Election Issues: National Broadband network

[bennymacca]

What, having a government owned and operated

wrong, individual ISPs will be able to use the network, with the government (instead of telstra) owning the infrastructure

[rcon]

What do you think operated means? I'm referring to the rules around pricing and access - both operated by government.

[bennymacca]

What do you think operated means? I'm referring to the rules around pricing and access - both operated by government.

why is this a problem? this is just regulation right?

public transport, hospitals, banks, utilities, all have rules around pricing and access

[wabbit999]

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/techno ... utostart=1

[bennymacca]

this really does back up everything i have said. thankyou very much for posting this wabbit. if i knew about this article i just would have posted it. i have gone through and highlighted important bits.

Experts have again ridiculed Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's sheer lack of knowledge surrounding broadband and labelled the Coalition's policy "technical ignorance on a national scale".

Abbott's claim on ABC's Q&A program last night that wireless was a substitute for a nationwide fibre-to-the-home network has been met with derision by the industry, which claims his plan would require a mobile tower on every street, push up internet prices and fail to support future applications that the public will demand.

Geoff Huston, chief scientist at APNIC, said the Coalition's plan to fall back on technologies such as wireless would end up running into capacity constraints due to a lack of spectrum and make broadband prohibitively expensive for most people.

Broadband has become a key difference between the parties going into the election and Abbott has been repeatedly criticised for his lack of knowledge and vision in the area. He readily admits he's "no Bill Gates".

Labor plans to spend $43bn on a nationwide fibre network supporting speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, whereas the Coalition will spend $6bn on a mishmash of technologies that will include upgrading existing copper networks and more wireless to support a 12 megabits per second peak speed.

"I'm not sure that we should assume that just because wireless is today slower than fibre cable that it's always going to be slower than fibre cable," Abbott said on Q&A. complete ignorance about the technology

"All of the people who are using their BlackBerries or their iPhones, Facebook, all of the people who are sitting in cafes and hotels rooms doing their work, they're all using wireless technology and we shouldn't assume that the only way of the future is high speed cable."complete ignorance about bandwidth requirements and ping times

The Coalition questions whether people will really need the bandwidth provided by a fibre network, but experts say its comments betray a fundamental misunderstanding of internet technologies and future needs.

John Lindsay, carrier relations manager at ISP Internode, said the Coalition's broadband policy is "just technical ignorance on a national scale and frankly Australians deserve better than that".

"Inside the industry the view is that they don't really know what they're talking about and that they've just rehashed [their policy from] 2005," he said.

Huston, an expert in internet architectures, said it was extremely challenging to "get high speed data through the air" and the limited availability of wireless spectrum meant we would fast run into capacity problems.

"What's going to happen with wireless is that as we crowd it, only those with the deepest pockets will be able to afford it, so rather than being a communications medium for everyone, it becomes only a medium for the few who can afford to pay," Huston said.

"For the same $50 a month that people pay for a couple of gigabytes of wireless, they can get 10-20 times that amount of data down the wire - wireless has its role but it also attracts a premium price."

Internode's Lindsay said wireless was inherently slower than fibre because it was a "shared access medium". Wireless was also prone to drop outs and spectrum constraints - Lindsay said Abbott had completely misunderstood the carrying capacity of radio networks.

If average home broadband use was transferred to wireless technologies users "would need to be a multimillionaire like Malcolm Turnbull to be able to afford the bill".

"Wireless is a brilliant technology to support the low bandwidth associated with mobility," he said, giving examples such as checking email on the go and browsing web pages on mobile phones.

"But if you wanted to build a wireless network that would be a viable substitute for fixed line ADSL you would need to put a wireless base station at the end of every street."

Already, this election campaign has seen an uproar by residents of the Sydney electorate Bennelong over the installation of a single new mobile tower by Optus.

The Internet Industry Association chief executive, Peter Coroneos, said wireless networks were already having capacity issues and there was no way the technology could support future broadband applications such as e-health initiatives, high definition video conferencing and smart metering for people to monitor their electricity use online.

"We've been disappointed by the Coalition's approach to broadband," Coroneos said.

"The experts in the industry seem fairly unanimous that fibre is the ultimate long-term solution ... the sooner we build, the sooner we start seeing revenue flow from the technology and the better placed we are to leverage lower costs that's won't necessarily be with us in the future."

Coroneos said that in 1904, when street lighting came to Sydney, the mainstream view of the population was that electricity was for lighting. There was nothing in the public consciousness that pointed to electricity as being a revolutionary technology for both the home and for factories, which was only realised decades later.

"We use the same analogy for broadband, which is to say you can't just look at today's use of the internet - that is the equivalent of saying electricity's great for lighting," he said.

Coroneos said a nationwide fibre network would enable applications like home high definition video conferencing "where we could spend the afternoon with our family overseas with the use of 3D glasses and a super-fast broadband connection".

It would also improve health care and open up new business models for the content industry, which is today struggling with rampant piracy.

On Q&A last night, Abbott said even if we could get 100 megabits per second capacity, 70 per cent of the sites Australians use were hosted overseas making us "dependent upon more than just our own broadband".

He also said the Coalition's plan for a $700 per household investment in broadband - far less than Labor's $5000 per household plan - was comparable to the kind of investment in other countries like Singapore, New Zealand and South Korea.

Coroneos queried where Abbott was getting his advice from and said there were already high-speed underwater fibre cables capable of carrying Australian internet traffic overseas at speeds of more than a terabit per second.

"Australia is a bigger country and nation-building investments will necessarily cost more per capita here - that's just a function of our relatively low population and our size," he said.

"But we don't deny ourselves more roads and more infrastructure simply because it will cost more - we realise that that comes with the territory of being so large and having a small population."

James Spenceley, chief executive of wholesale ISP Vocus, rejected Abbott's claims that wireless could ever come close to being as fast as fibre. But he said wireless was a viable technology for regional areas and questioned the sense of spending large sums to lay fibre cables across the country.

"In a lot of cases wireless is a perfectly good solution, especially in regional areas," said Spenceley.

He said fibre by its nature was always going to be faster than wireless, but the question was is wireless fast enough for whatever people want to do. Existing copper networks, he said, could also be upgraded down the track to deliver speeds of up to 100 megabits per second.

"I think the Coalition's plan is more realistic, $43bn is a lot of money ... you don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water, the copper network is pretty good in the cities and will continue to evolve."

[Matt Porter]

the best analogy i've heard about the NBN is a comparison to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The Bridge was opened in 1932 to cater to about 10,000 vehicles a day (horse dawn), today, with minimal structural alteration it copes with almost 170,000 vehicles plus a pedestrian lane, a cycle lane and 2 train lines. Although the bridge was too big and too expensive at the time, think of the billions of dollars that have been saved by not rebuilding or upgrading the bridge every 20 years. it was built for the future and is still a viable piece of infrastructure for many years to come. (have probably not worded that as well as when i heard it, but hopefully you get the gist)

[bennymacca]

the best analogy i've heard about the NBN is a comparison to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The Bridge was opened in 1932 to cater to about 10,000 vehicles a day (horse dawn), today, with minimal structural alteration it copes with almost 170,000 vehicles plus a pedestrian lane, a cycle lane and 2 train lines. Although the bridge was too big and too expensive at the time, think of the billions of dollars that have been saved by not rebuilding or upgrading the bridge every 20 years. it was built for the future and is still a viable piece of infrastructure for many years to come. (have probably not worded that as well as when i heard it, but hopefully you get the gist)

i like this analogy

[666HARPS666]

the best analogy i've heard about the NBN is a comparison to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The Bridge was opened in 1932 to cater to about 10,000 vehicles a day (horse dawn), today, with minimal structural alteration it copes with almost 170,000 vehicles plus a pedestrian lane, a cycle lane and 2 train lines. Although the bridge was too big and too expensive at the time, think of the billions of dollars that have been saved by not rebuilding or upgrading the bridge every 20 years. it was built for the future and is still a viable piece of infrastructure for many years to come. (have probably not worded that as well as when i heard it, but hopefully you get the gist)

Matt build a bridge & get over it

[rcon]

Wow, and industry player suggesting they'd much prefer the taxpayer to foot the bill for infrastructure they want, I'm shocked

No one is arguing that having FTTH would be nice, would be awesome by todays standards, but its a national approach that is needed, not an industry approach.

Laughing at having a tower on every street - what about where there are underground cables, where are you going to "hang" the fiber to the home then? Remember the uproar when cable operators wanted to hang cable along side the power lines? How much cable will you have to lay - people only ridicule the libs plan because no one wants to hear they can't have new "toys" (yes, it would provide some valuable uses too)

Sure, the libs plan might not be the best for broadband, but it sure as hell strikes me as a better use of my money

But I guess it comes down to do you want the government to fix your problems, or do you trust the market.

On balance, I trust the market to get it right, i trust the government to screw it up.

[wabbit999]

the best analogy i've heard about the NBN is a comparison to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The Bridge was opened in 1932 to cater to about 10,000 vehicles a day (horse dawn), today, with minimal structural alteration it copes with almost 170,000 vehicles plus a pedestrian lane, a cycle lane and 2 train lines. Although the bridge was too big and too expensive at the time, think of the billions of dollars that have been saved by not rebuilding or upgrading the bridge every 20 years. it was built for the future and is still a viable piece of infrastructure for many years to come. (have probably not worded that as well as when i heard it, but hopefully you get the gist)

Matt build a bridge & get over it

Just make sure u plan ahead four the future, that u don't have 2 replace it every 20 years, and u have a visionary approach (not a 4 year timeframe)