
Australian Government will offer 1Gbps this year to all NBN-connected homes - treelovinhippie
http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/nbn-customers-set-for-worldleading-download-speeds-to-happen-by-end-of-the-year-20130418-2i32b.html
======
davidjohnstone
Of course, we're having an election sometime this year, and the Liberal's —
who are probably going to win — are planning on making the NBN slower and
cheaper[1] (100Mbps by utilising the existing copper network, rather than
fully replacing it with fiber).

1\. [http://www.zdnet.com/coalitions-nbn-to-cost-
almost-30bn-7000...](http://www.zdnet.com/coalitions-nbn-to-cost-
almost-30bn-7000013702/)

~~~
MarkMc
The ABC program "Inside Business" gave a neat summary of the differences
between the Labor and Liberal plans: <http://imgur.com/OtmOBE7>

It's worth noting that the Liberals plan has 'Fibre To The Premises' going to
22% of households, while Labour's plan goes to 93%.

So we're spending an extra $17 billion to give 71% of households a boost from
100Mb to 1Gb per second? That's about $2,500 per household. That doesn't seem
like good value to me. Shouldn't we delay the massive cost of installing fibre
to existing homes until most households need more than 100Mb per second?

~~~
oohmeplums
How much extra would it cost to upgrade the FTTN to FTTH afterwards? Surely
it's more efficient to do it once and do it right with fibre?

And I have my doubts about the copper reaching 100Mbps.

~~~
jacques_chester
My understanding is that copper will be replaced with FTTP when it wears out.
That spreads the cost over time while bringing forward the 25Mbps minimum
service level forward by a few years.

There's no doubt that FTTP is the ultimate long term solution. But that
doesn't mean it has to happen first.

~~~
elithrar
> My understanding is that copper will be replaced with FTTP when it wears
> out. That spreads the cost over time while bringing forward the 25Mbps
> minimum service level forward by a few years.

Much of it _is_ wearing out. Users who already have issues with noise,
interference and/or slow speeds on ADSL will be similarly disadvantaged by
VDSL under the Coalition's FTTN plan. You also still need to worry about
flooded pits, leaking conduit and so on. Having worked at a number of ISPs and
watched all the faults roll in after even moderate storms, I know that these
are real problems.

Further, how does the Government decide when your copper is "worn out", and
what incentive do they have to spend more money (over their original plan) to
upgrade you? How many people in your area need to suffer the same problem
before they need to both a) completely replace your FTTN VDSL equipment with
GPON gear, and b) pull fibre, replace conduit and wire small groups of homes
on an ad-hoc basis?

~~~
jacques_chester
I agree, lots of of the existing infrastructure is worn down. My understanding
is that Turnbull proposes that some of it will be replaced immediately and the
rest would continue to be replaced on a rolling basis.

The main difference between the coalition plan and the business-as-usual plan
is that old copper will be replaced with fibre, not with new copper. It's easy
to forget that waaaay back when, this is what Telstra and the government were
negotiating to do anyhow.

In Turnbull's position I wouldn't have promised anything except to review once
in government. For one thing, a lot of work will already be contracted and
it's not plausible to renege on the contracts. So there'll be an uneven
distribution of fibre/copper which will lead to some distortion in the housing
market. Not huge, but it'd be nice if it wasn't there.

~~~
elithrar
> I agree, lots of of the existing infrastructure is worn down. My
> understanding is that Turnbull proposes that some of it will be replaced
> immediately and the rest would continue to be replaced on a rolling basis.

The problem is that these costs are most certainly not encapsulated in
Turnbull's $20B costing.

~~~
jacques_chester
The problem is that neither the government nor the opposition have ever
produced their original costings nor any audit of those costs. In the
government's case we're promised that audits were done. But we can't see what
was audited and we can't see what the instructions are.

------
anigbrowl
I wish the US government would get its act together on this. The Constitution
includes a grant of power to Congress to create a national system of post
roads (Article 1, Section 8.7) and my understanding is that the founders
included this because they recognized the importance of a public
communications infrastructure rather than a privately held one [1].
Considering the criticality of our communications infrastructure in an era of
cyber-attacks, I find it disappointing that Congress seems to have abandoned
this important role to the private sector.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurn_und_Taxis>

~~~
wyager
Do you really want the government to be in charge of data transport with its
track record of blatantly ignoring the right to privacy? Aren't you the least
bit concerned that we'll end up with something like in the UK or China, where
government control over internet infrastructure has lead to extensive
monitoring and censorship?

I'd rather take (possibly) slower and/or more expensive internet that the
government has to put a lot of elbow grease in to censor or monitor than a
(possibly!) cheaper and/or faster internet that the government has extensive
control over.

If you've worked in telecom, you might know how extensive the government's
data monitoring infrastructure already is. I sure as hell don't want to make
it any bigger.

~~~
jeza
With the NBN, the government is just a wholesaler. They just provide a
physical medium and end users will still get a retail service from a private
company. Besides the government has the same responsibility to adhere to
privacy laws as any private company, in fact government have their own privacy
requirements with additional channels to resolve complaints. Ethnically I
don't see why a government that you vote for would have any less reason to
respect privacy than a private company (who you pay money to). Finally, the
government could just pass legislation to monitor/censor within a private
network, so it doesn't really matter whether it is public or private from this
perspective. It's more a matter of voting for the right representatives.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _With the NBN, the government is just a wholesaler._

The Minister responsible for the NBN -- Senator Conroy -- is also the guy who
wants ISP-level internet filtering based on a secret blacklist.

------
DigitalSea
The whole NBN has been a joke from the beginning. The roll-out delays for what
was originally a 100mbps fibre network that is now supposedly going to offer
1gbps speeds conveniently announced right around the time Quigley is about to
be grilled in parliament over the delays and so close to an election it looks
like Labor will be losing in a landslide.

While the prospect of 1gbps speeds sounds great as a developer, the very fact
those speeds will only be affordable to businesses at a cost of what looks
like could be close to the AUD $200 per month mark initially and no doubt rise
with minuscule bandwidth provided for the cost. The reason current Internet
offerings in Australia are so expensive is because of the small number of
cables that connect us to the rest of the world and monopoly of our limited
selection of ISP's, are they planning on laying more deep-sea cables to handle
the increased load?

Will the high-speeds only apply to Australian content like Optus's fraudulent
high-speed 100mbps addon pack promises for cable subscribers which only could
promise close to those speeds for Australian content, not content from
overseas.

On the outside this looks like a Godsend for Australia and while it
undoubtedly is in some aspects as we saw with the rise of ADSL in the early
2000's, the project has been poorly managed from the start and this sounds
like a stunt more-so than a reality based on what we've seen so far.

Having said that, I would be more than happy with 100mbps speeds compared to
the 20mbps connection I currently have which costs me $75 per month through
Optus Cable. And overall the premise and vision for the NBN is still better
than the archaic coalition "high-speed" network plans they have of their own.

~~~
jacques_chester
The odds that a project of this magnitude and complexity would be done on time
and budget were basically zero. But it's very hard to tell what could have
been better because of the Commercial-in-Confidence veil.

Quigley is not an idiot; he's a smart, well-educated bloke with decades of
telco experience. He had no control over the schedule -- Treasury (remember
those guys? they're the ones who said that the European carbon price would
continue rising to hit $29 by 2015) pretty much drew up an estimate for a
press conference and that's what got chucked over the wall.

In Quigley's position I'm pretty sure anyone would have struggled to make it
work.

------
zmmmmm
That's kind of a tautology ... all the homes in the US connected to 1Gbps
fibre "this year" will also be connected to 1Gbps fibre "this year". The
salient missing fact is that the NBN is going to reach only a tiny tiny
miniscule minority of homes "this year" (my house is not even scheduled on the
plan that stretches out past 2017).

~~~
treelovinhippie
True, just that "XXX,XXX homes currently connected to the Australian
Government's NBN initiative, will have 1Gbps speed enabled by the end of the
year" is a bit long for a title. I've made a small title edit :)

Here's the NBNCo targets:

June 2013 - 661,000 "passed or covered" and 92,000 premises with active
service

June 2014 - 1,681,000 "passed or covered" and 551,000 premises with active
service

[http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/nbn-co-corporate-
pl...](http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/nbn-co-corporate-
plan-6-aug-2012.pdf#page=35)

------
jameswyse
They'll find some way to cripple it for sure, like sticking a 200GB/month cap
on it. Australia can't have nice things :/

~~~
elithrar
> They'll find some way to cripple it for sure, like sticking a 200GB/month
> cap on it. Australia can't have nice things :/

If you look at many of the plans already offered by ISP's, you'll find that
this isn't the case.[1]

Once more homes are connected, these limits are only likely to increase (as
they have each year prior). Perhaps we shouldn't have limits at all, and just
pay for a pipe of a certain bandwidth; but from an ISP's perspective they
implement these caps to protect themselves from abuse by a small % of users.

Personally I'd rather know my cap is there, as opposed to the odd behavior of
many US ISPs in targeting "high usage" users with what seems like little
transparency.

[1]: <http://www.iinet.net.au/nbn/nbn-plan-residential.html>

~~~
cynix
> If you look at many of the plans already offered by ISP's, you'll find that
> this isn't the case.

The largest plan offered by iiNet has a quota of 1000GB. If you're on the
100Mbps plan, this can be consumed in less than 1 day. How is this not the
case?

~~~
kondro
Because you won't consume it in less than a day.

For the present time, 1TB is enough for almost all home users.

As history has shown us, these limits will increase as demand does.

And iiNet overage at $0.10/GB is pretty favourable as well… what does AWS
charge again?

~~~
cynix
> Because you won't consume it in less than a day.

I would if I could…

> And iiNet overage at $0.10/GB is pretty favourable as well…

Well, I suppose it's reasonable. I don't think it's fair to compare it to
business-grade services like AWS though; it would be more appropriate to
compare the NBN to Google Fiber or one of the Japanese/Korean ISPs.

------
angersock
Pardon my ignorance, but aren't the pipes that actually go to Australia
relatively small? So, wouldn't this just increase burden on those
interconnects and maybe not help unless connecting to somebody else in
Australia?

~~~
nness
I don't know much about the pipes actually, but I do believe a new one is
being constructed. That said, I am curious to know the answer to this question
too.

I guess torrenting within the borders will be a speedy affair however.

~~~
Schwolop
Allow me some time to find the statistics again on this, but from what I've
gathered following the NBN debate for a few years now: No. The pipes are more
than double our current requirements and growing faster than requirements do
due to some funny incentive scheme.

Total capacity: ~2TB/s [1], but the PPC-1 line has potential to add another
2.5TB/s. The others are being upgraded too [2]. "Currently, Australia has a
theoretical 5637734.4Mbit/s of transpacific bandwidth, however lit capacity is
much less."[3]

"The total international capacity in use for the Australian market in 2009 is
estimated to be around 300 gigabits per second."[4]

References: [1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_Australia...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_Australia#Submarine_cables)
[2] [http://www.itnews.com.au/News/157753,ppc-1-delivers-more-
spe...](http://www.itnews.com.au/News/157753,ppc-1-delivers-more-speed-than-
expected.aspx) [3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia#Internati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia#International_connectivity)
[4] <http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn#nbn_faq> (See section 5.7 - "Does
Australia have the international capacity to provide every customer with 100
megabit internet?")

------
jacques_chester
I hate to be the guy who says that this looks like an election-year stunt to
try and "save the furniture", but ... well, it does.

Edit 2: A mate of mine pointed out that they _made the same announcement
before the 2010 election_ :

[http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/nbn-
downloa...](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/nbn-download-
boost-ups-ante-in-web-war/story-fn59niix-1225904128498)

Part of the problem with the NBN is the highly selective veil of secrecy. It's
a public project and it's being backed by the Commonwealth. The lenders who
are loaning the funds are not doing it because they think NBNCo would be
allowed to go broke; everyone knows that these are really Australian
Government bonds in a dress.

But the government still uses "Commercial-in-Confidence" to stymie all
oversight. This would be more reasonable in dealing with a company at arm's
length, but NBNCo is 100% government owned. They would be well within their
rights to waive the requirement for confidence.

Consequently, nobody _really_ knows how the rollout is going or what it costs.
NBNCo claim they can't give Parliament information about particular streets
because they don't track to that level of granularity, yet mysteriously they
are able to claim in aggregate to be on track.

Leaving to the side of whether this is the right thing to build, there's still
the important question of _building it the right way_. And IMO that's not been
happening, and it really bugs me.

edit: I know people don't like this point of view, but if you disagree, the
done thing on HN is to reply, not downvote.

~~~
oohmeplums
The upgrade to 1Gbps was always in the roadmap:
<http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/initial-roadmap.pdf>

Frankly, I think they should've launched with 1Gbps to begin with -- customers
don't have to pay for the higher speed tiers if they don't want to.

~~~
jacques_chester
Ah, I hadn't realised that. So it's a stock standard re-announcement.

