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Why the NBN needs to go the full way

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Re: Why the NBN needs to go the full way

#61

Post by eru »

jsmeaton wrote: post #53
gd1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems fair. Some quick maths says that 200 billion dollars (just you watch it blow out) / 30 million people = roughly $6600 per man, woman and child living in Australia. Probably $12k per taxpayer. Seems fair to make the user pay for a bit of that rather than dump the debt on the next generation. I know people don't like to let little things like numbers intrude on their socialist utopia, but this is real money I'm a…

We already are paying - with our taxes. Not to mention that this is an investment which will pay back to the government. NBNCo will be getting paid for use. Pay-to-connect isn't available to the users who'd want it most - young people. And I don't just mean unaffordable. If you're renting, good luck convincing your land lord to splash out $4k every time you move.

Just only move to apartments that have the fibre. People are already doing that with windows and bathrooms.

Re: Why the NBN needs to go the full way

#62

Post by Wingman4l7 »

shirro wrote: post #10
cpayne wrote: post #6

I always thought it was a silly argument until I was using my laptop in London. Getting 20 meg downloads just blew my mind away. For me, it changed everything. (Non technical) friends just didn't bother with torrents anymore. It was easier for them to download a movie legitimately instead of all the mucking around...

Keep in mind that Rupert Murdoch owns half of Foxtel which is the main cable tv network in Australia as well as owning most of the newspapers (he has a monopoly in several states). The argument that you can watch tv from companies like Netflix under an NBN is one of the main reasons the opposition is getting an easy run from the media here. Every year Rupert is spared that is millions more in the bank. The ALP were a…

Foxtel is so ubiquitous in Australia that the name has become a genericised trademark for "cable TV".

Re: Why the NBN needs to go the full way

#63

Post by Wingman4l7 »

eru wrote: post #61
jsmeaton wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already are paying - with our taxes. Not to mention that this is an investment which will pay back to the government. NBNCo will be getting paid for use. Pay-to-connect isn't available to the users who'd want it most - young people. And I don't just mean unaffordable. If you're renting, good luck convincing your land lord to splash out $4k every time you move.

Just only move to apartments that have the fibre. People are already doing that with windows and bathrooms.

That's hardly a reasonable solution -- people have to first consider bigger things like proximity to their place of work, good schools, whether or not pets are allowed, etc.

Re: Why the NBN needs to go the full way

#64

Post by NamTaf »

40 wrote: post #52
NamTaf wrote: post #35

The problem with the NBN is that Labor has, like so many other of their policies, sold it beyond terribly. It's about 2 things, and neither are raw download speed. 1) It's about upload speed. That's the major upgrade that we don't see right now. As the net moves towards more and more user-generated content (youtube, dropbox file relocation, etc.) it's going to be upload speeds that are the Achilles heel of these tech…

You can already find plenty case studies on the NBN here: http://www.nbn.gov.au/case-studies/ and here: http://www.nbnco.com.au/nbn-for-business/case-studies.html The problem I see is that most are already possible with current internet speeds. The ones like media production studios ( http://www.nbnco.com.au/nbn-for-business/case-studies/increa... ) do offer new opportunities which aren't possible with ADSL2. The onl…

My DSL, at 6km from the CBD of a city of >2 million, syncs at about 3400kbps down and 700kbps up. I struggle to stream 720p video unless it's compressed to oblivion. Purchasing games on Steam is an overnight (plus potentially during work the following day) affair to actually get the content. Grabbing trial software (stats packages and VMs are two that I've encountered so far) to do online study are hours of waiting.

60-70KB/sec upload means that producing video content is out of the question. It means that dropbox-style syncing of content I produce on my mobile device to the could is not possible. Services like crashplan are a far-away dream.

There's many, many things that are not possible even with our current DSL network, even for people who are living in the highly developed parts of this country. Never mind those who are out in rural areas and for whom DSL is even more crippled.

Re: Why the NBN needs to go the full way

#65

Post by Wingman4l7 »

NamTaf wrote: post #64
40 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already find plenty case studies on the NBN here: http://www.nbn.gov.au/case-studies/ and here: http://www.nbnco.com.au/nbn-for-business/case-studies.html The problem I see is that most are already possible with current internet speeds. The ones like media production studios ( http://www.nbnco.com.au/nbn-for-business/case-studies/increa... ) do offer new opportunities which aren't possible with ADSL2. The onl…

My DSL, at 6km from the CBD of a city of >2 million, syncs at about 3400kbps down and 700kbps up. I struggle to stream 720p video unless it's compressed to oblivion. Purchasing games on Steam is an overnight (plus potentially during work the following day) affair to actually get the content. Grabbing trial software (stats packages and VMs are two that I've encountered so far) to do online study are hours of waiting.…

Yeah, for those not in the know -- unless you're just a couple of km away from your local telephone exchange, you can kiss goodbye any hope of 21st century sync speeds. It's amazing how quickly the speeds drop off.

If you want to get an idea of this, just look at the "DSLAM maps" for a major Australian ISP: http://www.tpg.com.au/maps/

Re: Why the NBN needs to go the full way

#66

Post by Wingman4l7 »

elithrar wrote: post #44
jbarham wrote: post #40

As a relatively recent arrival to Australia I'm surprised that that there isn't more skepticism about the long term wisdom of granting wholesale internet access for the entire country to a single government funded monopoly. It's absurd to hear politicians argue about how networks should be built. IMO that is the role of a competitive market.

The issue there is that it is extremely difficult for a private organisation without existing cable assets to deploy a new fibre network. Land access, easement issues, pit access/location/sharing and so on are very difficult problems with no single solution. Private industry wouldn't be able to take the risk.

Not to mention that the second the big telcos (read: Telstra) got wind of someone trying to compete, they'd use regulatory capture and other dirty tricks to ensure that the newcomer had a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding.

Re: Why the NBN needs to go the full way

#67

Post by jacques_chester »

threeseed wrote: post #32
jacques_chester wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is how badly it has been planned and managed from the very beginning. How fast is the actual rollout? We don't know. Commercial-in-confidence. And NBNCo say they don't keep figures down to the street level anyhow (which begs the question of which basis they are using to pay contractors). How much has already been borrowed? We don't know. Commercial-in-confidence. How much has been spent? We don't…

I am so sick of this obsession with cost/benefit analysis. How can you possibly quantify the future benefits of the NBN ? Nobody could have predicted that when the copper lines were installed that one day it would be primarily used for the internet. And the historic changes to the world economy it has caused. So why even attempt to do it ? Or why not just say it will cost $50 billion but result in $500 trillion worth…

> How can you possibly quantify the future benefits of the NBN?

If this can't be done, even to an order of magnitude, then is the project worth pursuing?

If we allow spending decisions to be guided by Pascal's Wager, why aren't we spending infinite dollars on it? Why aren't we investing all our taxes into fusion reactors, flying cars and the fountain of youth?

> Or why not just say it will cost $50 billion but result in $500 trillion worth of benefits.

Because infrastructure decisions shouldn't be made by Dr Evil.

Re: Why the NBN needs to go the full way

#68

Post by jacques_chester »

NamTaf wrote: post #35

The problem with the NBN is that Labor has, like so many other of their policies, sold it beyond terribly. It's about 2 things, and neither are raw download speed. 1) It's about upload speed. That's the major upgrade that we don't see right now. As the net moves towards more and more user-generated content (youtube, dropbox file relocation, etc.) it's going to be upload speeds that are the Achilles heel of these tech…

This analogy assumes that there is a linear relationship between speed and new applications. But streaming video is about as hard as it gets, and that can be done pretty well with either FTTP or FTTN. Better with FTTP, certainly.

The problem is: what's after video? There doesn't seem to have been a rash of such game-changing applications of faster networks coming out of Japan or South Korea. They've had very fast internet for around a decade; where are the step-function changes in what can be done and what are they?

Re: Why the NBN needs to go the full way

#69

Post by jacques_chester »

davidp wrote: post #38
threeseed wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am so sick of this obsession with cost/benefit analysis. How can you possibly quantify the future benefits of the NBN ? Nobody could have predicted that when the copper lines were installed that one day it would be primarily used for the internet. And the historic changes to the world economy it has caused. So why even attempt to do it ? Or why not just say it will cost $50 billion but result in $500 trillion worth…

Because without some rudimentary numbers like the ones he's talking about, everyone involved can escape accountability -- the politicians, the contractors, the public (since they can claim to have been "misled" and not feel guilty later), ... But mainly because it's an invitation to corruption, for people known to be highly corruptible. You're right that cost/benefit analysis is hard for transformative things like th…

If in the first place Labor had said "20 years, 100 billion", I for one would have found that plausible and -- yes! -- affordable.

When they promised it for 40 billion in 3 years ... well. No. That was never going to happen. Imagine how many streets there are in your suburb. How many suburbs are there in your city? How many in the country?

Somehow in just 750 working days they were going to source thousands of contractors, open hundreds of thousands of pits or dig thousands of new ditches, feed millions of kilometres of new cable, wire in millions of homes, install tens of thousands of new racks in exchanges without expanding the exchanges ... and somehow nothing would go wrong and nobody would fuck up and there'd be no asbestos or blocked tubes or inaccurate records or particularly tough ground or shonky contractors or labour shortages or bad weather or delayed deliveries.

3 years.

This is what makes me mad. We were promised an amazing thing and so many of my friends and colleagues took absolute leave of their senses over it. It's embarrassing. We bitch about salesmen promising impossible bullshit to close a sale ... and then we bought impossible bullshit hook, line and sinker.

Re: Why the NBN needs to go the full way

#70

Post by jacques_chester »

zmmmmm wrote: post #49
jacques_chester wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is how badly it has been planned and managed from the very beginning. How fast is the actual rollout? We don't know. Commercial-in-confidence. And NBNCo say they don't keep figures down to the street level anyhow (which begs the question of which basis they are using to pay contractors). How much has already been borrowed? We don't know. Commercial-in-confidence. How much has been spent? We don't…

> Ends are important. But for the amount of money spent, so are the bloody means. If the alternative was proposing to do the full project but address all those concerns that would be wonderful. But that is not the choice we have. And it may not be a realistic choice at all. Every single large project like this that has ever been undertaken has had these kind of problems. Look at the east west link in Melbourne - no b…

I don't want perfection. I just want public money to be spent effectively. Infrastructure is important, but we should try to build the right infrastructure, at the right time, in the right way.

In the long run FTTP is the correct solution. In Turnbull's place I would have pushed for a slowdown on the rollout. No matter who does it, the NBN will probably not be finished in this decade.

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