Speaking up about the NBN is not supporting Labor or Conroy, but if you work for serious company's that chew data and or watch the exponential increase in internet traffic and the technologies driving it then you will wonder why people just don't do a little bit of research and understand it.
This is a bit of a long winded post. Skip to the last sentence if you just want the summary.
I think the point that many would implicitly question is whether or not there is much benefit in all that data in the first place?
The internet now is a bit like road traffic or electricity in the 1960's. It's been around long enough to become "critical" but still has huge annual growth rates which are now starting to require some serious infrastructure to support them.
People started worrying about roads when they started being put up on pillars and being "cut through" long established areas of significance to the community. Add in the huge financial cost of building them, the 1970's oil crises and the smog (and if you're under 35 you probably don't realise just how polluted even Australian cities used to be prior to emissions control improvements on cars) and the opinion of the general public and governments started to shift away from the "car is king" mentality. In any event, what was the actual point of all that traffic and all those roads? Do we really want every city to look like Los Angeles?
Electricity was much the same. Demand went up 10% per annum and that was taken for granted. Nobody really questioned where all the power was going or what the real point of it was. We just built more and bigger power stations with more and bigger coal mines to supply them. Nobody worried too much until Lake Pedder, Three Mile Island, the Franklin River, Chernobyl and what was then termed "the greenhouse effect" became household terms. Throw in the soaring financial costs, technological innovation improving energy efficiency and the realisation that it was only a matter of time until the Latrobe Valley ended up as one huge hole in the ground and opinions shifted.
Car use per capita peaked some years ago and is now trending down in much of the developed world. The car is no longer king. Electricity did the same, indeed it is declining in absolute terms not just per capita in Australia. Life has carried on quite well without doubling road traffic and power generation every 7 years it seems.
The same goes for water although I don't have the figures. Concern about the environmental effects and cost plus the need for ever more elaborate infrastrucuture changed the game there too. Building a few dams around Melbourne (for example) is one thing. Once you come to the point where you need to either dam every last creek in Victoria or bring the water from Queensland, Tasmania or a desalination plant well then things are getting out of hand somewhat. Life has carried on without hosing the driveway every weekend or leaving the sprinkler running all night.
The same questions could be asked of the internet. What, exactly, is the real world benefit of all this data? What can I actually do with 100 MBPS that I can't do with ADSL2+ or for that matter plain ADSL? What is the actual benefit here?
1. Like other industries before it, the internet started with growth of its' own and in due course moved onto replacement of pre-existing industries. First comes the obvious major benefits such as email instead of snail mail, the web instead of newspapers or cars instead of horse & cart. No questions there.
2. Next come the second level benefits. Things like downloading music or social networks. Or electric vacuum cleaners instead of dust pans and brushes. There are clear advantages over previous technology, even though we did previously have a means of achieving essentially the same end result.
3. Then we come to the point where further growth is really only replacing some other technology that does much the same with a relatively minor benefit. Downloading TV instead of watching / recording broadcast TV. Buses instead of trams. Electric clothes dryers instead of a Hills hoist. Etc. A key point here is that the service must be kept cheap in order to sustain this growth. Cheap diesel will favour buses over trams, cheap electricity and people will use it to dry clothes or heat buildings. But if it's expensive then that demand disappears due to being of relatively minor advantage compared to alternatives.
4. Then finally we come to growth for the sake of it. I don't know what the internet equivalent will be but think in terms of running down railways to the point that they cease to function thus putting everything on the roads. Or banning the installation of gas mains in new subdivisions so as to force the use of electricity. At that point it is growth for the sake of growth, with no real benefit to the community.
I read only a few days ago about a game which you play it mostly by yourself. However, it won't work without being connected to the company's server even though there is no real need for it to work this way since you're playing by yourself. Apparently the servers aren't coping, people aren't happy and even the geeks have realised that there's no actual need for it to work this way. That's stage 4 behaviour - consumption for the sake of it, rather than for an actual reason.
The NBN is essentially based on the notion that level 3 uses are driving up data volumes and that this will continue. There are benefits, but marginal utility is declining and in due course we end up at stage 4.
The unanswered question in all of this is where do we eventually end up? At some point the growth in data traffic will end, and it is already at the point of being price sensitive (nobody's would even think of downloading TV at the data costs which prevailed a few years ago). In other words, how much capacity do we actually need to build, before demand flattens out and it becomes pointless?
Will household demand for data actually exceed the capabilities of FTTN? Simply looking at current growth rates does not answer this question since in due course that growth will end.
Replacing the copper network because it is in a poor state and Telstra are difficult to deal with, rather than an a genuine need for FTTP rather than FTTN, is the rational reason to build FTTP now. If we had a good copper network and didn't have to deal with Telstra then FTTN would make sense given the uncertainty of future data demand. But if we have to replace it anyway then we may as well go all the way given that there won't be much difference in cost.