Eh... The Prime Minister of Australia is actively working against the technology industry here, and he actually states that preventing Australians from having better internet access is his biggest accomplishment.
- Behold, the Australian "IT tax" makes everything 60% more expensive here Just Because™.
- There's absolutely nothing like Silicon Valley here. If there is I've never heard of it, and I live in Sydney, the most population-dense area.
Situation: the two political parties here (Labor and Liberal) have opposing ideas about how to implement our new fiber network. I forget who wants what (which says a lot).
- One wants fiber to the node, where you get a fiber termination box inside your house.
- The other wants fiber to the <some other term I forget>, where the fiber link terminates under the street or on a telegraph pole, and you get VDSL service along existing copper lines.
The problem: both solutions actually work, but the second one is a few million less expensive because fiber cable is a bajillion dollars per meter and it really does add up. (And then there's the problem that installers are nailing the fiber boxes to the first thing that looks like a wall because they have so many installations to do and insufficient resources, and then people are all like "???" when they realize their box is mounted to the ceiling... or at least that's what I think I heard...)
The other problem that nobody talks about: 1Gbps briefly got a "oh hey yeah that sounds awesome, we should look at that sometime around 2187" very early in the discussion a couple years ago, but I haven't really heard much to suggest this sort of capacity is actually going to happen anytime soon. And VDSL maxes out at 100Mbps.
It's a very difficult situation: do you create a technically-1Gbps-capable network capped at 100Mbps, or create a 100Mbps network for a few million less? Remember, there's no established Silicon Valley or similar scene here. Sure, there are tech companies, but it's not the same, there's no startup thing. (Case in point: how many .au companies are on Hacker News? Problem.)
Anybody can go out right now and get 500Mbps fiber for something like $499+/mo (business only - expensive Just Because™ \o/ (see? :/) and also due to SLAs etc) if you have fiber in your area (and the month has a Z in it), but that doesn't put it in the hands of random individuals. To enable the entire country (or at least the urban areas), the 1Gbps connectivity would need to be utterly ubiquitous, unconditionally deployed to everyone.
And so, in amongst all of this, all new dwellings are required (I think by law, or something close to one) to have fiber runs installed, and terminated in the street. Apparently the two new apartment blocks down the road from me have functioning NBN service, and I can see the "NBN" trench cover in the middle of the footpath outside the one I checked, so... it is rolling out, sort of, but all the political wrangling is creating a level of uncertainty that's slowing everything down horribly.
Oh, and the NBN (national broadband network)'s plan for rural Australia? 6Mbps satellite. What's latency? (Not much else they can do though :/)
I can relate in a certain way. In Germany, the state-owned Telekom wants to avoid the cost for building fiber networks, and instead squeeze multi-hundred-megabit connections through the existing copper wires with VDSL2 Vectoring [1].
They're the only one advocating this. Literally everyone else, from watchdogs all the way up to the EU commission, wants them to do proper fiber networks.
That's really interesting. I'm guessing they're doing it to save money. The idea of premature optimization comes to mind, but this is one area where the investment really does need to be made, and will be worth it in the long run - once it's set up it's unlikely to be changed for decades (!!).
I'm wondering if it's something nonfinancial, but I (honestly) can't figure out what it could be.
Fibre To The Node is to the street, Fibre To The Home is into your house.
This is a decent summary of the situation in Australia. The NBN rollout map, however, makes things look better than they are. There are places that have been stuck at “in development” for about three years now, and none of the areas that I ever look at seem to change. NBN has been much hyped, but has fizzled much more than you’d expect. Or hope.
I want to move out of Melbourne to a place in the country with good Internet supply (Stawell vicinity, mostly), but it’s surprisingly difficult to find housing in NBN-connected areas. Take Stawell for example: at a broad level you look on that map and see it’s covered. But it’s not: everywhere around it is covered, but Stawell itself is not covered. I’m not certain why, but I’m guessing there are difficulties in the line-of-sight fixed wireless installations.
> Fibre To The Node is to the street, Fibre To The Home is into your house.
OH, that's why I couldn't remember the second one, I confused it with the first one. Thanks.
> There are places that have been stuck at “in development” for about three years now, and none of the areas that I ever look at seem to change. NBN has been much hyped, but has fizzled much more than you’d expect. Or hope.
I see. I've talked to Telstra people (instore tech support) while discussing other things, and my understanding of their consensus was that if a given area doesn't seem to be moving, you could probably use it's stuck-ness as structural support for something.
> I want to move out of Melbourne to a place in the country with good Internet supply (Stawell vicinity, mostly), but it’s surprisingly difficult to find housing in NBN-connected areas. Take Stawell for example: at a broad level you look on that map and see it’s covered. But it’s not: everywhere around it is covered, but Stawell itself is not covered.
I'm in the North Shore area of Sydney myself, smack bang right in the middle of the new Sydney Metro project (a ~20 minute bus ride away from the closest station), and to be honest I do wonder if the NBN service to those new buildings (which does light up green on the map...) is actually live and functioning. There's no cable in this area and my current ADSL2+ is... right now my modem says 13102kbps - 12.79Mbps. My situation is similar: little dots of NBN connectivity (I see where all the new developments are!) but... crickets chirping where I live. Which, to be fair, isn't a major town center, just a suburb like any other, but still. I'm glad I'm moving soon.
> I’m not certain why, but I’m guessing there are difficulties in the line-of-sight fixed wireless installations.
Wait, what? I thought the NBN was all fiber and satellite. How does this work?
There are three levels: fibre, fixed wireless and satellite. Satellite is only for those who don’t have anything better available. Start at http://www.nbnco.com.au/learn-about-the-nbn/network-technolo... for more details, but it can be a bit hard finding all the right details.
Wireless can do 25/5 and now, I believe, 50/20. So it’s pretty good, better than ADSL2+ in bandwidth anyway (no idea about latency).
I do some astronomy as a hobby, and it really drives home the point that the great circle path is not the shortest distance between two points. At midnight, if you want to point to the Sun, it's basically straight down (modulo latitude/season/DST).
