
National Broadband Network CEO says Australians don't want super-fast broadband - prawn
http://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/nbn-ceo-says-australians-do-not-want-superfast-broadband-speeds/news-story/822bc8b57836bc8dc80cc9bd285d56d5
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ClassyJacket
This guy was specifically installed to hold back the project as much as
possible for the sake of partisan politics and making profit. He's well aware
that he's installing a useless network, that's his job. They're actually
actively installing _slower_ connections than people had before, and spending
around 2300$ per house to do so. And the technology they're using has no
capability to be upgraded. At all. Ever.

Labor wanted fibre, so the Liberal Party wanted copper. The current plan is to
waste the entire NBN budget so that even if the other government gets back in
power, they still can't give us good connections.

There is no excuse for deploying fibre-to-the-node in 2007, let alone 2017.
It's a deliberate, political move.

Jobs, education, small businesses, science, research, film, art -- all of
these will sadly be held back in Australia for at least a decade while we wait
for decent internet.

Thanks for destroying our future, Turnbull. But at least a few Telstra
shareholders got a bigger mansion.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
To be fair VDSL is good enough for a single household to run a 4K stream or
two and other activities provided you actually get the whole 55Mb downstream
and not the BS "up to" line the telcos like to use for their craptastic DSL
offerings. 100Mb+ isn't really a necessity for most people.

~~~
ClassyJacket
You can get 100Mbit even, if the node happens to live in your front lawn.
Problem is they're installing them up to a km away and only promising 25Mbit
-- and lots of people aren't even getting that. There are people on 10 and
less.

Also, why spend MORE on "Maybe 25mbit or up to 100" with no upgrade potential
when you could install the fibre and have reliable gigabit right away? It
makes no sense.

The NBN should be for the future, not for what's okay for most people today.

Imagine if we only had dialup now because that was all we needed 15 years ago.
That's what the Liberals are doing to the NBN.

~~~
mortehu
Are coaxial cable connections not available? These days, you can get 10/1 Gbps
with DOCSIS 3.1 (although TWC in USA offers only 300 Mbps), and the standard
seems to be improving still.

~~~
ClassyJacket
In some areas they are, but it's a minority of houses in Australia. Telstra
and Optus have them.

NBN is decommissioning the Optus HFC network and replacing it with VDSL. Yes,
I'm serious.

They're taking over and using the Telstra coaxial network, which should
improve upload speeds, but they aren't planning to offer anything above
100Mbps (about 94 actual throughput) on it. They're replacing the DOCSIS 3.0
equipment, but with more DOCSIS 3.0 equipment.

Since Telstra's max plan goes about 115mbit, this is actually a downgrade in
speed at my house. I'll be waving 20Mbit/s goodbye.

------
ctphipps
Can't agree with this sentiment more. I've been involved directly in two
separate decisions over the last 5 years where US companies decided not to
invest in product and operations launches Australia specifically because of
the cost of bandwidth to residential users. This is not just about home users
wanting to streaming movies, Australia is losing jobs because of this short-
sighted, political farce over the NBN.

The clincher is that my mother, who lives in the nation's capital, has only
two options for Internet connectivity at her home, both are ADSL1, neither
offers downlink speeds in excess of 8Mbps and uplink is capped at 256kbps,
with actual speeds more like 2Mbps down/128kbps up.

Why? Because Telstra, the national telco decided to implement micro-exchanges
in the form of roadside cabinets (RIMs) in the 1990s, thus locking out all
other players from offering ADSL access, and themselves from being upgraded to
ASDL2/2+.

Almost 30 years later, these RIMs are still a key part of their landline
infrastructure and due to lack of competition and the delays in the NBN,
they're able to charge the poor customers that are connected to them top
dollar (~AUD$70/month) for third world Internet speeds.

~~~
nikcub
> I've been involved directly in two separate decisions over the last 5 years
> where US companies decided not to invest in product and operations launches
> Australia specifically because of the cost of bandwidth to residential users

Cost of bandwidth and last mile network are completely unrelated. Australian
bandwidth is the most expensive in the world because it is poorly peered
mostly one-way expensive transit.

You could install gigabit to every home tomorrow and you'd still have 100GB
download caps because an international link is $25/Mbps+

I find a lot of people confuse these issues, which is unfortunate because all
of this NBN energy directed towards the price of Australian bandwidth could
actually fix something tangible.

~~~
deadlyllama
Really? NZ is in a similar situation and I can buy an unlimited 1Gbps
residential fibre connection in a town of 43,000 people for NZD115/month.

NBN handover charges are excessive, and interconnecting with Telstra is crazy
expensive, and you need to for good domestic connectivity. The NZ UFB fibre
network has much lower handover costs, and the incumbent telco here is
marginally more reasonable.

------
mrmondo
I remember moving from New Zealand where I'd had 100-200Mbit/s fibre for
several years to Australia in 2012, when I arrived I moved into a brand new
apartment in the first suburb to get fibre to the home, turns out it wasn't to
all homes... and I was stuck with 2Mbit/s, which is what i had when I started
high school in NZ many many years ago. 2017 is here now and I literally spent
over an hour today trying to help someone figure out how to get better than
her 2.5Mbit/s ADSL to her house which is not at all far from the CBD, turns
out there's nothing she can do. Up until recently I was paying for 3x ADSL
lines all set to annex-M and peered together using PFSense because all you can
get in most of the cities is 100~ year old copper that's falling apart thanks
to the hard right governments that are anti-technology and often anti-
education from what I can tell. Recently I gave up on my three links and
managed to get a point-to-point 5ghz wireless link from a beam off the top of
my roof to a large building in line of sight which is better but obviously
won't scale well.

~~~
djsumdog
Where the hell did you get 100-200Mbit fibre? We had a fibre connection at
work for our data centres in Wellington and I still felt the connection wasn't
all that great (mostly the limit of the undersea fibre cables to Australia/US
Pacific).

Even people I knew on TelecomNZ/Spark fibre didn't have the greatest
connection speeds (They were decent I guess, but not what I'd consider fibre
at all).

~~~
mrmondo
It was common as anything in Christchurch, most of my friends had between 40
and 500Mbit at home either on fibre (up to 1Gbit to the home at the time back
in 2011), VDSL (I think up to 200Mbit if you're close to the exchange back
then) or the old Cable network which was 100Mbit.

At my work we had two 1Gbit internet links at our primary site and anywhere
from 1Gbit down to 50Mbit~ way out in rural areas and we had between 500Mbit
and 10Gbit dark fibre between sites.

~~~
mrmondo
Here's some pricing: [http://ufb.org.nz/pricing-
plans/](http://ufb.org.nz/pricing-plans/)

------
prawn
Had a mild argument with a friend before the "NBN election". He thought that
our internet was just fine. He could read news sites and so on. I argued that,
before long, we'd be streaming video as a matter of course, and it would be
high definition. More people would be working remotely or storing information
online.

I remembered this the other day. The kids were watching Netflix, my wife was
watching Stan (another streaming service) and I was live streaming sport. We
almost never switch on regular TV. Without NBN in our area for years yet, this
makes for a lot of buffering and quality degradation. And if anyone needs to
be working, the streaming generally stops.

At work, my docs, time tracker, email, backups and so on are all in the cloud.
Multiply that by every person in the office.

As a nation, we can't compete on manufacturing. We should be making sure our
infrastructure for online services (education, entertainment, etc) is
exceptional.

~~~
vacri
Do you remember the "No household would really use more than two HD streams.
That's enough" comment, made at a time when 4k monitors already existed? Fun
times.

------
qzervaas
For those who are unaware, NBN stands for National Broadband Network, the
Government-funded project to bring "high speed" Internet to all of Australia,
both urban and rural.

This article is about comments the CEO of the NBN company made yesterday.

------
tlow
Sure. You can survive without high speed internet. This website is fantastic
for me because I do not have a high speed connection. Australia would do
itself a disservice to write off the impressive power of connectivity high
speed always on connections provide.

As a side note, a friend from several years ago attended University of
Queensland, and at that time they implemented a program to provide only
extremely limited volume of bandwidth to students which made geographically
distributed collaboration much more difficlt.

~~~
TRManderson
Current UQ student here. They currently provide 40GB a month. If that's not
enough, you're probably torrenting.

~~~
nitrogen
40GB is like one week's worth of one hour a night HD video. That's
emphatically not enough.

~~~
tlow
Imagine if you're running netflix ;)

------
flukus
Context for international readers:

The original plan was to roll out fiber to each house to for 90% of the
country, despite the large size of the country and low population we are very
urban so this was doable. Then the other party had to differentiate themselves
and promised brand new copper for a about 2/3rds the price (know looking to
cost a lot more).

So the debate isn't so much do we need fantastic fiber connections to every
house, it's should we spend a bit more to get a more future proof result.

------
kirrent
As always, get the story through Google to bypass the paywall.

[https://www.google.com.au/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=Y0adWIbZCI_Y8AfT5LZ4...](https://www.google.com.au/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=Y0adWIbZCI_Y8AfT5LZ4#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.couriermail.com.au%2Ftechnology%2Fnbn-
ceo-says-australians-do-not-want-superfast-broadband-speeds%2Fnews-
story%2F822bc8b57836bc8dc80cc9bd285d56d5)

~~~
jlardinois
That's what the "web" link at the top of every thread is for.

~~~
kirrent
You learn something new every day.

------
Arcaire
There's a six-hour old reddit thread[0] on this article with comments from
(mostly) Australians in /r/australia, for the interested. It may provide
additional context and opinions, although I'm sure you can imagine what the
overwhelming opinion is going to be.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/5t3arf/nbn_ceo_s...](https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/5t3arf/nbn_ceo_says_australians_do_not_want_superfast/)

------
qzervaas
One thing that the US-based HN crowd do well is mobilise in order to contact
their local politicians. Australians aren't so inclined generally.

In case you are though, you can contact Prime Minister Turnbull through this
form:

[https://www.pm.gov.au/contact-your-pm](https://www.pm.gov.au/contact-your-pm)

------
voycey
Sure - who doesn't love 1mb/s down and 256kish up?

I'm in the process of moving apartment and I am living in the Melbourne CBD
and it's fringe and I would say at least 60-70% of the apartments are still
ADSL only!

I can't do my job on infrastructure like that!

~~~
voycey
Actually maybe that's why I got a permanent visa over here, I'm British and I
DO want fast internet, so I can... you know... be efficient!

------
shmerl
Yeah, yeah. Telegraph should be good enough too. It's the pinnacle of
innovation after all. Or may be this guy should just stick to the pigeon post.

------
andrewstuart
This would be a Murdoch newspaper?

