National Broadband Network CEO says Australians don't want super-fast broadband | Hacker News Reader

National Broadband Network CEO says Australians don't want super-fast broadband

couriermail.com.au

60 pointsprawn69 comments

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.

I felt like the up-vote just wasn't enough.

Well said!

Man. Looks a lot like America... Spending money just to waste money AND to hurt your citizens.

Indeed, I seem to recall a massive subsidy given to American telcos in the 1990s to deliver fiber to the consumer (we all know how that turned out).

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.

This thing is supposed to last more than 3 years into the future.

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.

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.

Only in some parts of my city at least. I'm lucky enough to have HFC to my house in Brisbane, it's expensive but it's a very consistent 35Mb/s down (the upload is barely 1.5Mb/s though).

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.

As qzervaas says, think to the future. But you're also missing out on business needs. Shooting data across a network opens up all kinds of things.

For example, think of a medical scan - lots of high-quality imagery. The same scans could be readily available to your GP, your specialist, and your surgeon, all in different locations, all relatively on-demand.

Unless they want 4k TV content, like pretty much everyone who bought a 4K TV...

I don't think it is possible to have communications infrastructure that is "too good".

> 100Mb+ isn't really a necessity for most people.

Maybe today, what about the future.

Could you imagine telling someone that moves a lot of files around their computer, or compiles large projects regularly, that they don't need a faster HDD/SSD?

Would you tell someone who renders 3d movies for their job or hobby that they don't need a faster CPU/CPU?

Telling people who regularly pull (and upload!) docker containers, software packages, or meaningful work data like pictures, videos or backups that they don't need to have time shaved off their activities is equally strange.

A decade ago we had to 'imagine' what quality internet we might need in 2017. But now it is 2017.

> There is no excuse for deploying fibre-to-the-node in 2007

Which was exactly the finding of Telstra's own internal investigations in 2005 and the reason why the FTTN tender process was set aside by the Labor government in 2008.

The destruction of the fibre-to-the-premises rollout is so achingly wrongheaded. It's an example of politicians clearly, directly lying on numerical, objective criteria – getting called out about their deception on a regular basis by the opposition, media and senate and clearly failing to meet their targets at every level – and there being precisely zero consequences despite the waste of some $40 billion of public funds.

If politics were working properly, the person responsible would be in jail. Instead, he got promoted to Prime Minister.

If you look at the political decisions made in this country in the last 5 years they have all been wrong footed disasters aimed at attempting to paint the other (instigating) party as wrong and appeal to the most base elements of either party, without consideration of our national future

This appears to be a frequent theme

That's really sad. I had TPG in Melbourne and it was pretty terrible. I worked in my company's data centre and we had a really good link, so I knew the capability for good connections was there.

I also worked for a shop in Wellington. DSL at home was shit, but even at work with our decent Telecom/SparkNZ pipe, speeds still felt not-that-great. NZ is in way worse shape just because of the limited number of fibre connections to the islands.

Australia has several Asian and trans-Pacific connections and should be in a better position to offer solid fibre to the continent.

My 1 Gbps unlimited UFB connection at home is sweet, here in Auckland. Times change - and NZ speeds are pretty impressive now.

As is my 2gb unlimited in Japan. I can't imagine moving back to Aus. I am so disappointed at what they have done, it's a large reason we decided to stay here.

Yep. This boneheaded plan was born from Tony Abbott's 'angry toddler' period, where he just said "No!" to everything the incumbent party was doing, regardless of merit. So he got into power and had to stick to his lines. This is something that Americans should keep in mind, given that they've just come off six years of a Republican majority going "No!" to everything, and now they're in power, free and clear.

The utterly nonsensical thing is that residential fast internet is just a nice-to-have, but for business, it opens up lots of new avenues. It's business that really has need of fast internet. And the party that scuttled this is the party that's supposed to be the business-friendly one.

I think you're under-representing residential internet there. Residents with fast internet are customers for entertainment services - movies, episodic shows, streaming of sports and events, education, etc.

Sure, but that's more a 'nice-to-have', not something new. People already watch streamed activities in the residential market, just not at hi-def resolutions. I certainly think there's a demand for it, just not the opening of new avenues of activity.

To speak for the quality of internet here, my DSL syncs at about 5800/600 kbps on a good day (rain will drop that and enough of it will throw sync loss issues in to the mix also). I live 5km from the CBD of Brisbane, a city with a greater population of ~2 million.

Here is a list of things I have directly experienced that are affected by my internet connection, which result in me not using services and products that I otherwise would (or would more so):

- Streaming 720p is possible if nothing else uses the connection but anything higher is laughably impossible. To this end, I don't have Netflix or any equivalents.

- Online backups are simply impossible at any significant scale because 70KB/sec is simply too slow. That rules out Crashplan, etc. Even icloud sync, photo stream etc. is a pain because it happening at the wrong time just destroys any other internet usage (see point 1).

- Similar to the above, uploading anything is painful. From a storage/upload point of view, I don't use Flickr. I don't use YouTube. It's just not a reasonable experience.

- Games are becoming a literal multi-day download affair if digitally distributed (if not, I'm paying the Australia Tax). 24 hours of absolute 100% download usage = 49.5GB. I stick to a small subset of games and only grab new ones very infrequently when I can leave my PC on for multiple work days to get through it all. See also my quota, though I could pay more to avoid that.

- Telecommuting using a remote desktop for my work is painful. It's a one-handed number of FPS sort of thing. I just don't even bother unless it's absolutely necessary and then only for the bare minimum to get what I need done before I come in to the office.

That's just off the top of my head with present-day use cases. Who knows what'll come in the next 5 years as I get left behind on the internet.

Even if it wasn't about about "super-fast", people need "super-reliable internet", if relying on old copper, that's probably not going to be a reality. If paying for 25Mbit/s, that is what one should get. Not 5Mbit/s with all sorts of packet loss.

Anyway, it's a real shame. I telecommute for work daily (SRE) and I can honestly say, the NBN rollout hasn't done much to improve my situation. Pulling packages and depdencies, cloning large repos, working with Docker containers and hconference calls are often very average experiences for me. It was really quite problematic while interviewing for remote positions, a laggy conference call doesn't exactly impress potential employers :)

Here is what I often have to work [1], this is about a 2 month old connection and this happens intermittently. I'm just starting the (often long winded), support dance now. I know others who have similar experiences, this is nothing new for a lot of people in Australia.

I guess whatever old and degraded copper lines people relied on before NBN rollout, are still the same old and degraded copper lines after the rollout?

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3vGeC5VUAAK0lV.png

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.

At my third world home, I get a 125 Mbps fiber to home connection for around USD 74 per month.

> 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.

I'd take good domestic bandwidth as a good (albeit primitive) first start. Overseas bandwidth/peering can be a commercial next step - if the last mile and domestic bandwidth is the bottleneck then there's no catalyst to kick-start international connectivity negotiations.

Let me run a stable FaceTime chat from Canberra to Sydney. Then let's worry about Canberra to Los Angeles...

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.

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.

You live in Rhodes, right?

I'm sorry I don't understand? I haven't heard of Rhodes before.

Ah, sorry, poor guess on my part.

Rhodes is a new super-high-density suburb in Sydney. There is zero new telco infrastructure and 45,000 residents. The nearest exchange is in Concord, about 5km away. So one or two buildings have NBN, a few buildings have (overpriced) internal fibre, but the vast majority have sub-2Mbps DSL.

There were a few companies putting in fixed 4G links cos, y'know, 2Mbps barely qualifies for email and web browsing these days.

I lived there a few years ago; perhaps the situation is better now.

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).

100/200/1GB is common now with UFB in NZ, and apartments/offces in the the CBDs are getting sorted. And dark fibre to DCs is available too. Heck - Trade Me was on the Wellington fibre loop back in the early 2000s.

International connections are up to the ISP - and those prices have dropped sharply over the years.

The main cost remains the last mile, and while plenty of money is there to be made from international (I was a Pacific Fibre founder - we tried, and a director of an ISP that can rapidly hook up connections from DCs to AWS etc) that's not really holding us back for most uses.

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.

*Update: Just called an old mate still back in Christchurch, he's on 500Mbit fibre but he said that most people he knows are still on around 100Mbit.

Here's some pricing: http://ufb.org.nz/pricing-plans/

Three years ago I was working for a small company in a ye olde converted apartment building in the heart of Melbourne. We were on ADSL, but had to upgrade because graphic designers really don't like the A part of ADSL.

So we went to symmetric DSL - going from 1.5/16Mb up/down (from memory) to 10/10. This cost $500/mo.

But over in San Fran, our satellite office was getting 100/100 for $50/mo. They were literally getting ten times the bandwidth for a tenth the cost. Admittedly their building was in range of some nifty ISP and it wasn't a deal you could get anywhere, but the difference was startling.

(AU vs US dollars were about the same at that point)

All internet should be done through omnidirectional lasers, in due time these companies will become obsolete.

This is really funny (sadly) and too true! If having a decent internet connection is even a slight prirority for someone in Australia, then it's really important to investigate what the internet is like before signing any papers!

If you end up in a bad area, there isn't much that can be done about it apparently. I know people who have spent literally years trying to get an issue resolved.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This was UQ Ipswitch (at that time that's where the IxD program was, no?) ? And this was 2009.

I think they had a maybe 200 MB/mo.

At the same time at Stanford, I was using about 50 TB/mo.

Edit: update: I was one of the largest bandwidth users, they sent me a letter every month. No I will not go into detail.

I was a UQ student 2005-08 and can confirm you got 150mb/month quota with the option to buy more at $10/gb. If you lived on campus that was your only option for Internet.

Thankfully they've upped it now.

And they wonder why DCHubs were so prolific through the UQ colleges...

Thanks for confirming this. My 2009 date was off, it was actually 2007 and I glad you clarified for me. My 200 MB/month was based on rough memory and I thought I might have made it up.

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

Imagine if you're running netflix ;)

40 GB is easy to hit with all kinds of legitimate uses, especially since most people do a mixture of things. In some months, I probably would fill more than half of that quota with university homework, and e.g. someone reinstalling their PC with all the software on it easily goes into the tens of GBs as well. As can YouTube, Twitch, ...

You cannot be serious. I use ~120GB a month and I don't consider myself a heavy user. I don't torrent. I do watch Netflix.

Edit: 40GB a month works out to one hour a day at 3.2Mbps. I have a 100Mbps connection. If I used half its capacity for only an hour a day, I'd consume about 630GB/month.

The year after I finished at Griffith, they implemented a 'Unlimited free internet downloads during off-peak hours' policy. Just reading up on it though, it's not as good value as I first thought: the first 5GB are full-speed, then thereafter you're capped to 64kbps off-peak for the rest of the calendar month.

>> 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.

As a UQ student from '04 to '07 I recall having those limits, and it wasn't that dissimilar to what you'd get on almost every ISP at the time (factoring in that it was there for tens of thousands of students so the quota itself was far lower than your monthly home one). I can't recall if the quota counted AARNet (sort of an AU uni peering arrangement) traffic or not but my stomach says it specifically excluded that, so you could pull as much data from other unis and research institutions as you wanted, which helped alleviate a bit of that pain. Certainly overseas was difficult back then though. Also, I didn't live on campus so it wasn't also my personal internet quota.

Quotas are still a thing here even now, though. My ISP gives me 250GB/mo for $50/mo. You can thank being on a desert island for part of the reason quotas exist. They're beginning to disappear but it's still a notable thing if the plan is unlimited quota.

e: split my comment for better context

Our problem was we were a team with half in California and half in Ipswitch and we were designing for the case of geographically distributed teams... It was a real pain when we literally couldn't connect with our partners because they were out of quota. I get it and I can't imagine. If your see my other comments I was running several encrypted "hosting" services off my Stanford connection at about 10,000x the quota imposed on you guys. The only consequence of which was receiving a monthly letter advising me to use bandwidth for only legal purposes, they never knew what I was doing and I'm not saying. The UQ policy was certainly grounded in rationalized arguments, but when you have a department dedicated to New Media Design (or whatever the IxD program was called), restricting bandwidth is highly counterproductive...

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.

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

https://www.google.com.au/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=Y0adWIbZCI_Y8AfT5LZ4...

Or use archive.is and avoid google tracking:

http://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/nbn-ceo-says-austra...

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

You learn something new every day.

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...

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

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!

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!

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.

This would be a Murdoch newspaper?

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