

Australian opposition announces National Broadband Network plan - pserwylo
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-09/conroy-hits-out-at-coalition-policy/4618232

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pserwylo
For those unfamiliar with the current state of Internet service in Australia:

The current government has founded a company called NBNco (National Broadband
Network Company) to connect 93% of Australian homes via fibre. The remaining
will be covered with a fixed-wireless and Satellite.

This comes at a cost of $44b and completion date of 2021.

The opposition party has just announced their plan, which is to connect 22% of
households directly to fibre, 71% via fibre to the node, utilising the
existing copper network for the last few hundred metres, 4% via fixed
wireless, and ~3% via satellite.

This comes at a cost of $30b and completion by the end of 2016.

What it comes down to is, should the Australian people be spending an extra
$14b and five years to connect 71% more of the population directly to fibre?

A lot of the discussion revolves around whether people really need > 100mb/sec
(FttH), or whether >25mb/sec (FttN) is suitable for the next "x" years of
technology.

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pserwylo
I've tried to write the above comment as un-biasedly as possible, just to give
you the info and what the arguments are about.

For what its worth, I think that the 50% extra price to connect an extra 71%
of homes directly to fibre is worth it. I like to use the analogy of the rail
networks being built in the USA, or the interstate highways, or even the light
rail in Calgary. Each is a massive project, which costs quite a bit of money,
but in the long term, repays the investments many times over in the things
they enable.

The opposition is guaranteeing that nobody will have less than 25mb/sec, and
the government is touting a maximum speed of 100mb. But they seem to shy away
from the fact that 100mb is just the speeds you will get with todays
technology in the exchanges. I'm not too familiar with networking hardware,
but it seems that increasing the speed of a FttH network is much easier than
the FttN network, because it involves replacing hardware in the exchange.
Whereas with FttN, you are fundamentally limited by the copper connections to
the houses.

I heard the opposition communications spokesman yesterday on the radio,
talking about "What will the average person possibly need with 100mb/sec?",
but then you could ask the same thing for their 25mb/sec connection: "What
will the average person possibly need with 25mb/sec?". I know right now, that
my mum, sisters, brother, etc would not be able to utilise that bandwidth. I
think that by conceding that 25mb is the minimum suitable bandwidth for the
future, they are conceding that faster networks will be required in the
future. So why limit it at the arbitrary value of 25mb and say "This is all we
will need".

