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National Broadband Network

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prawn_86 said:
LOL, technical issue im working on... Just a pet project to increase my coding and programming skills
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It was working earlier today, good luck, always good to play around you learn more that way,
the web is great isnt it ?
 
waz said:
K Rudd's plan involves digging a new trench on every road in the city and laying a new cable. Think of those above ground Optus vision cables you see hanging from telegraph poles in the city, only underground to every home in every town.
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Surely the government owns the existing trenches?

Mike.
 
Aurum said:
Surely the government owns the existing trenches?

Mike.
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Unfortunately Telstra does. That was one of the big mistakes made when telecommunications were originally de-regulated and Telstra was privatised. They got to maintain a monopoly on the existing exchanges, last mile twisted pair copper cabling and the tunnels/access etc for said cabling. The only concessions made since then has been allowing competitors to put their own equipment in exchanges and gain direct access to the exchange end of the twisted pair copper - and Telstra had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the courts by the ACCC to even get to that point.

Did you know that we got ASDL in Oz 3-4 years later than in the US because of the above? Telstra initially refused to provide the service and no competitor could either because they were locked out of the exchanges and away from the twisted pair copper! Why? because Telstra had foolishly invested heavily in ISDN equipment and was trying to maintain revenue through their ridiculously expensive and obsolete ISDN access service.

This new project will in effect remove that monopoly from Telstra by building out completely new last mile infrastructure, and keeping it this time separate from the retail service providers. This should create an even playing field for access to that network for all players.

Cheers,

Beej
 
For those who cannot get speeds faster than 1.5Mbps there is a reason for it.
It's not financially viable to give you anything faster unless your willing to pay for it.

In order for the project to succeed, the amount of revenue needs to be more than the cost of servicing the debt on these infrastructure bonds.

The private sector (Telstra, Optus, Mac. Telecom, Powertel/AAPT, etc.) has already cabled the CBD's of Australia with FTTP (Fibre to the premise). This was done as they knew they could make money from it and get a return on their investment. i.e they would earn enough to pay their interest bill on their borrowings and still have money left over as profit. i.e positive EBIT (which some are yet to see)

So this new project will do nothing for them.

Isolated areas were left out as no profit could be made from it. Regardless of who owned the network (private or goverment).

Keep in mind that isolated does not have to mean a country town in the middle of nowhere, you could be just 25km out of the city and still be considerd a remote location as far as technology goes.

Effectively what the government is doing is subsidising broadband. Taking from the city and giving to the country (where most National Party voters are).

Instead of building a new network, the govt. could have just as easily used that amount of money to build a house in the city for every country folk and told them to move.

Australia is a big country, you cant compare broadband speeds over here with what can be achieved in densly populated Asian countries. The laws of economics state that they have that advantage over us and we shouldn't bother trying to compete by using subsidies/protectionism.

God gave us Iron ore/coal/agriculture/vast open spaces. Thats where our advantage over other countries lies.

You win some, you loose some.

Broadband is where we loose.

Yeah I know I've gone a bit of tangent. My point is that world class telecomunications is always going to be expensive and most likely unprofitable when the worlds 5th largest country (around that) is only populated by 21mil people.
 
maybe slightly off topic but still intrested

years ago there was a mob that trialled running broadband through the powerlines in tassie ......... what ever happened to that idea and why didnt it work

i personally think it would have been a mighty viable idea IF it worked as no other main infastructure needed at time

any ideas ?

p.s it was an ozzie listed co , anyone remeber who it was ?
 
Canada, a somewhat more socialist country than Australia, made it a priority over a decade ago to have every home supplied with the option of high speed internet. Today it is still one of the fastest networks i have ever used. Even my small home town of 1000 people has access to this network.

At the time, the Telco was still state owned, and privatized after the network upgrade i believe.

Cheers,


CanOz
 
C'mon guys and girls,

Don't you know your history? Go look at what the American Government policy was in relation to telecommunications (and other infrastructure) has been during economic declines in the past. The rise of Microsoft and the position of America as undisputed champions of software for manay many years go back to their efforts in the '70's and '80's and infrastructure spending during economic decline lead to massive economic gains. It resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars entering the american economy over decades. Which politician wouldn't want that eh?

Krudd is trying to use the same tactic. Of course he and his advisers seem to think that the way of the future is to run a physical cable to every house and don't seem to see the problem with this concept because hey it'll employ a bunch of people and it worked in the past right?

So big Kev can you just answer me these questions about your policy to reassure me that it isn't a kneejerk reaction and an attempt to improve your popularity rating.

Questions on cable...

Do you expect that the population of Australia will increase? Coz won't continued building and increasing populations mean that ultimately you'll need to lay more cable in the future? And more cable in the future, and yet more cable in the future? Are you trying to create jobs by suggesting cable should be the backbone of Australia's telecommunication needs going forward? Why is taking an approach that picks off one household at a time better than taking an approach that has an area effect and doesn't care how many people live within a certain patch of dirt?.

Satellites
Wouldn't spending 15 billions dollars on a whizz bang satellite that you own, that can cover those pesky rural voters, can cover those whiney city slickers, and maybe even (Shock horror) make extra money by selling excess capacity to New Zealand and South East Asia, and be able to be sold via all existing telecommunications providers in the country and still provide you with a tidy mark-up be a BETTER IDEA?

Every indication I have seen is that wireless will become more and more the focus and cable less and less. Why is it that when I set up a satellite connection recently, the satelitte I'm tuned into is somewhere over Asia?



Moronic policy

Sir O
 

I would have thought the noise insulation would make it cost prohibitive.

CanOz
 
From Crikey -

 
waz said:
For those who cannot get speeds faster than 1.5Mbps there is a reason for it.
It's not financially viable to give you anything faster unless your willing to pay for it.
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I'm aware of that, and that wasn't my point. It was people stating that they don't need any higher speed because they already have decent speed. That's great for you. But it's insular for people to say "I won't get anything out of this because I already have high speed."
 
Argue all you like about whether it should be private or public, fibre or copper, to the node or to the bone... but please, please, don't talk about too much bandwidth being on offer.

Until you can switch on one pipe into your home running at 100Mb/s+ that provides cable TV, video telephony, true online gaming, educational services etc.... that's when we can finally start to see why this whole Internet thing was started in the first place. Until then we're just fumbling around in the dark.

I'll never forget using a 2400bps modem and thinking that a 1Mb/s connection would herald the ultimate user experience.
 


$43b? up from what wasn't it $8 or $9b?
in 8 years?
so the govt is spending $35b on setting up a new consulting/contracting firm to outsource the work to everyone else?
This is an unbelievable result, but I guess the governments ignorance shouldn't surprise, they're in the business of buying votes.
I will piss myself if they end up trying to privatise the NBN when it's finished and it ends up going back to Telstra, or they create Telstra2.
How the hell is the government going to build a broadband network in 8 years, or start it in 8 years, or bring it in under $100b?
Wouldn't mind a job with the government in doing this, I'm up for wasting government/public money when I lose my current job
 
Aurum said:
Maybe because the only geostationary orbits are over the equator.

Mike.
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Point.

Perhaps I should have said however that I'm connected to a satellite owned by an asian country rather than an Australian one? Does that make it better?
 
nunthewiser said:
i cant remember the mechanics of it canoz, just wondering if anyone knew what happened with it
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I don't believe it lived up to it's promise of being able to offer fast and/or reliable speeds... another idea that died a quiet death.

marcadrian said:
I'll never forget using a 2400bps modem and thinking that a 1Mb/s connection would herald the ultimate user experience.
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300bps.. you had to turn the switches at the right point to connect, I win


The Internet was created as a failover communication network for military communication in the event of a nuclear war.. not for any of those things you talk about. They've come later by folk as to what the Internet should be able to deliver. You can video conference, stream near-HD videos, stream full and all of these things with 10mbps speeds (or even lower), yet barely anybody uses those services now, and it is not due to speed. It is due to not that many local companies stepping up to the plate and developing these services which can be both profitable to them, and affordable to the consumer. Telstra offers "Bigpond movies" for download, but who here is using it? If not, why do people even want a superfast broadband network if you're not even using what is available presently?

This is why I question the point of offering something 5 times faster without these services reaching critical mass, and everyday people requesting it. The underlying technology is there to develop these things right now, but the implementation is lagging, simply putting a large road in front of somebody doesn't mean it's going to be full of cars. Without money being spent on the services side of things then it's only half the equation.
 
Internet connection speeds between two connections are determined by whichever one has the lowest connection speed. The connecting cable inbetween may be capable of running at 40 megabytes per second but if connection "A" only has a 10 megabit modem/router and connection "B" has a 100 megabit modem/Router speed, the download/upload connection will only operate at maximum of 10 megabits per second.
Many local area networks are set up to run inhouse at 1 Gigabit per second (Routers, Switches, and Network Interface Cards) and they will run full duplex 1000 megabit (equals 1 Gigabit) speed for traffic between the server and the work station. However as soon as they connect the same network to the internet, through the standard 10 megabit modem/router, you guessed it, the fastest they will ever run (accessing the internet) is 10 megabits per second.
Rolling out broadband is only part of the solution, to faster communications. You also need to upgrade modems/routers to allow the end user to fully take advantage of network speed cababilities. There is also the issue of shared band-with in your street/area which determines how fast your cable connection runs. The more people connected, the more the band-with is shared (diluted) and the slower your connection.
 
Interesting... of course I expect it will have a great big frickin' firewall in front thanks to Senator Conroy :007: and we'll be back to dial-up speeds!

m.
 
marklar said:
Interesting... of course I expect it will have a great big frickin' firewall in front thanks to Senator Conroy :007: and we'll be back to dial-up speeds!

m.
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Meh.

Got 8 years to chew the fat??

Or more likely 10+ if things don't work out as planned. The chances of this puppy being "on time, on budget" is going to be remote as hell.

Oh well, I'll be 68 by then and past caring....

LOL
 
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