Australia's $44B Broadband Network May Settle For Fiber Near the Home 229
Garabito writes "In April 2009, Australia's then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, dropped a bombshell on the press and the global technology community: His social democrat Labor administration was going to deliver broadband Internet to every single resident of Australia. It was an audacious goal, not least of all because Australia is one of the most sparsely populated countries on Earth. ... So now, after three years of planning and construction, during which workers connected some 210 000 premises (out of an anticipated 13.2 million), Australia's visionary and trailblazing initiative is at a crossroads. The new government plans to deploy fiber only to the premises of new housing developments. For the remaining homes and businesses — about 71 percent — it will bring fiber only as far as curbside cabinets, called nodes. Existing copper-wire pairs will cover the so-called last mile to individual buildings."
Don't they have an fiber to the node cable network (Score:3)
Don't they have an fiber to the node cable network in place now? why not just build off of that?
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No. Most people don't have cable, but instead have ADSL over copper phone lines from the interchange to the home. Pay TV is not ubiquitous, and AFAIK is mostly served via satellite. I live in a fairly typical suburb and the interchange is a few kilometres away, so max download speed is around 4-5 Kb/s.
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max download speed is around 4-5 Kb/s.
Either you have a typo there, or you should consider upgrading to a modem from the 80's ;)
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It's also not available to all people within that area. I live in an area covered by both Telstra and Optus cable, but can connect to neither since I live in a unit. Neither Telstra nor Optus will connect their HFC network to units.
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The biggest issue with HFC is the shared medium. NBNCo fibre uses a 2.5/1.2Gbit OLT with a 32 or 64-split GPON local loop, a design that shares many of the same issues and has a maximum design speed compariable with FTTN w/VDSL local loops (~100Mbit). The biggest benefit of fibre is being able to deliver 100Mbit over 20KMs instead of 300m with DSL technology.
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That cable you have isn't the same as what the NBN was doing. It is a hybrid coax.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fibre-coaxial [wikipedia.org]
The fibre is downstream only, not upstream.
My rubbish ADSL beats your upstream by double yet my downstream is 10Mbit.
Hence the massive flaw with HFC.
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I dont know what you call common but if you dont live in expensive parts of Sydney or Melbourne, you have no cable.
Over 90% of the urban areas inside major cities (300,000+ population) have no cable, let alone fibre and are on ASDL which is at best 24 mbit down and 1 mbit up however the average is much lower, around 5 Mbit down for ADSL.
Fibre optic is not common in the major cities.
There are places not covered by the 1996 cabling (Score:3)
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Good for you. However, you're not in the majority. In reality, what you have depends on your suburb. All the new developments (ie. in the last 10 years) are serviced by Satelite for Pay-TV and DSL for Internet. It's only the really new developments (last 2 years) that have fibre.
Everyone in my suburb has a DSLproblem. The DSLAMs in most areas are full and Telstra won't upgrade. Mine is about 5km away (as the crow flies), so give it about 7km of crappy copper. Every time it rains, I lose my interne
Re:Don't they have an fiber to the node cable netw (Score:5, Informative)
When you say 'cable', are you referring to cable as in US-style cable TV (and internet, using DOCSIS)?
If so, then no, most areas of Australia do not have this. Subscription TV is delivered by satellite in virtually all areas of Australia, save for small sections of urban Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Far more cost effective for such a big and sparsely settled continent. So the cable footprint would be lucky to cover 5 or 10% of the population.
Currently most people in Australia get their internet via ye olde copper phone line using ADSL2+ (which can provide up to 24 Mbps if you have a short line, but degrades rapidly and can barely push a few Mbps at distances of 4-6 km, depending on the quality and gauge of line).
FTTN rollout would thus require that nodes be built, branching out from or replacing the current telephone exchanges/central offices (where lines currently terminate) so that they would be no further than a few hundred metres from any given house, and leverage the existing phone lines as much as possible to cover the remaining distance. You can push 50-100 Mbps using VDSL2 over these kind of distances. But only if the lines are in good condition (which they aren't, in many cases).
It should also be pointed out that most newer areas (built in the last 10 years or so) already have fibre right to the door, and also that some parts of the original FTTH NBN network have already been completed (I have some friends that are already on it, at 100 Mbps). But the rollout is still only 10% complete at most.
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I should point out, if you're American, that some parts of AT&T's U-verse service are precisely this - fibre to the node, then VDSL to the premises. Not true in all areas though - U-verse also uses ADSL2+ and even some ADSL1 in some areas still, I believe.
Compare to Verizon FiOS which is a true FTTH service.
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Verizon FiOS is FTToutsideofTH, not fiber to the router. They actually use cable (as in nasty TV connectors) to link the fiber termination box to the TV cable box and the WiFi router.
It actually makes it more flexible to install and doesn't impact bandwidth given the reach, but it's fundamentally no different than fiber to the curb.
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I think the Australian FTTH proposal technically only delivers fibre to the 'outside' of the house too. Or more exactly, it's fibre to the ONT (Optical Network Termination). The installers will then run CAT6/ethernet to a point inside the house for you (or multiple points if you want to pay for it).
Don't quote me on it but I believe the ONT can be placed either inside or outside the building, or in a garage etc. Depends on the particular house.
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Makes sense.
Pulling fiber through existing walls is a pain, when cable can just be rammed through, and most people can't be trusted with optical fibers and connectors: "look Ma, I can bend it along the edge of the shelf and then loop it around that nail, stop kneading and give me a hand"
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Don't quote me on it but I believe the ONT can be placed either inside or outside the building, or in a garage etc. Depends on the particular house.
I can confirm that is generally correct for FIOS (so I can't imagine why it wouldn't be in Oz), since at my old house it was inside, my current one it is outside, and I've visited homes with it in the garage.
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NBN doesn't use compatible GigE technology, so you wouldn't be able to use an fibre SFP or switch anyway. NBN's even heavily customised the firmware on the NTUs so nothing is quite standard.
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You can do Ethernet to the ONT if you want to, which can eliminate the Verizon router inside altogether (if you don't use them for TV). To upgrade to gigabit you need a new ONT usually, but the system can easily accommodate gigabit throughout.
AT&T's service is a mess in comparison. I've had several friends who needed the 30-year old copper replaced at least from the street to the demark point.
Today using FTTN as anything but a stopgap to FTTH is really a joke.
For Australia, the original goal and benef
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Not unless you are almost close enough to spit on the node. Look up how far you can run ethernet for details. Not much good for sprawling suburbs, which is a lot of them. Those in rural areas can just forget about it.
Correct. Now the man that was in charge of that service provider back when it started being a problem is in charge
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Not New York (Score:2)
Most of these places are single homes and not apartment buildings. Also even most of the apartment don't have basements
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U-verse did include FTTP at one point: I had fiber to my router in an apartment I lived in 3 years ago. However, U-verse is now nothing in particular since AT&T have rolled all of their residential data offerings under the U-verse banner, including sub-1Mbps DSL that they will still sell as U-verse service.
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So New Zealand has better internal than Australia? Ha Ha.
We've got ADSL2+ and VDSL with fibre going to street cabinets where homes are more than a few km from exchanges.
TelstraClear was gloating about their fibre to the node before they pulled out of the country and sold themselves to Vodafone when the government said they would over-build their DOCSIS network.
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Subscription TV is delivered by satellite in virtually all areas of Australia, save for small sections of urban Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Far more cost effective for such a big and sparsely settled continent. So the cable footprint would be lucky to cover 5 or 10% of the population.
It's actually about 28% of the population. http://delimiter.com.au/2013/02/15/turnbull-confirms-hfc-areas-last-to-get-fttn-if-at-all/ [delimiter.com.au]
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And Perth.
I only add this becase there's a whackjob on one of the Australian tech forums who - despite living in Perth himself, repeatedly being presented with lists of suburbs that are cabled, and provided with first-hand information from customers connected to it - likes to claim there's no Foxtel cable in Perth.
He's such a whackjob that he's likely to use your com
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Everyone knows ?
I don't.
Using cables has an enormous advantage:
It doesn't foul up the RF spectrum (or not as much as with Radio emitters).
Wireless may be a lot more convenient (in terms of equipment connectivity and installation), but has some serious capacity limitations:
- RF spectrum occupancy. (In which they will be in competition with : TV, radio, satellite, baby cams, wifi, Air traffic control, police, the list goes on and on and on...)
- Limited number of possible clients for each location and frequenc
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The current governments plan is to obey the order of Fox not-News boss Rupert Murdoch. That is stop broadband. So first step, stop new FTTH services, so they are only carrying out existing contracted services. Next step FTN, well, they are not going to do it, quite simply they are going to spend the next three odd years talking about doing it and then of course just prior to the next election change their minds and go back to FTTH, they really truly promise (After setting is place as many obstructions as p
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Meanwhile Ziggy, destroyer of Telstra, is already swinging the axe around in the NBN. Soon nothing will be standing apart from the accounts section that delivers millions into his bank account.
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The copper is old, has be patched up over years. The fixes are usually to get the service working again - as in data and voice - not a real repair. So a lot of copper lines are now shared and the amount of spare lines has dropped over many years.
Back at the exchange you have an adsl 2+ card via your isp or the telco (rented). Hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) exists by only for the push of pay tv and in
government fibre to your house? (Score:2)
THAT'S SOCIALISM!... oh wait. ;)
yelling? me? no way, slashdot filter!
Fuck you Rupert Murdoch! (Score:4, Insightful)
Rich prick didn't like the idea of losing his total control of media, so began a relentless attack of the previous government using the current media he has at his control. All sorts of brainwashing techniques were used. It worked.
We had a chance and we blew it.
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His mother died this year. Expect another decade or two from him, plus he's got the dynasty thing going.
Re:Fuck you Rupert Murdoch! (Score:5, Insightful)
What killed the National Broadband Network as a progressive fibre-based infrastructure project was the politicisation of a technical project. The Parliament (not the Government), having decided to do the project should have allocated the money to the project for the next ten years, got the **** out of the way, and stayed there. However, at the time we had a corrosive opposition party that saw an opportunity to pester an internally fragile, and later minority, government. They could not let cheap political points lie for the greater good. That they had the help of certain vested commercial interests is not surprising, but that was only possible while the political division continued. Had the same politcial effort been put into constructive endeavours aimed at furthering the project we would still have a fibre-to-the-home network project, that was not in danger of being canned entirely (my prediction), and Murdoch and the shock-jocks would have been neutered.
surprise! it takes money! (Score:2)
and unless you have a New York City density, it takes more money than you can ever get a return on to run FTTH to every hobbit hole and cabin. now, you can remote gig etherswitches and run spokes of fiber off that to cut the cost of cable placement, and you can subtend more dslams on short runs from a control unit, but if you have copper in the ground, it's still valuable. you can punch 100 Mbit/sec from a dslam from 750 or so feet on copper pair, perhaps bonding two pairs, and that's massively sufficient
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Why not use the copper you've got? The short answer is, a lot of it is shit.
That copper has been lying in the ground slowly corroding for some time. Telstra doesn't really bother with maintenance unless customers complain. Customers just get changed over to a spare pair of wires in the conduit when the pair they were on stops working properly. But conduits are running out of spare pairs.
That's assuming you're on copper in the first place. There's aluminium and lead in the ground in some places. They were ch
What's the speed limit of copper? (Score:4, Interesting)
So if G.Fast can extend VDSL2 to 1 Gigabit at a couple hundred meters, are people really going to outgrow that by the end of the decade?
Copper links simply lack the capacity to support the massive growth in data consumption that analysts predict. Eventually, Australians will have no choice but to replace those links with fiber, probably before the end of this decade
Since the average speed in Australia is 4.8mbit now it seems unlikely that people are going to be demanding 10gigabit connections in 7 years. Even 100mbit would be about 20 times their current average and VDSL2 can already do 100mbit for short distances.
By the end of the decade, point-to-point (with high-gain directional antennas) wireless networking may be the way to go to get better bandwidth from the fiber cabinet to the home - put an antenna tower on the cabinet and hang an antenna on houses.
Re:What's the speed limit of copper? (Score:4, Informative)
VDSL2 is great in the lab but in the real world the speed numbers up and down can drop off.
http://www.zdnet.com/nbn-co-cant-guarantee-libs-50mbps-speed-promise-report-7000023901/ [zdnet.com]
"....only realistically be offered two guaranteed speeds: 12Mbps (with 1Mbps uploads) and 25Mbps (with 5Mbps uploads)."
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The Coalition plan assumes that the copper is in good condition and won't require significant repairs, upgrades or ongoing maintenance. Now that the Coalition has to actually implement their plan rather than just talk about it, they have to find out whether or not those things are true. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence from people who work on the copper network to suggest that they aren't.
Also, the $29 billion number doesn't include the cost of going back and replacing the nodes with FTTP in 10 to 15 yea
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The average download speed in Australia is 4.8Mbit. Upload speed is nowhere near that.
And yeah, sure, VDSL2 can do 100Mbit for short distances. In ideal conditions. Um, you did notice the location is Australia, right?
The Best Of A Bad Deal.. (Score:2)
If paying for FTTN and then FTTH is individually cheaper then going straight to FTTH (even if the total is more expensive) it may be easier for a future government to sell as prudent policy.
Government finances work differently to normal finances, when you're guaranteed a certain level of tax income, two smaller payment (over a period of time)
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orly? (Score:2)
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Having FTTH was to also not be reliant on the ageing copper network that has been shown to be temporarily fixed at areas with grocery shopping bags. There are regular outages as the copper fails and millions are spent in maintaining patchwork solutions.
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Failing if you cut it with a knife isn't unique to fiber optic cables.
Copper corrodes. That means it fails if it's left lying in the ground completely undisturbed. That sort of unreliability is hard to beat.
Oh, Boo Hoo (Score:2)
That'll likely be far better than the service the phone company wants to provide to our neighborhood. I wonder how much the carriers will be dinging the residents for this service? (Didn't see anything about that in the article.)
FTTT: Fibre To The Telstra (Score:4, Interesting)
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"It's a bit like BT in the UK, but without the customer dedication, commitment to upgrades or ethics, fairness, and sense of social responsibility of its management team"
So, it's like AT&T then.
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Telstra is the Australian telco monopoly. It's a bit like BT in the UK, but without the customer dedication, commitment to upgrades or ethics, fairness, and sense of social responsibility of its management team. The new government sacked the board of NBN Co and has stacked the new board with ex- and current Telstra insiders. It's pretty obvious that once the NBN Co has finished rolling out the fibre network, the plan is to sell it to Telstra. This will ensure a fairer outcome for all Telstra shareholders, but may be a drag on the rest of the country.
Telstra was like that when it was Telecom Australia but back in the early 90's the last Liberal government under John Howard sold it off to make his economic credentials look good.
Now Telstra is a private semi-monopoly as they own all of the copper but not all of the services. Telstra is forced to sell their copper at fixed wholesale prices (which they are continually trying to increase) to other service providers.
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Telstra is forced to sell their copper at fixed wholesale prices (which they are continually trying to increase) to other service providers.
I read somewhere recently that Telstra at one point set the wholesale price well above its retail price...
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Telstra is forced to sell their copper at fixed wholesale prices (which they are continually trying to increase) to other service providers.
I read somewhere recently that Telstra at one point set the wholesale price well above its retail price...
At the very least I'm sure they tried to.
But the ACCC and Telecommunications Industry Ombudsmen would have shot them down in flames.
Telstra should have been separated into wholesale and retail when it was privatised in the 90's. But the Howard govt didn't want that as the sale price would have been lower. The Australian public's been paying for it every since.
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They did, sort of.
That plan had a cheaper monthly charge than the wholesale price, but had a 100 megabyte download quota and huge excess usage fees. Telstra's intent was to abuse clueless users.
Vote for Monkies (Score:2)
What we saw in this election was the other edge of the double edged blade which is democracy. There's wisdom of the crowds, then there's the complete opposite too.
not sparsely populated (Score:3)
This statement is extremely misleading. Australia's population lives almost entirely in urban areas and has vast amounts of land that are not populated at all. This makes it a much, much easier task, not a much much harder task.
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This is infrastructure for the future of the nation. We are paying for this now to last the next fifty to a hundred years just like the copper network has. The issue is not that it will provide a service that is 'fine'. The issue is that what is provided relies on a slow, outdated and highly degraded copper network. The copper network in australia is almost at the brink of failure, network engineers have described it as non-repairable. The new Government wants to save a few million dollars now by installing
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However in ten or twenty years what kind of bandwidth requirements will we have?
In the United States, the analog "plain old telephone" network was designed to handle 300 to 3400Hz voice traffic, which in practice allowed for 9600bps communication at 2400 baud even if the telephone switches were using 1970s (or older?) technology and the wire from the switch to the end user was who-knows-how-old. By the 1980s, we had developed mathematics and modems that could use the same lines to get up to about 33.6kbps at 3,429 baud.
Disclaimer: The above is from unreferenced text available at Wik
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In any case, odds are, whatever we put in the ground today, in 20 years we'll be able to do more with it than we can today.
Yes and no. There is a phenomenal amount of black magic working on getting basic DSL running at those frequencies. It is basically accepted that eventually you'll reach fundamental physical limitations of the signals that you can send down the wire. Even ADSL2+ only works at 25mbps if you're within a stone's throw of the exchange and quickly deteriorates beyond. Yes there's been a proof of concept of 100mbps but from what I remember of that slashdot article it only worked within 20m of the exchange.
Bottom l
Re:Not an issue, provided... (Score:4, Informative)
Note: this post is from a UK perspective, things may vary a little arround the world.
By the 1980s, we had developed mathematics and modems that could use the same lines to get up to about 33.6kbps at 3,429 baud.
And then things more or less stopped there. There was one more marginal speed increase (56K) but they had pretty much hit fundamental limits of the phone system. Pushing speeds further required bypassing parts of the phone network.
ISDN BRI delivered slightly better speeds in the 90s but the way it was priced (if you wanted a 128k connection you had to pay for two phone calls in addition to the ISDN line itself costing more than twice what an analog phone line did, AIUI most unmetered dialup packages allowed single channel ISDN but not dual channel ISDN) made it an expensive option. ADSL turned up in the early 2000s but again it was initially expensive.
ADSL gradually improved through the 00s first with the providers getting more confident and taking the artificial limits off and then by the providers moving to ADSL2. However while speeds improved so did the gap between the haves and the have nots. Those close to the phone exchange could get 20mpbs, those stuck a long way from the exchange got less than 1mbps and we have pretty much hit the limit of what phone cables can carry over long distances even with advanced modulation techniques.
In any case, odds are, whatever we put in the ground today, in 20 years we'll be able to do more with it than we can today.
The problems with mixed fiber/dsl systems don't really have anything to do with the fiber that is being put in the ground.
1: it still relies on that old phone wiring for the last hop. There are a few tricks we can pull but we have pretty much hit the limits of what those cables can carry over those distances. You still have the "cable length lottery" except now it's distance from the point of fiber to copper transition to the house rather than distance from the phone exchange to your house.
2: having all that infrastructure spread out like that makes it very difficult to do incremental upgrades. When ADSL was introduced they could start by putting one DSLAM in a phone exchange and patching the subscribers to it, when one DSLAM filled up they could add another. It didn't matter that only a few percent of customers were taking DSL intitially because the phone exchange was large. On the other hand there were places in the UK that had their POTs and ISDN delivered over an early fiber to the cabinet system and these were among the last to get ADSL because it wasn't worth putting a DSLAM in a cabinet for a handful of subscribers. So even if there was a system that could get a slight improvement over the current VDSL gear rolling it out would be very expensive.
The only real way to substantially improve a "partial fiber" system (fiber to the cabinet, fiber to the distribution point etc) is to push the fiber closer to the subscriber but each time you do that your infrastructure ends up even more spread out. Eventually you get to the point that you may as well just take the fiber all the way.
On the other hand with a fiber to the home system all you have to upgrade to deliver faster speeds is the consumer premises equipment and the exchange equipment. All the outdoor infrastructure can remain the same. Plus current fiber to the home equipment has a much wider margin over current needs than the VDSL that is being deployed in current fiber to the cabient system.
Deploying fiber to the cabinet now means in a few years time either internet speeds will stagnate again or a fiber to the home project will be needed anyway making the fiber to the cabinet equiment redundant.
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ADSL gradually improved through the 00s first with the providers getting more confident and taking the artificial limits off and then by the providers moving to ADSL2. However while speeds improved so did the gap between the haves and the have nots.
Trust me, it only gets worse not between fiber customers but between the fiber and not-fiber customers. Here in Norway fiber penetration is rather strong (23%) but it's all in the areas that used to have good ADSL2/VDSL/Cable. Those stuck on 1 Mbps ADSL are still stuck on 1 Mbps ADSL.
2: having all that infrastructure spread out like that makes it very difficult to do incremental upgrades. When ADSL was introduced they could start by putting one DSLAM in a phone exchange and patching the subscribers to it, when one DSLAM filled up they could add another. It didn't matter that only a few percent of customers were taking DSL intitially because the phone exchange was large.
Meh, considering how many people I heard who couldn't get DSL because the central was full I really don't think that's accurate.
There's no doubt that the future is FTTH, here in Norway call volume on land lines is down 81% sinc
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Improved mathematics and modems fall a tad flat when they encounter a wet and corroded copper cable. For more reliable communication infrastructure, fibre is far more superior. Australia is hamstringing their infrastructure upgrade if they only do a partial fibre install.
It's a shame that this will happen, not only because a node solution is inferior, but also because the change in policy is politically motivated. The new government needed to adopt something different, because they were so critical of th
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We are paying for this now to last the next fifty to a hundred years just like the copper network has.
Good luck with that. Copper was sufficient for 100 years because for 80 of those years it wasn't used for anything more than the occasional analog voice call (or eventually a dial up modem). Even in the last 20 years technology improvements have resulted in more than one round of major infrastructure upgrades everywhere BUT the last mile to allow increasing bandwidth and capacity.
Of course, you can make an educated guess that applications will exist in 20-30 years that may require gigabits to the home - b
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Now, as for squeezing good speeds out of the existing telephone-grade "last mile," well, if there is money to be made, someone will be working on this problem.
And someone has. VDSL2 can do 50Mbps at 1km and 100Mbps at 0.5km, which, while still not quite FTTH speeds, is going to be a huge upgrade over the crap they probably have now.
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Re:Not an issue, provided... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually it IS an issue. The previous government was planning to spend $37bn to provide FTTH which gives a future proof network and guarantees a starting speed of 100Mbps. By that I mean the next logical upgrade is a simple change of gear either end of the fibre making the network future proof. They were anticipating that most households would be able to cheaply upgrade to 1Gbps internet in the future.
Compared to that the current government wants to spend $20bn and provide FTTN at 25Mbps which I don't consider much of an upgrade from the current 25Mbps.
The previous government's plan was to spend double the amount to upgrade the internet for most Australians, and the current government is still spending a fortune for what will not be an upgrade for people in major cities, is in fact slower than the two major telcos current cable networks, gives benefit of a fast cabled connection to a few coastal towns, and then sticks the of rural Australian on either high latency satellite, or an overly congested wireless link.
As for upgrading the last mile if there's money to be made, you don't really understand the way these networks here work. We live in a country where some of the installation of the last mile was so cheap that people couldn't get more than one phone line to their house. That's right they split the 2pair phone line between 2 houses. It's a country where the last mile of copper is rapidly corroding due to cheap maintenance over the last 20 years. Even in major city centres its somewhat accepted in areas that your internet will drop out when it rains. Oh better yet the last mile is owned by one company.
I am still wondering how the coalition promoted the former Telstra CEO who absolutely destroyed the value of Telstra, who accepted that fines from the Ombudsman were a cost of doing business, to the CEO of NBN Co. It's almost like they deliberately want this to fail. I can think of better things to do with $20bn than waste it on nothing.
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This might be a bit of a waste though. With 802.11AC offering 320mbps and probably gigE+ speeds in the next gen it kind of starts calling into question whether wired networks are even necessary.
FTTN and then enough bandwidth to blanket a block in 2gbps wifi w/ 10ms pings would be fine by me and save a small fortune.
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The latter. Currently the most prevailing school of thought is that Rupert Murdoch's's media empire was instrumental in ensuring the coalition wins. Heck he sent a special advisor out with the sole purpose of ensuring his media empire did their best to discredit the labour government, also a document put on wikileaks about 8 months ago showed his support for the coalition was conditional on them ripping the NBN to shreds.
Mind you I don't blame him. With a 50% ownership of the largest and most over priced ca
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Do you have a link to that? It's not that I don't believe you, I'd say I didn't hear about it since the only paper here is a Murdoch one and I must have missed it on the ABC.
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Are you cherry picking your stats? By the time Ziggy turned Telstra over to Sol Trujilio (who I admit was no better) Telstra's share price had already collapsed. He insisted on investing the proceeeds of the sale in Asia and stupidly tried to turn Telstra into a Pacific multinational. Under his reign investment in infrastructure was greatly reduced in favour of instead implementing the world's first broadband caps (3GB per month on a 10mbps connection, you just can't make stupid shit like that up) and inte
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The NBN install was only behind schedule because of Telstra issues, and also due to a delay to train techs to handle asbestos. The thing is, in full stride, the NBN was actually going to end up being cheaper than the $4000 per house estimate (not per man/woman/child as you say). A report I read about estimated that it would actually soon be around half that. Also, at full speed, they would have been able to deliver it faster than projected, which meant they could catch up to the schedule.
So yes, the FTTH
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Fair point, but I still think that the NBN, as originally conceived, and once it gets some good momentum, has a good chance of getting close to its original budget.
As for connections to the home, the cables won't all be underground.
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/news/2013/4/3/nbn-buzz/nbn-co-uses-federal-law-access-nsw-power-poles [businessspectator.com.au]
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Yes. A major bit of the cost was Danegeld to Telstra to get access to the ducts that the taxpayer paid for not so long back (since Telstra haven't done much wired infrastructure since). Without that the cost would have been a shitload less. Simon Hackett of Internode wrote a few well reasoned articles back when the NBN ws proposed about how it couldn't possibly cost as much as proposed - but then it became clear later that Telstra had to
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Because Telstra were threatening legal action.
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Well it was never going to be FTTH ~everywhere~. The original plan proposed by the Labor government was for every town with more than 1000 people to have FTTH, with the remainder being served with either fixed wireless, or for the most remote 1% or so, satellite (which is already available of course, but the plan included a significant upgrade of satellite speeds and capacity). Doing the calculations, it essentially meant 93% of the population would get FTTH.
The Liberal government from the outset said that if they got elected, they'd scale back the FTTH and rely mostly on FTTN/VDSL for existing developed areas (though, still supporting FTTH for new greenfields development, since if you have to lay cable anyway it may as well be fibre). As you say, that's probably fast enough for most purposes provided you can keep copper line lengths down to a few hundred metres at most.
The criticisms of this revised plan, broadly speaking, are that:
1. Much of the existing copper is in bad condition and would need to be replaced anyway anyway to deliver decent VDSL speeds and reliability. Telstra, responsible for managing the copper network, has publicly stated that they consider the copper network at end of life.
2. The Liberals' plan, compared to the original Labor plan, would only result in cost savings of 20-30%, yet deliver an outcome that is a lot more than 20-30% worse (in terms of speeds, reliability and future capacity for growth and upgrades).
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1. Much of the existing copper is in bad condition and would need to be replaced anyway anyway to deliver decent VDSL speeds and reliability. Telstra, responsible for managing the copper network, has publicly stated that they consider the copper network at end of life.
I have three questions:
1. Does Telestra still own the copper?
2. As part of the NBN, does Telestra have to lease their copper to anyone that wants to provide service over it?
2. The Liberals' plan, compared to the original Labor plan, would only result in cost savings of 20-30%, yet deliver an outcome that is a lot more than 20-30% worse (in terms of speeds, reliability and future capacity for growth and upgrades).
I recall reading a few months ago that Rupert Murdoch was trying to screw with the elections so that Rudd (Labor) would lose and his 90%+ FTTH plan would die and be replaced by FTTN.
3. So how did it come to pass that Rudd won, yet Labor's FTTH plan died and got replaced by the Liberal Party's FTTN?
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3. So how did it come to pass that Rudd won, yet Labor's FTTH plan died and got replaced by the Liberal Party's FTTN?
The Labor party lost and Rudd has subsequently quit as a Member of Parliament
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1. Much of the existing copper is in bad condition and would need to be replaced anyway anyway to deliver decent VDSL speeds and reliability. Telstra, responsible for managing the copper network, has publicly stated that they consider the copper network at end of life.
I have three questions:
1. Does Telestra still own the copper?
2. As part of the NBN, does Telestra have to lease their copper to anyone that wants to provide service over it?
1. Yes.
2. Short answer: No.
2 Long answer: Telstra is obligated to provide access to that coper under the a previous service agreement but the federal government is attempting to bypass this because it makes their FTTN project more expensive than existing ADSL or the Labor governments FTTH project. What happed was that the previous government negotiated a contract with Telstra for access to their pits and ducts in order to lay fibre to the home alongside copper an the copper network would be retired. The
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that's probably fast enough for most purposes
There is one major problem with this statement that I saw summed up in a comment on this article pretty well:
http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/nbn-petitioners-target-turnbull-mps-20131126-hv3t1.html [smh.com.au]
GMan:
"1925: Here's our new plan for the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It'll be a bit cheaper and we'll finish it sooner. And 2 lanes will be plenty..."
Going cheap on the NBN is just another case of a political party fucking things up for future generations for short term political gain (i.e. a better bottom line in their budget). Their justification being that the previous government forced their hand into doing so by economic mis-management i
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It *wont* be enough, but it's not because the technology isnt sufficient.
See the fiber to the home is sold as a panacea for problems that it wont actually address. If your uplink is throttled back to nearly nothing it doesnt matter a bit how wide your pipe is otherwise, it's still inadequate. A simple 1gb symmetrical dsl link over copper wire is something the ISPs have the ability to offer but absolutely refuse to. So what will they offer over fibre? 40mbps!!!! (But read the fine print, it's 256k up, and ab
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The reason for their refusal is given as "physics".
10M/10M requires more wires than are univerally available and has a short range from the exchange.
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Google are not "rolling out gigabit". Google have realistically done nothing more than a very small-scale trial. Add together the population of everywhere Google Fiber covers or has promised to cover -- that's Kansas City, Austin, Provo, and one neighborhood in Palo Alto -- and make the erroneous assumption that every resident is covered, and you still have a "rollout" that touches only 3.3 million people i
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Grandparent suggested the US as a model for Australia to follow. I pointed out that the US is a cautionary tale, not a model to follow.
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while google in the US is rolling out gigabit, and the private sector in UK is doing the same....
In a few small areas.
Most of suburbia in the UK is getting fiber to the cabinet from BT openreach, better than what we had before certainly but way off what fiber to the home can deliver. Openreach are planning to do a "fiber to the premisis on demand" service but it looks like it will be pretty expensive (installation charges predicted to be in the thousands iirc making it impractical for anyone who isn't well settled) and they don't seem to be planning to offer gigabit speeds, upstream in particular seems
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Ah... conservatives. I SHUDDER to think of what privately owned and operated roads would be like. Eugh... No thank you. Oh, and I work for a large corporation. i assure you, they're not any brighter or better than government. Any large organization has beaurocracy and red tape. It's kind of an emergent property.
But I LIKE my basic services to be provided by the government, because then I at least have a little say in it. I can't vote out the CEO of a company. Nope. I'm a small business owner. I WANT my cu
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Problem is, private enterprise will simply cherry pick the few dense and/or wealthy suburbs to roll out to that will generate them the biggest return on investment and cover only those areas (see: Foxtel and Optus cable). While I support an appropriate mix of public and private investment in such things, if it were left to the private sector alone, many smaller and even mid-sized settlements wouldn't have ANY form of broadband today.
Australia, despite its large size and small population, is actually signifi
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is not happening either. The NBN is being killed off to be painted as a failed project of the previous government. What happens after that is still in limbo, but IMHO will be "let the market decide" which does not work when a government protected monopoly is only thing allowed in the market.
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It's the obsession you get when a monopoly has been letting the copper network rot since 1996.
Australia is a little bit bigger than Texas and the houses are a bit spread out by close to an order of magnitude what you are suggesting in what is considered relatively densely populated suburbs.