

Why is Australia building a FTTH network that is only 100Mbps? Why not gigabit?  - andrewstuart

The Australian government is constructing a brand new, purpose built from scratch nationwide fibre to the home broadband network.  However sights are set extremely low when it comes to performance.  They are promising 100Mbps which seems slow.  Hong Kong offers symmetric gigabit home connections over fibre.  Why is Australia constructing a superhighway and not making it fast?  Surely the cost is in getting the cables laid and that gigabit would cost little more than 100Mbps?
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lambda
Probably because for one, you're not going to get gigabit speeds in practice;
the servers only have limited amounts of bandwidth, so you'll probably only be
getting a few megabits to tens of megabits most of the time anyhow.

Also, fiber is generally pretty scalable. Once the fiber is laid, you
generally have an awful lot of unused fibers; the limiting factor is the
routing hardware, which can be upgraded later. The initial investment, for
getting the fiber in the ground, on the poles, and to the homes, is the
important part.

Heck, in the US, there are places where they're still working on 10 Mbps FTTH
networks, and places where there aren't any FTTH network plans at any point
within the near future. 100 Mbps FTTH would be great.

Also, remember that Australia (like the US) is a heck of a lot bigger and more
spread out than Hong Kong. That means a lot more miles of fiber for the same
number of people, which means more of the initial investment needs to go into
just laying the cables.

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andrewstuart
All true, but surely the cost of implementing gigabit instead of 100Mbps is
trivial relative to the cost of laying all that cable? Why lay a formula one
racetrack and only drive pedal cars on it?

~~~
lambda
Er, no, as I said, the real difference between gigabit and 100 Mbps fiber is
in the routers (and repeaters, and switches, and the like), not the cables.
And it would cost significantly more to implement gigabit than 100 Mbps, and
it wouldn't really make sense anyhow until the backbone infrastructure catches
up. But if you build out the 100 Mbps network, you can then just upgrade the
hardware later on, having already spent the cost on laying the fiber.

100 Mbps fiber to the home is no "pedal car." 100 Mbps is pretty damn fast.

Take a look at the global speedtest.net averages:
<http://www.speedtest.net/global.php> . Note that even places with high
penetration of FTTH, like South Korea and Hong Kong, only have averages for
real-world performance a few times higher than, say, the US, which has very
little FTTH penetration (the US is at 9.72 Mbps, Hong Kong at 14.18, South
Korea at 32.26, and Australia currently at 7.12). Given these sorts of
results, gigabit vs. 100 Mbps FTTH will likely make _no difference_ in real-
world performance, while gigabit will cost substantially more. And they both
use the same fiber; once the backbone infrastructure and hosts are in place to
support that kind of bandwidth, you can upgrade from the 100 Mbps to gigabit
hardware at that time, rather than spending the money now when the extra
bandwidth will go unused.

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Yaa101
Money and Monopoly is why. Australia has too little competition between big
providers of anything and by laying out a 100MB/sec network they want to make
sure that they stay in vision to provide the 1GB/sec network next (in ten
years or so) while milking the users of said 100MB/sec network. Just business.

