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Comment by ClassyJacket | Hacker News Reader

Point three makes me weep. In Australia the government started building a nationwide fibre to the home network. Wholesale only, so any ISP could provide services on it.

They got about 10% of the way in, then a new conservative government got in power and stomped on the plan. Instead they're doing fibre to the node for everyone.

Why have gigabit fibre when you can have slower, less reliable, more expensive copper connections that go a whopping 12Mbit!? Faster even, if the node happens to be sitting in your front lawn.

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It doesnt make a bit of difference because whole project was doomed from the start (staffing committee with incumbent telco execs made sure of that).

Whats the point of nation wide fiber network when you force data caps on it like it was some kind of undersea cable to mars?

It wasn't doomed from the start. The original plan was a good one. If we'd stuck to the fibre plan, nearly half the country would have fibre by now.

The CVC prices are unreasonable but they can and will come down. Once the fibre is in place you can argue about the business details later. You can't, however, lay fibre overnight. That takes years of planning.

The POI decision was dumb too but it can be worked around.

As for the data caps, you can already buy an unlimited 100Mbps service right now. So it's just a matter of cost.

There is new technology like g.fast for 100+mbit speeds over a copper pair. Yes it is not as fast as either fiber or co-ax, and it is short sighted, but 100mbit is a huge improvement over legacy DSL speeds.

It already goes 100Mbit IF you're very lucky and happen to have the node right near your house (and then some poor sap at the other end gets 12).

And no, they cannot upgrade FttN to G.fast, no matter what they tell you. That requires shorter copper lengths than all but the closest handful of houses to the node have. Plus you need everyone on the same technology so that the vectoring (like active noise cancellation) can work.

Gfast drops off a cliff after a few hundred metres, and they have houses connected to nodes a kilometre away. Gfast and Xgfast are only appropriate for Fibre-to-the-curb.

FttN can never be meaningfully upgraded.

You can get 80 meg broadband from BT Infinity with fibre to the street cabinet, so you might need to offer more than 100+.

G.fast extends the fibre closer to the house but I suspect it's not very cost-effective unless the take-up is high, so perhaps it will mainly cater to rich people in suburbia.

We've know that fibre (FTTH) was the answer since the 1980s but all British governments have been too short-sighted and stupid to finance it.

Of course, they dug up the streets to install new pipes for the short-term benefits of North Sea gas, and they can find £50 billion for HS2, when they could have FTTH for less.

And realistically no consumer needs more than that.

>And realistically no consumer needs more than that.

Yet.

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

By your argument all homes and house should have a 56kv 3 phase electricity supply

What reasonable use has a consumer sub for more than 10-20 Mbs? if your running a business from home get a business line and stop expecting Pensioners to subsidize your business

>What reasonable use has a consumer sub for more than 10-20 Mbs? if your running a business from home get a business line and stop expecting Pensioners to subsidize your business

2 different people watching high definition video at a high bit rate.

Having multiple users certainly increases the need. However, my experience is that speed increases bring diminishing returns.

Going from dial-up to 2Mbps ADSL was a huge jump, and ADSL2 also made a big difference. However, for a single user, there's not really that much difference between 20Mbps, 40Mpbs and 80Mbps. You have a faster connection to the exchange, but you're still limited by the speed of the net and the speed of the servers you connect to.

Not so sure I live in a BB nospot with a max of 3.5Mbs and we can watch 2 iPlayer streams with no problem.

We started the same thing here in New Zealand. I was a bit outraged when $1.2 billion of taxpayers money was handed out to build a national fibre network, but it's turning out not too bad. Not perfect, but not bad either. It helps that the opposition bought in, despite disagreeing on details.

NZ's UFB network has always been FTTH (meaning it terminates inside your house), there is no copper in this picture.

This is why, for example, last month people who qualified for 200MB can now get gigabit plans.

Why were you outraged that your government invested $1.2 billion in a significant upgrade of an important piece of infrastructure, beneficial for citizens and companies, now and in the future? Was it because you've jumped on the anti-government train that's so popular right now, like the overused term "taxpayers money" suggests, or did you really believe that building a national fibre network was the dumbest idea ever?

Considering the population of New Zealand, that's a bill of around $255 per person. Perhaps they think the money could have been better spent?

$255 sounds extremely reasonable. That's much less than what most people pay annually for service.

I would happily pay a one time cost of $255 to run fiber to my house. I'd even be willing to pay $500 to run fiber to my house. Sadly around here if I want fiber to my house, even assuming I could find an ISP willing to run it, it would probably cost me upwards of $2000 to have it run, and probably significantly more than that. That's also not counting the cost of actually getting service, that's just the "installation fee" to have it run.

He said per person, not per household - not the same unless you're living alone. Also this doesn't make your internet free you have to pay for the service on top of that.

And believe it or not a lot of people don't care about having fiber internet available.

Once installed, fiber optic lines become long term infrastructure, and will be used for decades. With those time scales in mind, the line installation cost is reasonable even after accounting for market penetration and occupancy rates.

But only a quarter of the people who have access are using the service so far.

> with fibre available to 1,006,741 users, of which 240,525 have signed up

And the goal is to cover 75% of the population (1,340,000 households).

So it's around $1000/household. And of those households the majority will not be using the service but they'll be paying for it assuming the household pays taxes.

FTC (fiber To cab) makes economic sense as you can get decent speeds with the massive expense of doing FTP.

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