NBN Rollout Scrapped

[So_Cynical]

Be thankful they're doing copper remediation in your area. I'd be interested to know what suburb.

I believe they were budgeting for about 10% remediation over the FTTN footprint. If they can honestly get away with around 50% I'd be surprised.

Western Sydney but not the far west, Parramatta area...they are fair dinkum digging up half the street, they replaced every pit due to Asbestos and have now replaced all the 6 neighboring unit block property's, junction or pit to property building...completely replacing the old Telstra line, copper for copper = crazy.

 

[sydboy007]

Western Sydney but not the far west, Parramatta area...they are fair dinkum digging up half the street, they replaced every pit due to Asbestos and have now replaced all the 6 neighboring unit block property's, junction or pit to property building...completely replacing the old Telstra line, copper for copper = crazy.

I had hoped MT would see sense and if initial testing o the copper showed a majority would need to be replaced they'd just do fibre instead since the costs are comparable.

Seems that hope is for nought.

In the years ahead this will be viewed as the greatest economic vandalism to tax payers.

 

[Calliope]

In the years ahead this will be viewed as the greatest economic vandalism to tax payers.

Actually it is now.I'm not surprised seeing that is was devised by two clowns on the back of a paper napkin during a four hour vip flight. Cost Benefit Analysis was a foreign language to these guys.

But it is good to see that you have a new-found concern for taxpayers which is normally alien to your Labor/Greens.

 

[drsmith]

The latest update has the brownfields network now passing 373,708 premises.

http://www.nbnco.com.au/content/dam/nbnco/documents/nbnco-rollout-metrics-15062014.pdf

 

[drsmith]

$150m FTTN rollout pilot signed between Telstra and NBN Co.

NBN Co and Telstra have signed a deal worth about $150 million to connect 206,000 homes and businesses with the Coalition’s preferred fibre-to-the-node technology.

The deal, whose negotiation was first revealed by The Australian Financial Review , means Telstra builds the national broadband network in mostly regional areas across NSW and Queensland with construction taking around 12 months.

These include Gympie and Bundaberg in Queensland as well as Hamilton and Warner in NSW.

If successful, Telstra’s pilot will be one of the biggest fibre-to-the-node rollouts and could help it win billions of dollars worth of NBN deals.

http://www.afr.com/p/technology/telstra_in_nbn_fibre_deal_2UhvyideUybBooTZ3nXFBI

 

[sydboy007]

http://www.zdnet.com/is-the-nbn-strategic-reviews-terminal-value-terminally-wrong-7000030856/

That whole objective was all but rubbished by NBN Co chairman Ziggy Switkowski, who has publicly conceded that the project needs to ramp up so aggressively as to be all but impossible to achieve under current guidelines. The Coalition has yet to offer a clear strategy about how and when the company is going to ramp up to roll out what Switkowski has conceded must be 100,000 premises per month for the next eight years.

The NBN Strategic Review addresses terminal-value calculations on just one page (p107), explaining that its internal rate of return (IRR) calculation of 5.3 percent is based on a terminal value of $45 billion in FY2040.

This valuation is “mechanically” calculated as being six times EBITDA for the theoretical revenues of NBN Co some 25 years from now – and 15 years after 2025, when by Ziggy Switkowski's own reckoning NBN Co will have already started to transition to a FTTP model.

By 2040, the actual NBN – the one based on the fibre that the Coalition refuses to pay for now – will have been built and will be based fully on fibre. Real revenues will therefore be based not on the services the government wants to build over its MTM model now, but on those that will have become capable over the FTTP network as it comes online.

The question to ask, then, is simple: Does the $45 billion terminal value assigned in the NBN Strategic Review seem reasonable?

In other words, in 1997, 1999 and 2006 the market valued Telstra at 6.5, 17 and 8.2 times EBITDA to give it market values of $43 billion, $100 billion, and $33 billion on revenues of $15,983b, $17.571b, and $22.75b respectively.

These figures would seem to support the 6-times-EBITDA metric – but can we therefore assume that NBN Co in 2040 will have an EBITDA of $7.5 billion?

That terminal value basically depends on NBN Co becoming a money-spinner on the scale of what Telstra was when it was sold off to the market. And that's a big ask – but a necessary one if the NBNSR is to hold water. Were the actual terminal value to be, say, 25 percent lower by that point, the Coalition's entire revenue model would be thrown into chaos – and its decision to forego a more-profitable FTTP network revealed as being highly questionable indeed.

 

[drsmith]

Brownfield premises passed to June 30 is 381,146.

http://www.nbnco.com.au/content/dam/nbnco2/documents/nbnco-rollout-metrics-30062014.pdf

 

[bellenuit]

New Internet speed record blows past Google Fiber

Bell Labs researchers just broke the broadband Internet speed record.
It is eight times faster than the previous record -- and it was done over copper landlines.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/10/tec...ternet-speed-record/index.html?iid=SF_T_River

 

[Knobby22]

Wow!

Bell Labs says that XG-FAST can provide up to 10 gigabits per second over a distance of up to 30 meters.

Bell Labs' test was done in -- you guessed it -- a lab. In the real world, there are plenty of factors that can reduce Internet speeds traveling over copper lines, including the thickness of the cable, signals picked up by other nearby cables and the length of the wire.

Wake me up when they can do it over 300 metres in real world conditions. Still good though. Also nice to see the US using the metric system.

 

[boofhead]

Did you read the details? 30 metre length of copper, bonded pair. In a lab. I can see it being beneficial for apartment blocks, office blocks etc but for stand alone dwellings I can't see it being overly practical with many cabinets needed per street. Then add in extra electricity costs, $89 million for FTTN power

 

[bellenuit]

Did you read the details? 30 metre length of copper, bonded pair. In a lab. I can see it being beneficial for apartment blocks, office blocks etc but for stand alone dwellings I can't see it being overly practical with many cabinets needed per street. Then add in extra electricity costs, $89 million for FTTN power

Of course I read the details. It has uses as you mentioned and the whole point about Turnbull's alternative implementation strategy is to use technology that is available where it is cost effective to do so. This isn't yet available, but may become usable at some stage.

The other point worth noting is that even though the 10 gigabits per second was achieved in lab condition on a 30M length, the technology does not appear to be limited to 30M stretches. What if they can get acceptable speeds, but not 10 gigabits per second, on 200M+ stretches. That would avoid having more cabinets than are currently planned.

 

[So_Cynical]

Of course I read the details. It has uses as you mentioned and the whole point about Turnbull's alternative implementation strategy is to use technology that is available where it is cost effective to do so. This isn't yet available, but may become usable at some stage.

The other point worth noting is that even though the 10 gigabits per second was achieved in lab condition on a 30M length, the technology does not appear to be limited to 30M stretches. What if they can get acceptable speeds, but not 10 gigabits per second, on 200M+ stretches. That would avoid having more cabinets than are currently planned.

The devil is in the detail...

As always with new copper wire technologies, XG.fast’s massive speeds mostly stem from its use of a larger frequency range. While VDSL2 only uses a 17 or 30MHz block of spectrum, G.fast allows for up to 212MHz, and XG.fast uses a massive 500MHz. It’s pretty much the same thing as WiFi: You could only squeeze so much data into the small 20MHz channel available in the 2.4GHz band — but you can cram a whole lot more into the 80MHz and 160MHz channels available at 5GHz.

The problem with squeezing 500MHz over a copper wire, though, is that higher frequencies attenuate (weaken) very quickly. Couple this with crosstalk (interference from the other copper wire in the twisted pair) and your effective range becomes very short. For VDSL2, max wire length is around 400 meters if you want 150Mbps; for 1.25Gbps G.fast, max distance drops to just 70 meters. For 10Gbps XG.fast, Bell Labs is reporting a max distance of just 30 meters (100 feet). For the slower version of XG.fast, clocked at 1Gbps symmetrical (2Gbps total), the researchers managed a range of 70 meters (230 feet).

And its a record for speed over copper.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...hone-line-a-new-world-record-set-by-bell-labs

Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs has managed to set a new world record for data transmission over copper lines — you know, the presumably "crappy" copper connection between your house and a local node, and the very thing that your ISP is likely balking at ever replacing with fiber-optic connectivity, due to the cost.

http://au.pcmag.com/news/13100/bell-labs-hits-10gbps-on-copper-lines

 

[sydboy007]

Of course I read the details. It has uses as you mentioned and the whole point about Turnbull's alternative implementation strategy is to use technology that is available where it is cost effective to do so. This isn't yet available, but may become usable at some stage.

The other point worth noting is that even though the 10 gigabits per second was achieved in lab condition on a 30M length, the technology does not appear to be limited to 30M stretches. What if they can get acceptable speeds, but not 10 gigabits per second, on 200M+ stretches. That would avoid having more cabinets than are currently planned.

Yet G.PON already does this over vastly longer cable lengths NOW. GPON doesn't require bleeding edge technology. What the original FTTN was rolling out was off the shelf 3rd to 4th generation technology. Cheap and reliable with well known performance chacteristics due to millions upon millions of installations around the world.

The other main issue is the use of bonded pairs ie using 2 copper lines for a 4 wire service. To achieve that in the real world would require massive investment in laying more copper. Why go down that path when fibre provides a superior service?

So pretty much any copper tech that requires bonded pairs will have little use for a country wide FTTN project. It MAY be useful in an office building, but only small ones. 30M is really barely useful for the internal cabling of a building. Unless it was possible to install mini media converters in the building you'd MAYBE get a few of the offices closest to the MDF within 30M, a few more at 100M, assuming there's enough spare copper pairs to make the service possible.

 

[drsmith]

Some senate committee action yesterday,

THE company cha*rged with *delivering Australia high-speed broadband could still provide fibre-to-the-premises to more than 80 per cent of homes, despite the government’s pre-election preference for a fibre-to-the-node network.

NBN Co chief executive Bill Morrow told a senate committee hearing neither the government nor voters would be “upset” if 80 per cent or 90 per cent of customers received broadband through fibre-to-the premises *instead of fibre-to-the-network ”” provided it was the cheapest.

“We are not giving up on fibre-to-the-prem, I’ve heard no one say fibre-to-the-prem is bad,” he said. “ It’s just more costly than fibre-to-the-node in the analysis that was done that I’ve trusted and (am) running with.

“I don’t think it would upset anybody; in fact, I think people would be proud and happy with that fact that we’re not taking a technology-specific option, we’re agnostic.”

Mr Turnbull’s spokesman said Mr Morrow had done “a magnificent job” and that NBN Co had met its June 30 targets “for the first time in its history”.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/bus...o-reach-majority/story-e6frgaif-1226986152979

 

[drsmith]

New Internet speed record blows past Google Fiber

Bell Labs researchers just broke the broadband Internet speed record.
It is eight times faster than the previous record -- and it was done over copper landlines.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/10/tec...ternet-speed-record/index.html?iid=SF_T_River

The AFR in a recent article has expanded a little more in this,

http://www.afr.com/p/technology/broadband_race_shifts_up_gear_M1xovZkYk07iE0LqjdEM5L

Meanwhile, NBN Co loses a $200m court case with Telstra over their original deal,

http://www.afr.com/p/technology/telstra_beats_nbn_co_in_case_oLeJCf791cxhlxdVl13mtN

 

[sydboy007]

Hopefully the ACCC decides to keep protecting consumers rather than giving Telstra and the Govt a free kick. Got to laugh they still haven't been able to get power to the trial nodes in Epping VIC as yet.

http://www.businessspectator.com.au...l&utm_content=844223&utm_campaign=kgb&modapt=

So what does the government do? Turnbull and Cormann write to Sims arguing that the 2011 agreement between NBN Co and Telstra should be ignored during the ACCC’s public inquiry into making Final Access Determinations (FADs) for the declared fixed-line services.

Arguing that a determination by the ACCC leading to a downward adjustment of fixed-line service pricing is bad for consumers beggars belief. What a ham-fisted attempt to influence the ACCC, a regulator that is required to take into account all reasonable information and industry pricing agreements when setting regulated prices.

To fail to include the 2011 agreement would lead to chaos where other companies will argue that their pricing agreements should be ignored.

If the ACCC complies with the government’s wishes then it is important that the decision be tested in court. Any suggestion that consumers should pay higher prices to utilise the obsolete and degrading CAN is unacceptable and demonstrates the level of desperation surrounding Turnbull’s office at the moment.

You might think the government would be interested in protecting the interests of 22 million Australian consumers... but you would be wrong.

The government letter states, “the terms agreed by Telstra, NBN Co and the government were approved by Telstra’s 1.4 million shareholders in October 2011. It will undermine the integrity of this deal if Telstra shareholders are deprived of the benefit of arrangements they did not initiate but negotiated in good faith.”

Wait a minute. Why would the government intervene to protect Telstra shareholder interests?

Can you remember the last time a Coalition government espousing an 'open and competitive market' mantra intervened to protect the interests of shareholders in what might be considered to be a regulated monopoly fixed-line infrastructure provider?

 

[Bintang]

Wait a minute. Why would the government intervene to protect Telstra shareholder interests?

It would be interesting to know the collective TLS holdings (if any) of our Federal members.

Ethically I agree with you sydboy but how many politicians these days actually make any decisions or act based on what is best ethically.

I've given up on all of them - both sides of the political divide as well as the ones on the fringe. They all walk around with the same hats on their heads labelled - SELF INTEREST.

So as a substantial TLS shareholder I'm inclined to don the same hat that they wear and say 'bravo Mr. Turbull'.

 

[DB008]

The Libs still want copper hey?


Danish researchers break fibre-optic data transfer record

Researchers in Denmark have broken the record for the high-speed transmission of data across a fibre-optic cable.

Using a new type of optical fibre supplied by Japanese telecoms company NTT, the High-Speed Optical

Communications (HSOC) team at DTU Fotonik transferred data at 43Tbps.

It was achieved using a single laser with a new type of optical fibre cable that contains seven cores made of glass instead of the single core used in standard fibres, allowing it to squeeze through more data.

The achievement smashes the previous record set by the German research team at the Karlsruhe Institut fur Technologie, which stood at 32Tbps.

Researchers at DTU first broke the 1Tbps barrier in March 2009 using a single laser. Their progress was swift, seeing that figure rise to 5.1Tbps five months later, going on to hit 9.5Tbps in 2011.

http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/danish-researchers-break-fibre-optic-data-transfer-speed-record-1259938

 

[noco]

The NBN....just another botched Green/Labor left wing socialist thought bubble.........$43 billion planned on the back of a beer coaster in 11 weeks by Conroy and Rudd......how shambolic.....What a disgrace!!!

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/bus...aotic-says-audit/story-e6frgaif-1227013441446

 

[sydboy007]

The NBN....just another botched Green/Labor left wing socialist thought bubble.........$43 billion planned on the back of a beer coaster in 11 weeks by Conroy and Rudd......how shambolic.....What a disgrace!!!

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/bus...aotic-says-audit/story-e6frgaif-1227013441446

The Liberal FTTN. Stalled in Epping VIC because they can't get power to the nodes. Now that's incompetency for ya. I wonder how many other suburbs will face the same fate as Epping?? Supposedly they had a fully worked out plan to do a nation wide rollout in 3.3 years. Not looking so good on that score now. Close to a year in office and they've got 1 test result for the public of FTTN and another for FTTB.

Then we have a $150M money throw to Telstra. No open tender for the work. For a Government all about open free markets and competition, how does that stand up with giving a very large amount of money to Telstra without seeing if they could get a better deal from someone else? Maybe they could have done a deal with TPG / Optus, or tendered out for FTTB trials. I'd love to know what Turnbull was expecting in return from Telstra on awarding them such a lucrative contract.

Only good thing about this report is the call for any Govt investment over $1B to have a full CBA done. Hopefully that includes Abbott's broken promises on roads funding. Why invest in a Melbourne road tunnel that provides 80c in economic return for every $ invested?? If the debt ain't self liquidating then it just increased the burden on the rest of us.