/m for AUD$90) the problem is that the internet drops out every time it rains.

I can’t imagine running a business that requires internet access in regional Australia, good on you for finding a way!

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#88

Post by indemnity »

robocat wrote: post #66
ggm wrote: post #30

First common mistake: Yes, Australia is geographically huge. No, it is not sparce. it is a highly urbanized economy in terms of geographic concentration of the population. Therefore, the oft-quoted extreme expense "oh, its so much more expensive to do it in OZ compared to ..." is bullshit: its not. There are of course some very expensive locations to service, but thats a USO problem. Overall, the cost of deployment o…

My main issue is that the investment enables digital consumption, without much impact on production. For example, a flaw I had with the NZ rollout: it was deployed to citizens before businesses. It feels kind of sad as a business owner when your business remains on VDSL while the suburbs are getting fibre (although lovely to get Netflix at home on fibre!).

In NZ: At work we have 100mbps fibre shared by 50 people, at home quite a few of us have 1gbps fibre. It’s kind of amusing how bad our work internet situation is compared to consumer internet.

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#89

Post by shmerl »

> After the conservative government attained power in 2013, the NBN struck more upheaval, with copper wire ordered for the final stretches of connection, surrounding neighbourhood broadband nodes.

How would pulling copper make it any better? It surely couldn't make it cheaper and at the same time would only use an inferior technology. Why would anyone pulling a new network today use anything but fiber optics?

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#90

Post by chowell »

aplummer wrote: post #74
aplummer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't though. The rollout follows political seats exactly to the street. In Brisbane this means that it followed the border of marginal ALP seats that cross the river and back again instead of doing adjacent houses. It's also not meaningless 5 years into a project that was announced 7 years prior.

I don't even vote LNP, but you have to wonder about the efficiency of a rollout where you get faster internet driving an hour out of Melbourne than Fitzroy or a lot of the CBD. For a project originally estimated at 4.7 then 15 then 42 billion, dense paying customers early should probably have been prioritised.

If your concern is just with government expenditures, sure, but you can also make the argument that prioritising rural areas could give them a head start on the growth of digital services. Taking Australia from being a market where cities have ~okay~ internet and rural areas have poor internet to one where at first everyone has okay to great connectivity and later everyone has great connectivity has its merits.
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