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Australia The Internet Network

After 11 Years, Australia Declares Its National Broadband Network Is 'Built and Fully Operational' (theregister.com) 106

Posted by BeauHD from the wait-is-finally-over dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Australia has declared its national broadband network (NBN) is "built and fully operational," ending a saga that stretches back to the mid-2000s. Minister for communications, cyber safety and the arts Paul Fletcher declared the build complete in a Wednesday statement that admitted 35,000 premises remain unable to connect to the network, but seeing as that number was over 100,000 in August 2020 and over 11.86 million premises have been wired, he's happy to say the job's been done.

The statement also pointed out that legislation governing the NBN build requires a declaration the job is done before December 31st. "New premises are being built all the time," the minister said. "This means that there will always be a number of premises around Australia that are not yet 'ready to connect.' The fact that there is a certain number of premises which are not ready to connect is not of itself evidence that the network cannot be treated as 'built and fully operational.'" Thus ends a saga that began in the mid-2000s when Australia figured out that ubiquitous broadband access was a good idea. Dominant telco Telstra proposed to build the network and operate as both a wholesaler to rivals and a retailer, but as that arrangement had stifled competition for years the government of the day wasn't keen on the idea. At the 2007 election the left-of-center Australian Labor Party swept to power in part due to its plans to build a fast national broadband network. That promise evolved into a commitment to build a fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network...
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After 11 Years, Australia Declares Its National Broadband Network Is 'Built and Fully Operational' More

After 11 Years, Australia Declares Its National Broadband Network Is 'Built and Fully Operational'

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  • Goal Posts (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Confused_Enemy ( 1613781 ) on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @10:44PM (#60858820)
    We were sold on an idea, which was Fiber To The PREMISE! We got a complete bastardization of the network and copper still left in the last mile in MANY premises providing wonderful hybrid. But even they were the lucky ones compared to the hack n fix sky muster. NBN is a joke, should have strongly invested in mobile network towers, which are far superior.

    • Re:Goal Posts (Score:5, Funny)

      by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @10:48PM (#60858832)
      Its OK, the government has declared victory so we can all move on. It worked in Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and Iraq, so why not in Australia?

      • Its OK, the emperor has declared victory so we can all move on. It worked in Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and Iraq, so why not in Australia?

        FTFY.

        Now witness the PACKETPOWER of this fully BUILT and OPERATIONAL BROADBAND NETWORK.

        Also, Artoo.

    • 5g is not a solution. Fiber is the only 80 year solution, thatâ(TM)s what government should spend money on, not stop gap solutions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by inflex ( 123318 )

      Oh please no no NO, do not give them the idea to install more mobile towers. Do it right, run the fibre to the premises. Mobile network towers are not a substitute for fibre network that'll be useful for 50yrs+, where's we'd be constantly having to change the towers every ~15 years if they want to keep up with the latest and as the frequency increases we have to typically install more towers per given area.

      The throughput from towers also falls off at a more rapid rate due to contention compared to fibre.

      N

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rhipf ( 525263 )

      ANY wired option is far superior to any wireless option.
      I currently can only get Internet via the local cell network (Starlink could be an option if it wasn't so expensive and currently limited participation). This connection gives me ~2mbps (only 3G service is available). I would drop this connection in a heart beat if I was able to get any form of wired connection. I would even take a 500kbps wired connection over the 2mbps wireless connection.
      Yes ideally I would like a 1gbps fibre connection but that jus

  • Done, but far from paid for. (Score:3)

    by quenda ( 644621 ) on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @10:44PM (#60858822)

    The NBN co. is massively in debt, taxpayer-guaranteed debt, which it will never be able to repay.
    The plan to sell it off at a profit was always a politician's fantasy, or smoke-and-mirrors.

    I have no objection to publicly funded infrastructure, but this is going to cost us a whole lot more than promised, due to government incompetence and corruption.

    • I wouldn't care about the cost, if the fucking shit worked properly and they just admitted that they fucked up with "multi-mix technology"

      Now "we didn't back flip, we just happened to end up doing what the opposition said to do from the start."

      Cunts. 'straya!

    • Not really fair to blame the whole government for it. It was literally just Tony Abbott who wanted it compromised to politically hurt Labor. Maybe you can say some of the blame goes to Turnbull for being a fucking coward who was supportive of Labor's NBN plan until he let Abbott walk all over him.

      • Re: Done, but far from paid for. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymouse Cowtard ( 6211666 ) on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:20AM (#60859042) Homepage
        Actually, Abbott screwed it up for his mate, Rupert Murdoch, whose paytv monopoly saw fast internet as a threat. It's amazing how few people realise this. The media only covers scandles on one side.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by inflex ( 123318 )

        I'll blame Conroy/ALP as well for the fiasco. They had enough years to get the momentum going but they burned up a lot of time and social credit with their great firewall crap which let LNP in to white-ant ALPs social standing. Never felt like Conroy was standing up for the FTTP policy, instead just remained weak in defending it when ever LNP was promoting BS about FTTP vs their mixed-tech idea.

        Sadly, it's done, and it'll be 30~50 years probably before we get a chance to do it again, if at all.

      • Not really fair to blame the whole government for it. It was literally just Tony Abbott who wanted it compromised to politically hurt Labor.

        Considering that "the whole government" was run by the Liberal-National coalition at the time blaming one person is just scapegoating. The rot that led to the NBN's demise runs deep and isn't limited to one person's idea. Fucking Australian politics have devolved to American level of shit flinging where it doesn't matter if a party has a good idea or not, the singular goal of the opposition is to oppose it.

        • No, in this case, it really is Tony Abbott. The Lib/Nats, despite me disagreeing with their politics, were not as a whole incompetent. Tony Abbott is like the precursor to Boris Johnson and Trump - people who thinks a blustering attitude and ideology would magically get things done. You can see once those three got it in, the rest of their party literally saw it as an excuse to race to the bottom. To be sure the UK/US/AU governments have been declining in ability as things got increasingly privatized, but a

          • No it wasn't. Tony Abbott has never had an original idea in his life other that to vote against gay marriage despite having the gayest constituency in the country, that has to be a new level of original and stupid for a politician.

            Tony Abbott had neither the fucking clue nor the capability to screw the NBN the way it was. That involved an approach within several levels of government and the help of private enterprises too. Blaming one person is stupidly narrow minded, just like blaming Boris Johnson for wha

            • When Malcolm Turnbull was opposition leader, he was practically in support of the Labor NBN. Only when Abbott took over was Turnbull given the job to screw it up.

              Nothing you said contradicts anything I said. I never said that the parties were perfect until those three came along. I never said they personally did everything themselves. However, it is very obvious that when those three took over, the crazy factions in their respective parties got confident to tear everything down. Yes, they mobilized the c

              • And you seem to be agreeing with me. The entire liberal government coordinated the screw up of the NBN. You said it yourself "Turnbull given the job to screw it up".

    • From-scratch fiber network? It takes YEARS to establish. Nothing happened in the beginning because they were establishing, training and deploying contractors (in the US) , I was on a line crew running fiber in '96. I was again in early 2000's , then came the splicing, then a few years later networks began flouting nation-wide broadband. Took over a decade in the US.

      But now there is Starlink and friends, likely cheaper.

      • There's nothing cheaper about this. They literally left the shittiest most maintenance heavy component in place which will need to be replaced within the coming decades anyway.

        Absolutely no one in the industry, in the labour government, or even the advisors from the IEEE thought this "multi-technology mix" was in any way a good idea.

    • Re:Done, but far from paid for. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by walshy007 ( 906710 ) on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:53AM (#60859072)

      I have no objection to publicly funded infrastructure, but this is going to cost us a whole lot more than promised, due to government incompetence and corruption.

      Indeed, They should have never bought the aged and failing telstra copper network [itnews.com.au] considering their initial goal of fiber everywhere.. but public infrastructure competes with private profit interests, so they just porked it up and paid for it.

      Of course, none of that would have been a problem in the first place if they hadn't sold telstra (australia's formerly government owned public service telephone company) for a short sighted raising of funds.

      • Isn't the problem the fact that the gov wanted a monopoly position? Making it illegal for telstra to continue offering anything on that address outside of the NBN... thats probably the reason they had to buy the network. Gov will always overpromise and underdeliver!

        • Telstra's privatisation was always flawed.

          The government owned copper telephone network underlying ADSL became Telstra's, which every competitor had to pay a wholesale price back to Telstra to access - which the government at the time never saw as anticompetitive.

          Building a NBN was thus Labor's plan to dismantle Telstra's cosy relationship as an ex-government monopoly and invest in fibre where Telstra were content to keep people relying on their copper lines.

  • It SHOULD have been better! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dendad51 ( 6204576 ) on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @11:17PM (#60858878)
    I will add my voice to the chorus of those who are disappointed in the roll-out. We were all going to get a reasonable system of fiber to the premises, but because it was started by the Labor party, the Liberal party just had to muck it up! I'm in the fortunate position of having fiber to my house and am really happy with it. But the Liberal wrecked it for so many people, and it did not save anything in the long run. Once you have the fiber installed, it is a pathway to much higher bandwidth later with changing the equipment on each end, but the mashup of the system our beloved gov. changed to has still got the old copper in use in many places! They should be ashamed of the mess they made of it, and it will cost a lot more to finally fix it later than it would have to do it right first time. A purely short sighted political decision!! Well, We have seen lots of them!
    • probably should have been better, but then we would be waiting another decade to get to current coverage levels.

    • I don't see it costing any more to fix later. Fiber is already old fashioned. They will replace the whole thing with some wireless contraption in a few years.

      • Re:It SHOULD have been better! (Score:5, Informative)

        by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:17AM (#60859040)
        That's not true at all. Fiber kicks wireless' ass wherever both are available and always will. I know 'always' is a long time but we're talking physics here. Fiber is like the most directional wireless you can imagine that can also go around corners and can be routed right through the ground, to say nothing of weather. And the fiber itself is merely a medium, you can keep upgrading the signaling over the fiber much cheaper than laying a whole new cable.

        • It is fine for now, but fiber's reflective index is horrendous, and with the light bouncing all around in those cables it makes the latency horrendous. There's only so much data a man can use, but people are getting sick and tired of being unable to effectively interact with people in separate continents. Hell, even just a few provinces over isn't great.

          • Most people do not need to run a data center in their basement.

            The idiocy about the NBN was not that it is not Fibre (at even greater expense). It is that it focused on people that did not need or want it. Once you can run a couple of TV channels at once you have enough for most households.

            Meanwhile there where and still are many households that have no or terrible ADSL internet. They desperately want it but are zero priority.

            In my case, we survived on 1.5 mbs which is enough for TV provided that one can

            • indeed, because it was labour, it needed to be there for everyone regardless if they need it or want it for that matter. A shame really. Here in NL they are now rolling it out now that people are actually asking for it. They ask everyone in an area if they want it and if there are enough people to justify the cost it's rolled out.

            • ..I'm Australian but spell it "neighbors"
              its neighbours you Muppet

            • times move on, and modern web page frameworks need more and more and more bandwidth for no particular reason. But 1.5 mbs is still plenty for most.

              IME modern internet life begins at 5 Mbps. That's enough for streaming (albeit at reduced quality) while also doing light surfing. If people aren't going to be reduced to third- or fourth-class citizens online, they need at least that much bandwidth.

              • As someone that lived on 1.5mbs for many years I can tell you from practical experience that you are wrong.

                TV works fine on 1.5. Not 4K, but perfectly watchable, DVD quality, with modern Codecs. Other web sites have yet to choke on 1.5.

                The killer is Windows Update et. al. which all need to be throttled. And they keep trying to escape ip based throttles so you have to keep changing them.

                But 5 mbs is better. And was delivered without the NBN to most households.

            • Current adoption rates have nothing to do with building infrastructure for the future. I'm reminded of the Story Bridge in Brisbane. When it was built at a huge expense and cost overrun it was done by a premier who at least had the forethought to plan for the future. Most of the state and even people in Brisbane absolutely grilled him for building a 4 lane bridge for such an (at the time) small city. What a waste of money that was.

              Yeah, now it's grid lock. My point... I'm glad Labour had some forethought. I

              • It is very dangerous to extrapolate demand for a technological service.

                If the increase in TV numbers had continued over the decades, we would have 100s of TVs each. And each carry a dozen mobile phones.

                The point is, that with some things, enough is enough. And for Internet, enough is being able to transmit video. At that point the human at the end is the bottle neck. And Video can stream OK at 1.5 mbs, well at 5 mbs.

                There has never been a use case, even in theory, why any household would need more than

            • where is 'Tasmainia' in Australia? next to your 'neighbors' place? nice try, pal

          • and with the light bouncing all around in those cables it makes the latency horrendous.

            I know. Here I was just thinking how much better life would be if I read your stupid comment 5ms faster.

    • Unfortunately this is true. It could - and should - have been much better. Also sooner would have been nice.
      As in - say - New Zealand. Or Croatia, come to that.
      I once saw the original specification, when it was fibre, and that was pretty silly. They had such weird specs that only one supplier could actually deliver the required modem - always a bad idea.
      As it happens, we were among the last sets of folk to get connected - and we are in the inner city, just by a university and major hospital. We get 50mbps o

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Sounds like other countries like USA. :(

  • Rudd pushed for FTTP in 2007. The man was a visionary. The Conservatives screwed it all to shore up Rupert Murdoch's outdated paytv operation. And no one battered an eyelid.

    • "And no one battered an eyelid."

      Ready to be deep fried I take it?

    • And the socialists want it for everyone if they want it or not... making the whole thing fail because of cost.

    • you can pay for FTTP - oh wait - you want free shit...

      • you can pay for FTTP - oh wait - you want free shit...

        You can pay for a private road - oh wait - you want free shit...

        Just to ram the point home for the logically challenged, if you're against "free shit" then just fucking stay home, because you can't go anywhere without making use of "free shit".

      • It's called infrastructure. Do you only travel on toll roads? Do you take your rubbish to an incinerator and burn it yourself? Would you reset and plaster your own arm if you broke it? Of fucking course not. Now pay your fucking taxes.

  • I'm really happy to not see much partisanship here but because I hear it elsewhere a lot, I'd just like to get in ahead of the "party P was doing great but then party Q screwed it all up" argument.

    Australian internet was not great but just OK before any of this NBN nonsense. Then along came the politicians with an appetite for takeover. The first of them had a big vision of top-down design, "everyone" gets fibre of some flavour (this isn't quite true but is largely accurate for the sake of argument), accomp

    • I'm really happy to not see much partisanship here but because I hear it elsewhere a lot, I'd just like to get in ahead of the "party P was doing great but then party Q screwed it all up" argument.,

      all Australians I've met hate their government no matter which one is in.

      It's great when the PM goes and visits some random place because the locals are performatively rude to him. They take it to an art form. The Australians are even better than the Brits in this regard.

    • Re:Non-partisan fail (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jezwel ( 2451108 ) on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @06:37AM (#60859396)

      Australian internet was not great but just OK before any of this NBN nonsense.

      There were (and still are) massive differences between connection quality, capability, and resilience for internet back when Labor dreamt up the NBN. It was in no way "OK" unless you were serviced by cable, fibre, or close to a non-Telstra ADSL 2+ exchange.

      Then along came the politicians with an appetite for takeover. The first of them had a big vision of top-down design, "everyone" gets fibre of some flavour (this isn't quite true but is largely accurate for the sake of argument), accompanied by economic growth fantasies like "now all the lawyers and doctors and researchers can move to the country but it'll totally work because they can send each other GB data files all day long!) all the while being totally ignorant of time and cost. Both of these had blown out before the change of Government.

      The vision was very long term I'll give you that. Budget was blown about 10%, same with time. That's nothing though compared to the farce of the MTM, promised at $29.5B with completion in 2016 to $57+B "completed" by end 2020.

      Then the Government did change and costs had to be reined in.

      This was a made-up problem. (Look at how many hundreds of billions we're throwing at keeping the country out of recession due to COVID for instance). Studies indicate high penetration of fast broadband increases GDP, which increases tax revenue. Fibre is cheaper to run (about $1B a year for NBN), and the payback time to install an expensive FTTP connection vs an ideal cost FTTN connection is less than a decade - far less than the lifetime of a fibre asset. TCO over 10+ years is lowest on full FTTP.

      So now we're tens of billions in the hole and everyone's internet is largely similar to before.

      . You do realise that NBN have borrowed another $4+ Billion to overbuild some FTTN premises to FTTP? There's only one reason to do that - the cost of those keeping those FTTN connections is more expensive than a complete rebuild with FTTP.

      Copper based fixed line internet is a massive waste of money compared to full fibre.

  • We're not getting the blazing speeds of other lands but it's nice to at least be able to download massive game patches quickly. FTTP would be better though.

  • "Completed".. Sure (Score:3)

    by auzy ( 680819 ) on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @02:04AM (#60859086)

    We set up home networks here for customers. And the number of customers with NBN problems (which included myself) was massive. In fact, it literally took me a year to prove to NBN/TPG that my FTTC connection dropped out EVERY time it rained (and I ended up going to the TIO, who resolved it by replacing the copper cable with ANOTHER obsolete copper cable).

    We have a customer in Mt Eliza with Skymuster / Satellite, despite having a school almost next door with Fibre, and FTTN 3 houses away. We have a customer with fixed wireless. They get 1mbps upload, and 10mbps download. Anything over 6/1 is apparently OK and they can't fix.

      FTTP was the only system with a standard for VOIP built in. On the rest of it, SIP isn't mandated, so we're stuck installing shitty ISP routers, instead of upgrading them to real ones. They should have required phone lines use standard SIP, and required SIP details to be provided to customers.

    NBN techs never confirm if the premises have a lift either, so lots of properties had NBN installed with No phone working in the lift (and I suspect many still don't have working phones in their lifts). Someone will likely die because of it.

    One of our customers was a NBN tech, and he said the cabling for lots of premises he's seen was poorly done (including some of the new Fibre ones).

    The whole thing is a disaster. This isn't completed. They just lowered the standards to ADSL standards in areas they couldn't be arsed with

    • Mod up. But the tail-end-charlies those 'not connected', basically now get ADSL speeds, but asked to pay $20 month more for no noticeable benefit. Meanwhile mobile phone companies are rolling offerings that beat NBN fixed line 3rd world basic plans as long as you are less than 60-100 gig month. The solution to this is a new tax on the mobile companies or any competition generally. Bandwidth arbitrage, or reselling bits on bigger plans is technically illegal, meaning synthetic pricing. If Huawei 5G was allo

  • From wikipedia:
    "NBN Co found no significant demand for wired connections above 25 Mbit/s (despite public surveys indicating otherwise) and upgrading the network would not be considered until demand for high-bandwidth services was proven."

    Most if it is still copper. I would say... keep trying?

    • Monopolist stating nobody wants better service... right

    • and upgrading the network would not be considered until demand for high-bandwidth services was proven

      I.e. company whose sole existence is to build the infrastructure of the future instead focuses on meeting today's demand with yesterday's tech.

  • Murdoch killed NBN to protect Foxtel (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Macfox ( 50100 ) on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @05:44AM (#60859352)

    While you wont see it in the Murdoch dominated media or even the whipped public broadcaster (ABC), Tony Abbott who was never a popular politician, benefited from Murdoch's unprecedented support. Murdoch papers shamelessly supported the the Abbott LNP government, and relentlessly attacked the ALP, who introduce the full fibre NBN. The LNP narrowly won government, despite obvious failings and lack of policy platform. In return Abbott killed off the 1st significant threat to the Foxtel (cable/sat tv) monopoly in 15 years. However it was plain to see in the News Corp SEC filings, which warned of “risk factors” to its businesses, including its newspapers and Foxtel pay TV.

    “Due to innovations in content distribution platforms, consumers are now more readily able to watch internet-delivered content on television sets and mobile devices, in some cases also without charge,”

    The innovations “could reduce consumer demand for our television programming and PAY-TV services and adversely affect both our subscription revenue and advertisers’ willingness to purchase television advertising from us”.

    The LNP still continues to benefit from the Murdoch media today and Foxtel having been afforded breathing space has ben able to see off rivals, ironically pivoting to leverage the NBN.

    Murdoch has now set his sights on Google and Facebook, pushing legislation through the Australian Parliament to force the platforms to pay News organisation for content and expose their ranking algorithms.

  • ...a politician declare an unfit-for-purpose, bloated behemoth fully operational before?

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