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I want the NBN

iwantthenbn.com

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Re: I want the NBN

#51

Post by XorNot »

nikcub wrote: post #42

The petition grossly oversimplifies the difference in approach between the major parties. The NBN will still be built under the new government, NBN Co. will still exist, the debate isn't so much about FTTN vs FTTH (terms that most Australian's aren't familiar with) nor about copper vs fiber. It is about the tradeoff between delivering higher speeds and the time taken to implement. The coalition plan is prominently te…

Also all those articles about more speed from copper don't go beyond 100m (ethernet distances) or involve pair-bonding copper lines, which means having multiple physical telephone lines to each premises. Which is expensive, inefficient and in many areas not even possible. At which point, the very moment you are sending people out to start trenching cables into the ground, you are wasting money if you are not putting fiber optics in.

You might note that the Australian recently ran an article crowing about how they deployed hybrid solutions to a big apartment block, when in reality it was simply the MDU solution of FTTH - you trunk in fiber lines to the central switchboard, then run ethernet using 4-wires of the existing phone cabling. It delivers 100mbit, but you haven't escaped the problem of needing a fiber network to connect it too.

Re: I want the NBN

#52

Post by XorNot »

joezydeco wrote: post #45
chewxy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the problem. Also, the vox populi interviews in newspaper from older people saying "25 mbps is fast enough" makes me rage so hard. Oh, 25 Mbps is fast enough? So if I were to offer you $25 or $1000 which would you take? Ugh. The NBN is a good idea, but poorly sold to the older generation who cannot seem to grasp the idea of its importance,

I'm someone from an older generation (and I'm also a non-Aussie), so forgive me for asking: What do you need to do at 1Gbps that you can't do at 25Mbps?

It's what can you do with a 40 mbps upload speed that you can't do with 1mbps?

Which is, you know - a lot. In the age of user created content, telecommuting and cloud services being unable to upload faster then 128 kilobytes per second is a killer.

If you're dealing with any type of multimedia content you can be needing to move 10-20 megabytes per cycle between a few people with ease - that time adds up, and it constrains how you work.

Re: I want the NBN

#53

Post by XorNot »

tezza wrote: post #43

I am an expat Australian living in London. Here in Belsize Park I have access to Virgin Media, which is fibre to a closeby yet remote center nearby (FTTN). This is easily good enough for me on the 120Mbit plan. I often get 12 MB/s with suitably fast peers. So I reckon that FTTN would be just fine.

What is the physical wiring coming into your house made of?

Because there is no way you are getting 120 mbit's through telephone copper. If it's not fiber then you're on HFC which means shared coax. In which case, well, that's not happening here because you'd still have to run coax to millions of premises. The type of wiring is not the expensive part.

Re: I want the NBN

#54

Post by another-one-off »

XorNot wrote: post #50
another-one-off wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hurrah, someone who cares about the actual policies. Nikcub has provided an excellent summary of the technical detail of the situation (which I will be relaying to many of my friends). There is a huge amount of ignorance in Australia regarding broadband policy. I enjoy talking to people about the NBN, and I came to suspect that no-one in my sample payed any tax. Or they are just really bad at accounting. Very, very f…

Here's the problem: That $2000 is per house. But its not about the people living in the house, it's about the physical premises being connected to the wider network, just divided up on a "per house" level. That's a piece of infrastructure which will exist 50 years from now. In fact, if technology is any guide, even with upgrades it'll likely exist 200 years from now even if the light going through it is used for very…

(edits: clarity) I divided $43 billion [1] by a population of 22 million, although now I see now that $1,500 would have been better (I read the wrong cost :[). Anyway, it was meant to be a per person, not per house, figure.

The NBN would be a good piece of long-term infrastructure, no argument there. It is better than a cash handout.

I don't think it is sensible to divide up-front cost by years of service. $100/year for 20 years is much cheaper than $2k up front (as a Net Present Value).

If we save the taxpayer $20 billion? Yes, that is a much better deal. Everyone gets 25 Mbps ADSL2+, and people who want fibre (happens to include me, but not the rest of my family) can pay for the last bit of cable work themselves if it makes sense.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network#Expe...

Re: I want the NBN

#55

Post by another-one-off »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #49
another-one-off wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hurrah, someone who cares about the actual policies. Nikcub has provided an excellent summary of the technical detail of the situation (which I will be relaying to many of my friends). There is a huge amount of ignorance in Australia regarding broadband policy. I enjoy talking to people about the NBN, and I came to suspect that no-one in my sample payed any tax. Or they are just really bad at accounting. Very, very f…

Before youtube and skype became mainstrream, your exact same arguments could have been made saying that there weren't enough uses for speeds >= 10k/s. The internet is an evolving system and the bandwidth required to get the most use out of it will increase into the future. In ways that smarter people than I can't even predict. Perhaps with >=1MBps connections we wouldn't need so many people transiting to and from off…

True enough, but the difference between FTTN and FTTP is currently sitting at numbers like 25mbps vs. 100mbps. That isn't even an order-of-magnitude improvement. It isn't worth the cost. If you want to argue that gigabit connections have a great use case, I'd appreciate examples - there should be some in Korea if they exist. Given that I'm all about taxpayer savings, I'd prefer educational/industrial rather than entertainment ones.

If it comes with a profitable business plan, it is a good time to leave it to private enterprise. I'd happily invest in a fibre-laying company if someone offered me the chance. I don't want the Federal government to choose for me.

Re: I want the NBN

#56

Post by joezydeco »

XorNot wrote: post #52
joezydeco wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm someone from an older generation (and I'm also a non-Aussie), so forgive me for asking: What do you need to do at 1Gbps that you can't do at 25Mbps?

It's what can you do with a 40 mbps upload speed that you can't do with 1mbps? Which is, you know - a lot. In the age of user created content, telecommuting and cloud services being unable to upload faster then 128 kilobytes per second is a killer. If you're dealing with any type of multimedia content you can be needing to move 10-20 megabytes per cycle between a few people with ease - that time adds up, and it const…

How much upstream bandwidth is coming from servers and multimedia producers in residences, and how much is coming from mobile devices?

Re: I want the NBN

#57

Post by mikelward »

crazytony wrote: post #25
jpau wrote: post #8

I do really want the NBN to be the best it can be, but I really really really want a proper debate about the issue. Arguments should not be as one-sided as either "the Coalition's plan is crap, because it's slower" or "Labor's plan is crap, because it costs more". Instead, the debate needs to be about whether or not the extra speed is worth the cost. We aren't currently seeing this sort of debate. The Coalition says…

"Instead, the debate needs to be about whether or not the extra speed is worth the cost." How about this: the coalitions plan is crap because it provides less service and less future adaptability at almost three times the unit cost. $44.1b/100mbps estimated FTTH = $0.441b/mbps $29.5b/25mbps estimated FTTN = $1.18b/mbps The numbers get even worse for the coalition when you factor in an additional $2B to the NBN plan t…

Those numbers seem wrong.

The Coalition plan likely involves VDSL2+, which is supposed to do 250 Mbps at the node, and 50 Mbps 1 km from the node, so likely 90%+ of the population would get 50-100 Mbps by 2016. 25 Mbps is the minimum, not the average.

And the NBN was supposed to do 1 Gbps within a few years. But the rollout might be slower.

Add to that that once FTTN is rolled out, it could be upgraded to FTTH/FTTP, for a lot less money, these numbers are really not as easy to compare.

Interesting point about the state of the existing exchanges, copper, etc..

The plan did make a brief comparison to other FTTN roll outs worldwide, e.g. AT&T uVerse. Wonder what problems they faced.

Re: I want the NBN

#58

Post by fphhotchips »

peterkelly wrote: post #20

Step 1 (now): Fibre to the node Step 2 (later, on an incremental basis): Fibre to the home Why do we need to do both steps at the same time? The last mile is incredibly expensive and difficult (as the slow rollout of Labour's scheme has demonstrated). Doing fibre to the node now doesn't stop us from having it to the home at a later point in time, as demands increase.

For one, because the nodes aren't exactly cheap. For two, because the maintenance cost in the meantime is large.

Re: I want the NBN

#59

Post by fphhotchips »

nikcub wrote: post #42

The petition grossly oversimplifies the difference in approach between the major parties. The NBN will still be built under the new government, NBN Co. will still exist, the debate isn't so much about FTTN vs FTTH (terms that most Australian's aren't familiar with) nor about copper vs fiber. It is about the tradeoff between delivering higher speeds and the time taken to implement. The coalition plan is prominently te…

Thanks for a really informative post! You haven't changed my view, exactly, but you've definitely made me more optimistic about the next 3 years.

I guess a lot of this depends on how well NBNCo executes the new vision. Are we steering a speedboat or Clive's Titanic 2?

Re: I want the NBN

#60

Post by XorNot »

joezydeco wrote: post #56
XorNot wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's what can you do with a 40 mbps upload speed that you can't do with 1mbps? Which is, you know - a lot. In the age of user created content, telecommuting and cloud services being unable to upload faster then 128 kilobytes per second is a killer. If you're dealing with any type of multimedia content you can be needing to move 10-20 megabytes per cycle between a few people with ease - that time adds up, and it const…

How much upstream bandwidth is coming from servers and multimedia producers in residences, and how much is coming from mobile devices?

802.11n in your house is 100mbit.

Mobile devices have been used as misdirection throughout the NBN debate, because very few people are uploading large YouTube videos from their smartphones over 3G and for anything that's got some level of production to it they'll be working on it on laptops and desktops at home and the like.

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