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

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

#111

Post by dsymonds »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #108
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…

> There are of course some very expensive locations to service, but thats a USO problem. I don't know what the acronym USO means. But I do know that the expensive locations are politically important because there is pressure for the government to build various things out in just those locations. They political lobbying arises precisely because those locations are so expensive that the locals wouldn't pay for it thems…

In this context, USO means Universal Service Obligations, namely that approximately everyone can get access.

https://www.acma.gov.au/Industry/Telco/Carriers-and-service-...

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

#112

Post by elementalest »

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…

When the Liberals privatised the government owned monopoly telco (now called Tesltra), they didn't properly structurally seperate it in the first place. The government, like NZ, could have gotten the wholesale part of Telstra to start upgrading network infrastructure. If they had done it properly the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess.

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

#113

Post by jbarham »

flukus wrote: post #36
Gatsky wrote: post #13

By 'fit for service' they mean 12Mbps down, or average copper wire speeds. What's the point? Although the original goal was great, in hindsight it appears that it could not be delivered anywhere near the original budget. For context, after a prolonged period of centre-right government, a centre-left government was elected, led by Kevin Rudd. He had a progressive agenda, but due to a combination of his unmitigated ego…

> For my part, I'm dropping all wires and switching to 4G/LTE, where I can stream 4K content, get decent uploads and still pay less than I would on the National Broadband network. If everyone does that you'll be lucky to stream youtube videos at 240p. Wireless bandwidth is inherently shared between everyone, wired is dedicated.

> Wireless bandwidth is inherently shared between everyone, wired is dedicated.

False. NBN FTTP connections use GPON which is a shared connection (https://www.nbnco.com.au/utility/glossary-of-terms.html#g).

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

#114

Post by dibstern »

JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #105
dibstern wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought he was going too hard on Turnbull (current PM). What has he done that justifies your appraisal of his brief term? People seem to be forgetting about Abbott, who in my opinion did indeed fuck around with rubbish policy his entire term (helped into the grave by treasurer/idiot Joe Hockey).

>I thought he was going too hard on Turnbull (current PM). The problem with Turnbull appears to be that either: 1) He has to balance his rather more radically right wing members of his party while keeping his further centre members happy else he loses his position. (Many peoples explanation). or 2) He has significantly changed his opinions and position on many issues over the last 5 years. And this is a problem becau…

I'm well aware of those two popularly perceived problems, but I don't see how either justifies him being a bad PM.

I believe proposition (1), there being more evidence that supports this view and more rhetoric that supports (2).

If he were elected with a significant majority of both houses, and the party returned to a more centrist state, such that he didn't need to appease the more Right-wing faction of his party in the same way, would he not still be the perfect PM many of us thought he might be?

An aside -> his election strategy was mostly: (1) use data to find popular buzz-words ("JOBS", "GROWTH", "INNOVATION"); (2) repeat those ad infinitum; (3) shy away from any compelling political narrative or vision for the future of the country (e.g. "MAGA" narrative); (4) ???; (5) Lose House seats to Shorten and Senate seats to Pauline et al.

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

#115

Post by dibstern »

tmeasday wrote: post #106
dibstern wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought he was going too hard on Turnbull (current PM). What has he done that justifies your appraisal of his brief term? People seem to be forgetting about Abbott, who in my opinion did indeed fuck around with rubbish policy his entire term (helped into the grave by treasurer/idiot Joe Hockey).

I think you're forgetting that Turnbull was the communications minister under Abbott. He's square to blame for this.

I agree that his actions as communications minister that contributed to this were horrible, but being given communications minister was essentially a punishment for crossing the line.

(1) The NBN falls under the portfolio, and the government knew they would have to deal with controlling the ever increasing costs of the program, which were hugely underestimated by Labour, and (2) The person in the role of Communications minister would take the blame for the public realisation that the costs were going out of control and had to be cut. (3) Any cut would result in a poorer NBN, because that's what cutting costs when you're building any product/service does.

So he was essentially handed that flaming pile of dog shit by Abbott, probably to lower the chance that Turnbull would ever be able to wrestle back power.

Turnbull's solution was to get the private sector to pay for a part of the network (FTTN instead of FTTH). So, costs would be managed, the 2020 target was still reachable, and it leaves the NBN open to improve the network to FTTH later on.

What could Turnbull have done better?

The bigger problem of the NBN is its business model, which charges Telcos for bandwidth on a total downloads basis rather than on a % use basis. This is what causes the poor service of the NBN. This could have been dealt with by Rudd, by using a different model for the NBN, as discussed above, but Turnbull couldn't do anything about that.

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

#116

Post by nikdaheratik »

dibstern wrote: post #94
zmmmmm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are going way too easy on the current government. "Stuffing around" - more like active sabotage. Their policy has been consistent in the NBN all the way through, and has defied all independent technical advice. It was a political solution that never made any technical sense.

I thought he was going too hard on Turnbull (current PM). What has he done that justifies your appraisal of his brief term? People seem to be forgetting about Abbott, who in my opinion did indeed fuck around with rubbish policy his entire term (helped into the grave by treasurer/idiot Joe Hockey).

Except that Turnbull was in charge of alot of this stuff in the Abbott gov't before he became PM. However, no one running this project to date has done a very good job.

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

#117

Post by [deleted] »

jakelarkin wrote: post #85
ioquatix wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

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

#119

Post by chrismorgan »

brad0 wrote: post #87
chrismorgan wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ever…

I grew up in Melbourne, but preferred the idea of living in the country, so I made it so. (I’m employed by FastMail and head into the office every couple of weeks or so; I told them of my plan to move into the country before they hired me.) When I was first planning it, I had been considering NBN essential, but shortly before actually moving here it occurred to me that regular 4G was actually quite suitable—better than ADSL2+, a test rapidly revealed. My experience with about five months of depending on 4G in Stawell is that apart from a period of about five days where the supply was dodgy (mostly usable, but no more), the Internet supply is at least as reliable than I ever got from ADSL2+ in two locations in Melbourne—where running a ping all day typically has zero packet loss. And ADSL2+’s reliability was never superb.

Your 1TB/$90 and rain dropout refers to ADSL2+, does it not? I haven’t noticed any problems with rain and haven’t seen any caps anywhere near that high on 4G.

Well, now I’m buying in Navarre, which isn’t covered by NBN at this stage (hence it wasn’t in my initial dragnet) but does have an Optus 4G tower, and thus great internet supply.

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

#120

Post by zmmmmm »

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.

> where you get faster internet driving an hour out of Melbourne than Fitzroy or a lot of the CBD

Melbourne already had awesome internet, the need was much less there. You can disagree with the decision to rollout to internet-disadvantaged areas if you want, but don't pretend that the conscious decision to do so was bad management when it was actually an attempt at equity (ie: addressing the most needy customers first).

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