How Australia Bungled Its $36 Billion High-Speed Internet Rollout (nytimes.com) 149
Not very pleased with your internet speeds? Think about the people Down Under. Australia's "bungled" National Broadband Network (NBN) has been used as a "cautionary tale" for other countries to take note of. Despite the massive amount of money being pumped into the NBN, the New York Times reports, the internet speeds still lagged behind the US, most of western Europe, Japan and South Korea -- even Kenya. The article highlights that Australia was the first country where a national plan to cover every house or business was considered and this ambitious plan was hampered by changes in government and a slow rollout (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source), partly because of negotiations with Telstra about the fibre installation. From the report: Australia, a wealthy nation with a widely envied quality of life, lags in one essential area of modern life: its internet speed. Eight years after the country began an unprecedented broadband modernization effort that will cost at least 49 billion Australian dollars, or $36 billion, its average internet speed lags that of the United States, most of Western Europe, Japan and South Korea. In the most recent ranking of internet speeds by Akamai, a networking company, Australia came in at an embarrassing No. 51, trailing developing economies like Thailand and Kenya. For many here, slow broadband connections are a source of frustration and an inspiration for gallows humor. One parody video ponders what would happen if an American with a passion for Instagram and streaming "Scandal" were to switch places with an Australian resigned to taking bathroom breaks as her shows buffer. The article shares this anecdote: "Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world have downloaded Hand of Fate, an action video game made by a studio in Brisbane, Defiant Development. But when Defiant worked with an audio designer in Melbourne, more than 1,000 miles away, Mr. Jaffit knew it would be quicker to send a hard drive by road than to upload the files, which could take several days."
Sabotaged by Telstra (Score:2, Insightful)
How dare someone else have a monopoly on internet service!
Re:Sabotaged by Telstra (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking of monopolies!
Non paywalled link is a Murdoch paper. Coincidence that just as they look like they're about to be sold off, they speak out about the economically short-sighted move a lot of people think he lobbied for in the hope that internet broadcasters wouldn't run him and his overpriced cable out of town on the horse he rode in on? I think not xD
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Totally right. The second they let Telstra into the deal I knew the infrastructure was going to be fucked. They bitched and whined that they were being left out of the NBN and a lot of people were happy it was working that way. Then the NBN Co caved and let them in the door and the project immediately went south. Combined with Malcolm Turnbull's fiddling with the tech it just got worse and worse. Now it turns out that the problems are worse than just infrastructure, they oversold connections where the techn
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When you get to faster connections that does get a bit skewed. I had a weird situation where I needed to burn an ISO a few weeks ago and it actually took several times longer to burn the DVD than to download the ISO from the net.
I can move files onto google drive faster than I can copy them to a USB2 external hard drive. The station-wagon-bandwidth thing doesn't really hold true if you have to move the files to external storage first and then move them off again later.
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I can move files onto google drive faster than I can copy them to a USB2 external hard drive
Depends on the size of the files, and your bandwidth from your PC to Google Drive. Until recently, I had an 18Mbps/5Mbps connection. The math says it would take a minimum of 2000 seconds, or just over 1/2 hour for me to upload a 1GB file to Google. A USB2 connection may not be as fast as the theoretical 480Mbps limit, but it has to be faster than 5Mbps.
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I can get about 300Mbit/s to google drive with a 13ms ping time which is faster than the WD external drive sitting on my desk.
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As I said, it depends on your bandwidth.
You've got a 300Mbps upstream connection? Great. Most people don't have that.
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In theory it tops out at 950Mbit/s up, but it's incredibly hard to find any single service that can handle those speeds.
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And to be fair to you, this was actually a common situation in the early days of LANs. Often local hard drives were so slow that even with 10Base2/10BaseT, it was faster for clients to access data on the fileserver than it was for them to access locally.
Again, it all comes down to speed of local storage, speed of network, and how latency sensitive you are.
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Yeah i vaguely remember that too.
Most SSDs can keep up with gigabit fiber internet, but i bet it'd be hypothetically possible to max out some of my SATA hard drives
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My pigeons wear sneakers, we have a bigger range, but the latency doesn't get much better and our packet loss does increase during shooting season...
$36 billion doesn't sound like enough... (Score:3)
I pay $540 per year for my internet connection. That's pure internet cost. I don't have cable or landline. I've not included my mobile though at least some of that is arguably internet too. They are trying to do it with a one time payment of about $1500 per person? That seems like they've low-balled it, especially when you consider that their landmass is almost equal to the contiguous US. So with less than a tenth of the population density, their costs per connection should be higher than ours.
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Most of the p
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The NBN costs are for the physical deployment: people would still pay monthly fees for the service. There is lots of blame to go around: for example, politicians sabotaged things by deciding to save money by throwing out the all-fiber GPON plan and instead to use DSL for the last mile.
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They didn't even save money if you look at even the relatively short term picture though. 76 months, which is a little under 6.5 years is the figure I read where the FTTH network would have recouped the cost of the additional investment, after that it would have been more profitable than FTTN.
I keep hearing how the coalition are supposed to have good business know-how, but they went with the plan that after 6.5 years will cost more to run and runs at a fraction of the speed: 40% faster on average than DSL
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It was never about saving money but making a point of differentiation from Labour at the 2013 election, which, like the last election, was a very close race.
Also, it was sabotage, but presumably as a matter of collusion between the Liberals and the higher-ups at Telstra and Foxtel, as well as Rupert Murdoch himself. Fun fact: Telstra and News Corp. (i.e. Murdoch) each own 50% of Foxtel, who hold a virtual monopoly on satellite and cable TV in Australia. Interestingly, throughout the 2013 election period New
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So, basically, Clarke and Dawe's take was an accurate summary? :)
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Everyone loves to blame NBN problems on the copper. While I agree that building fiber to the node is stupid, that's not the biggest problem with the NBN. The pricing model of the NBN means that only huge ISP's can compete on price, by massively oversubscribing. To compete you need a very large number of customers in each geographic area, so you can reduce your CVC charge per person. CVC? Well there are 3 costs associated with leasing a line from the NBN. First is the customer end, with difference price tier
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Everything old is new again (Score:5, Insightful)
Mr. Jaffit knew it would be quicker to send a hard drive by road than to upload the files, which could take several days
Or as Andrew Tanenbaum said back in 1989, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
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Wise Man and Flash (Score:2)
As a wise man once said - "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truckfull of USB flash drives traveling on the highway".
We send stuff online even if its something which could be sent as a batch rather than needing any interactivity.
Resource limitations like this make it more clear where we really need bandwidth and where an alternate would work.
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RIP, Steve Jobs
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But think about the latency. Sure you can get a lot of data across the country if you fill a train full of harddrives, but you can't use a solution like this to stream Netflix, or upload a video to Youtube.
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But the point is not every application cares about latency. If you are sending a music video off to the editing house to get edited and sent back in a month you dont care about latency.
If you are streaming a netflix video you do care.
But most of the time we dont think about what application cares about latency and what doesnt.
Only bottlenecks like this make us think about it.
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The wise man was Andy Tanenbaum.
It was a station wagon, not a truck.
It was tapes, not flash drives. Flash drives hadn't been invented in 1989.
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Thanks for the correction. I remembered reading it somewhere but just couldn't recollect. On second thoughts it should have been obvious it was from the "Guru" of networking.
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It's not like the addage needs to change: station wagons and data tapes still exist, now with capacities measured in terabytes.
Sort of like (Score:2)
Don't envy USA (Score:1)
I'll take reliable over "speed". If it's reliable, one generally learns to work around the slow areas, such as reducing YouTube resolution if it's not a video that needs it. If it's unreliable, then you often get stuck with nothing, and have to go out and get a life while it's jammed up.
I live in a relatively populated area and we still have crappy telecom choices. We even upgraded to a "faster" plan, and it still jams up on weekends. They simply spread bandwidth too thin, and blame it on wind, sun-spots, M
Meanwhile, in Germany (Score:2)
448/96 kbps is the highest I can get here, just some ten kilometers from a large city.
A friend of mine in Australia has explicitly said that I am the only person in his social circle to whom he CAN'T complain about Australian internet speeds.
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There are still plenty of people in Australia on 512/64kbps ADSL(1) and 56kbps POTS connections. NBN was only meant to cover 95% of the population, that being those in the six major metropolitan centres covering less than 1% of the landmass.
Dayboro, itself only about 30km away from the Brisbane CBD, only has ADSL1 connectivity in its exchange. Drive 5km northwest of that and you have no ADSL, no POTS, no CDMA coverage and no sewerage. Another 2km and you also have to provide your own power and water.
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I think that kind of situation arose because once the govt announced "NBN!!!" years ago, Telstra decided to halt or severely curtail any expenditure on ADSL{2+}. Our exchange in the sunshine coast hinterland has a 6-month waiting list for ADSL because all the ports are occupied - you've got to wait until someone else cancels before you can get in, and they're NOT going to upgrade to a higher capacity DSLAM when the NBN is scheduled to arrive here in August. Also, you'd be lucky if the backup batteries last
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NBN was only meant to cover 95% of the population
Originally 93% with fixed line FTTP, 4% fixed wireless, 3% satellite.
By installing fibre to the home future upgrades for higher bandwidth would be much cheaper, with the intention that profits would eventually push fibre even further into that wireless space.
All gone now, the copper based network soaks up an extra $bill or so a year, plus upgrades means expensive civil works to reduce the length of copper.
Same thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Same exact thing I say when they talk about this with the US:
Korea: 519 persons per sqkm
Japan: 348 persons per sqkm
Europe: 127 persons per sqkm
USA: 35 persons per sqkm
Australia: 3 persons per sqkm
It seems to be hard for tech-enthusiasts to grasp that a widely-distributed population makes providing infrastructure INTRINSICALLY harder.
Re:Same thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Same exact thing I say when they talk about this with the US:... USA: 35 persons per sqkm; Australia: 3 persons per sqkm. It seems to be hard for tech-enthusiasts to grasp that a widely-distributed population makes providing infrastructure INTRINSICALLY harder.
I don't think it's useful to talk about the AVERAGE population density. In Australia the population is almost entirely concentrated in small dense coastal cities. If you served those dense cities well, you'd hit such a high proportion of the Australian population, that average internet speeds would increase dramatically.
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And it's not harder to deploy, just more expensive. The fiber backbones are there already IIRC. Exchange-to-exchange has been fiber for a long time now. It's the "last mile" rollout that's expensive - in some case it's last (many) miles. Still, POTS copper pairs were rolled out decades ago - it's not impossible, just expensive.
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The large central desert has nothing to do with it whatsoever. Gotcha.
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Oh, look, that bullshit again. First of all, the european population obviously fails to include the european part of Russia. Second, many US people will exaggerate just how large all US states are and how small european nations are. As an example, only two US states are larger than Sweden, Texas and Alaska. So, let's compare Sweden with the nearest US states area wise.
Sweden, 450 295 km2, population density of 24.5 people/km2
California, 423 970 km2, population density of 92.6 people/km2
Both have heavily urb
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Over 80% of the Australian Population lives within a 50km long strip of the East Coast.
The distance here isnt the issue. All of the spare areas are to be covered by Satellite and or Fixed wireless. At the moment, they are currently busting their balls to turn Cable internet into the worlds only L2 provisioned wholesale service, and trying to wrangle a dilapidated copper access network that is life expired into VDSL. Copper maintenance is over 10 times what they budgeted for. And the budget for maintenance a
Average speeds could be misleading (Score:1)
... trailing developing economies like Thailand and Kenya.
It may be a bit misleading to only look at average speeds. In a country like Kenya, far less people have internet access and those that do are typically in the urban areas where it is easier to provide high speed access. The further access is extended, the slower average speeds are likely to become, as the hard to reach places with satellite connections etc. bring down the average.
This is really simple (Score:2)
If there are no consequences for taking the money and running they'll take the money and run. Every. Single. Time.
What killed the NBN. (Score:4, Informative)
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Funny isn't it, whenever comments on the NBN failure come up they are almost all one of two completely incorrect possibilities:
* Australias low population density guaranteed the failure, as if the 90% of the continent that is empty was all getting fibre as well and its somehow an excuse for using rotten copper in the middle of Sydney.
* Proof that government should stay out of infrastructure and private industry will fix it all, ignoring that a private monopoly is largely the reason the rollout was desperate
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A couple of points here. I live in Australia and I got to watch this entire fiasco unroll before me.
1. The conservative party got elected before the main rollout of the NBN could get underway. They had one mission: Kill the NBN anyway they could. They did this because they didn't want the Labor party to have a political victory with a major project, and because it aligned with the interests of the largest cable tv network and news corporations in the nation. Cable TV in Australia is a monopoly owned by Fox. They dominate Satellite, and fixed line pay TV.
2. The NBN Fibre rollout was delayed by asbestos inside the pits which had to be cleaned/repaired before they could proceed. This delayed the rollout by probably 6-12 months as the clearance work had to occur. There was also a political deal made where rural/country areas would be rolled out first. This combined with the fact that the backhaul services had to be built first led to an impression that the network was facing major delays and was taking a long time to be built, when it was actually on time and on budget.
3. Where it was actually deployed the Fibre to the Home NBN works perfectly and I've never heard anyone in those areas complain about having a fibre link. The same is not true of the Fibre to the Node and HFC connections.
4. Australia is not as sparsely populated as people would have you believe. 90+% of Australians live in larg coastal cities like most major countries and Australia's major cities have population densities equal to or higher than Auckland in New Zealand which has Fibre to the Home available. Density/population were never an issue with a metropolitan rollout of the NBN.
5, The conservative vision for the NBN was always a complete clusterfuck. Policy made without proper planning or consulting of industry. Done at the urging of people with a vested interest in keeping the internet speeds in Australia as low as the electorate would allow. The largest ISP in Australia has been quite happily milking ADSL 1.5mbit services for the last 20 years and only implemented ADSL2+ because competitor ISPs began taking marketshare. They refused to do any upgrades or builds involving fibre, unless they were guaranteed a monopoly and the ability to charge massive prices for it.
Slashdot seems to have eaten your formatting. Fixed that for you. Because what you typed is something that more people should read.
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Blame Rupert Murdoch (Score:2)
The original NBN plan for fiber to the home (with the best available wireless and satellite technology for areas not easily reachable by fiber) would have delivered very fast speeds to a large chunk of the population.
Then we had a federal election and the Murdoch press ran a huge anti-NBN FUD campaign aimed at crippling the NBN in order to protect Foxtel (the main pay TV provider in Australia). There is a change of government and the new government (no doubt with Rupert lobbying away in the background) crip
Political expediency killed the NBN (Score:1)
The Labor government (Center left or Democrats for US folks) sought to roll out a completely new fibre to the premises network that would reach 80% of Australians with satellite comms for the rest. The idea was very popular. With an election coming up the Conservative party (read Republicans) realized that they couldn't compete in terms of nation building projects so they decided to white-ant the other guys plan instead.
They started claiming that it was too expensive, too wasteful, etc. etc. and that they
it sounds like someone in Australia was 4 profit (Score:1)
they used an American for profit approach by accident, sabotaging their network deployment. everyone knows copper needs replaced entirely with fiber;
really I would try whoever deployed copper and hang them. it angers me so much like a murder or rape of an innocent had taken place.
a law should be passed world wide too: internet can only be deployed over fiber, not copper.
https://www.obamasweapon.com/ [obamasweapon.com]
Poor old 'Down Under' (Score:2)
Yes just think about us poor unfortunates 'Down Under' with our gigabit fibre to the home ....
Australia may have bungled its fibre rollout, but NZ's seems to be sailing ahead ....
The National Fraudband Network (Score:2)
This is where you can say it was the libtards fault because that they locked the country into ongoing expensive infrastructure costs.
Assuming a fully loaded 384 port NBN node is to be upgraded from FTTN to FTTP, with 4 fibres already allocated to the FTTN DSLAM for connectivity back to the Fibre Access Node, 8 fibres are remaining to potentially deliver fibre services all the way to the customer’s premises.
However, the 8 fibres will only be capable of delivering GPON services (the FTTP technology
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I completely agree with you.
The current model of mix mode delivery is complete BS. Because it allows the installations to have such truncated capacity out to the nodes that it is impossible to upgrade in the future.
I sit here and think, Aus has missed a huge opportunity to get a head a solve a lot of upcoming social problems. Now we have to pay to fix this mess for at least 30 years.
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Why so few ONUs? I worked for an ISP in a third world country for a while, and we used Zhone equipment, which I would never recommend. Even so, it supported up to 64 ONU per fiber.
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Why so few ONUs?
I don't know. I can only guess that for the few years they were planning one type of deployment (FTTP) with the vision that they were designing a network to last. When the entire board was replaced to suit the whims of their new political masters the people re-designing the network just didn't give a fuck anymore, their vision for a future proofed network based on fibre everywhere was over.
There was a chance to break Telstra's monopoly over telecommunications and instead the political fuckwits ended up pou
I'm Aussie and the NBN is a downgrade. (Score:2)
The NBN when first conceived and actually started to roll-out was basically a great network. Fiber to the home.
Then the politicians got involved.
The end result is that for a lot of Aussies. OK a LOT OF AUSSIES. the max speed they will get is less than 25mbs. For a lot of people this is actually a downgrade in service. There is no option to stay with the old service btw.
And to top it off. The build out is not putting enough fiber in the street to eventually run fiber to the home. So it the whole damn t
Forget Australia, come to New Zealand (Score:2)
We have a Fibre network that work... ;-)
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Re:USA is highly ranked (Score:5, Insightful)
This ensures companies are always providing reasonable prices and a fast connection, as is evidenced by our high ranking compared to the Australian experiment.
You're trolling, right? We're the nation that invented the internet and yet our ranking is shit, in large part because in most places people don't have a choice of high-speed internet providers.
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The US also has a bigger GDP to easily afford a better internet. Like every other shortage it is caused by politics, and of course, economics [cbsnews.com]
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To tell the truth, I prefer copper more than fiber. The phone company can keep service running during a power outage.
They don't care. They don't have to. They're the phone company. We dropped our $50/mo land line when AT&T informed us that a repair would be six weeks out.
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Your argument fails to explain why places like Seattle, WA have shit internet access. Pretty decent population density there.
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Comcast having a stupid 10 year exclusive franchise doesn't help.
Where does Comcast still have a ten year exclusive franchise, and why haven't you reported the problem to the federal government that has prohibited exclusive franchises for about 20 years now?
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It's bigger than I thought. I thought it would be like Belgium.
But to put it in context, there's a single cattle ranch in Australia (Anna Creek) that's a quarter of that.
Re:USA is highly ranked (Score:5, Interesting)
The private market will always surpass the nationalized or state run model for all services.
Never say "always". Market solutions work well when there is competition and transparency, but when those are lacking, governments can often do better than a private monopoly or duopoly. There are many examples of this: America's privately run healthcare system is worse in both cost and outcome compared to any other developed country. Many cities in America have municipal power, water, and even Internet, and these tend to be at least as good as privately run monopolies in neighboring cities.
Whenever possible, rather than directly providing services, the government should focus on making markets more competitive and transparent. We have government owned roads and ports, but the government doesn't own the cars, trucks, and ships. Likewise for Internet, the government should provide wide conduits so any bonded company can pull fiber. Since trenching is by far the biggest cost, this will allow more companies to enter markets at greatly reduced cost.
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While it's true that you can lack competition for purely private reasons, the most common reason for lack of competition is government regulations. When a permit is required to connect households to your service, the people who issue the permits are the ones who control whether you have one choice, two choices, or n choices....
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While it's true that you can lack competition for purely private reasons, the most common reason for lack of competition is government regulations. When a permit is required to connect households to your service, the people who issue the permits are the ones who control whether you have one choice, two choices, or n choices....
Actually, it's more like.... local government gives tax breaks to company A. Company A moves in, and the high cost of entry to the market (infrastructure, bribes, ["election campaign contributions"], etc.) dissuade company B from moving in.
Meanwhile, in the next city over, they want to install municipal broadband, but company B has bribed enough state legislators ["campaign contributions"] to pass a state law banning municipal utilities.
And I keep wondering why USA doesn't score higher on the corruption i
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And I keep wondering why USA doesn't score higher on the corruption index.
If you seriously wonder that, then you should get a passport and go see the world. While there are a a few countries that do better [transparency.org], most are far worse. When was the last time that you, as an American, had to pay a bribe to get a government clerk to do his job? For many people in other countries, that is a daily occurrence. In America, if you offer a cop a bribe at a traffic stop, he is more likely to throw you in jail than to let you off.
It is not just random chance that some countries are rich and oth
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If you seriously wonder that, then you should get a passport and go see the world. While there are a a few countries that do better [transparency.org], most are far worse.
Yes but most are poor and developing countries. If you want to compare how you are doing against your peers, compare yourself to the developed wealthy countries Western Europe, North America, and parts of Asia Pac (Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, NZ etc).
I've seen most parts of the world, and one of the great mysteries is how much America squanders its wealth.
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And I keep wondering why USA doesn't score higher on the corruption index.
Organisations like Transparency International are themselves not transparent and get to define corruption differently every time they do a 'survey'. They more or less function to assuage concerns of western populations which believe in it that even if things are bad "at least we are not like those third world hell-holes out there". Its based on perception rather than on hard facts. The impact is also never considered.Again a 100 government clerks demanding 10 dollars bribe to do their job would do less da
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The private market will always surpass the nationalized or state run model for all services.
Never say "always". Market solutions work well when there is competition and transparency, but when those are lacking, governments can often do better than a private monopoly or duopoly. There are many examples of this: America's privately run healthcare system is worse in both cost and outcome compared to any other developed country. Many cities in America have municipal power, water, and even Internet, and these tend to be at least as good as privately run monopolies in neighboring cities.
Whenever possible, rather than directly providing services, the government should focus on making markets more competitive and transparent. We have government owned roads and ports, but the government doesn't own the cars, trucks, and ships. Likewise for Internet, the government should provide wide conduits so any bonded company can pull fiber. Since trenching is by far the biggest cost, this will allow more companies to enter markets at greatly reduced cost.
There are significant cases where market based solutions don't work. Public utilities, heath care and education are some of the biggest examples.
You cant expect the "market" to automagically fix teclo monopolies because it costs millions and millions to lay your own cables. The barriers to entry were not governmental in origin. This is why the NBN under Labor was the closest thing you could get to a market based solution of a public utility. The idea was that the government owned the actual infrastructur
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Market solutions work well when there is competition and transparency, but when those are lacking, governments can often do better than a private monopoly or duopoly
Ontario has 3 main mobile providers with very relatively expensive plans, but neighbouring provinces have far lower rates from those same providers. Those lower rates exist in other provinces because of legacy crown-corps providing reasonable competition. In Ontario every new entrant gets delayed, litigated, and restricted access so that even if they can operate they cannot provide comparable products.
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We (the USA) may have a "private market", but it's not "free" in most places when it comes to utilities. There is little difference between a tightly-regulated monopolist and a government-owned provider. The corporation gets its charter from government and is subject to rate controls... it's really just a quasi-independent extension of government that leverages other people's money for capital improvements rather than taxes, fees, and municipal bonds.
In the places where there is actual competition (we recen
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That's nowhere near always the case.
Australias example isnt that government led projects always fail, its that projects led by incompetent people fail. The Australian network was a well thought out, costed project, running FTTH. The next government got it, renegotiated the contracts to give themselves a worse deal, leased very nearly useless copper off the incumbent networks and rolled out barely working FTTN for around the same price.
At the same time New Zealand copied Australias original plan with some mi
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Didn't you read the article? The private sector, aka Telstra, reneged on the deal and shifted all of its agreed costs onto the taxpayer, then Australia elected a Libertarian government, who couldn't let a government project succeed, and thus they did everything they could to sabotage it.
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The problem with telstra was that the previous administration wanted to forcibly buy out telstras copper network, in order to ensure that the NBN had a monopoly. That copper network is still worth heaps of money, and the negotiations were around that cost.
The terms were changed when the government changed and decided to use existing infrastructure rather than drop new fibre and wireless everywhere.
As part of the change, Telstra no longer needed to fix problems with their pits & ducts, and NBNco became owners (and rectifiers) of the copper access network (CAN) so they could use it in place of fibre. The monetary amount to Telstra was pretty much the same, though Telstra now scores a lot of those remediation contracts for pits & ducts plus the CAN re
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As if corporate run IT projects are any more successful.
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Re: Did it Fail? (Score:2)
I think the hybrid FTTN is actually quite a good compromise for a fast rollout. I've had 76 mbs down/20 up with this for a few years, and I have no complaints. They didn't have to dig up the street to deliver it. I'm sure at some point they will, but for now his pretty good.
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And I concurr!
I live in the middle of Sydney Suburbia and am 4.5Km from the exchange. I have always had Shit internet on ADSL2+ (3.4M down and 500K up. I have complained for years as has everyone else in the street and Telstra Replaced the last mile of Copper a few years ago.
Despite all that and the fact that every suburb around me, and the Exchange is NBN Enabled, i still cannot get it now and are not slated to do so fro another few years yet.
If Fibre to the node was rolled out originally, I could have had
Fibre to the node never had a business case (Score:2)
Contrary to what the Fraudbanders will scream, there was never a business case for the fibre project. It would have cost much more than the $42 billion (over $5,000/household) budgeted and delivered something that most Australians did not actually want. It was always obvious that multiple technologies should be used -- which ones is debatable on a case by case issue.
But the big issue was than when they did trials in Tasmania most people could not be bothered to switch. Because their ADSL was good enough.
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If you wanted to pay for a faster connection (250/100, 500/200, 1000/400) that would be available at the flick of a software switch and a modem reboot.
Now, you're limited to 76/20 - pretty good for the present sure, but to get anything better is going to cost more - a lot more - to get fibre closer to your premises, so they can run g.FAST for up to 1Gb.
So where are the touted savings?
It's not in time, that's now prett
Re: Did it Fail? (Score:2)
Maybe I misunderstand you, but you seem to be suggesting that a complete fibre deployment to millions of homes won't take that much longer or much more cost than delivering fibre to just tens of thousands of cabinets and re-using the existing copper infrastructure to the homes. That makes no sense unless there are some massive mitigating factors such as seriously poor or even no copper infrastructure that would need replacement/installation; is that the case in Australia?
I was living briefly in Melbourne a
Re: (Score:1)
You probably don't realise that you're very lucky. I myself can get full 100mbit, but that's rare. Most NBN FTTN connections are only good for less than 48mbit/s, and less than 25mbits is very common.
My point is that if you're able to get over 50mbit/s (I think the average is 48mbit/s), you aren't getting a realistic impression of what the NBN is really like for the average punter. Try to imagine being stuck at ~20mbit/s and look forward to being stuck on that for the next 10 or 20 years. That's why people
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Other rollouts have significantly reduced rollout costs, but time....time was the problem.
Politically the underserved regions needed to be amongst the front runners, plus some issues found with asbestos that the incumbent telco had to remediate, well that threw things out a fair bit.
The project sought