Australian fibre network business plan summary released | Hacker News Reader

Australian fibre network business plan summary released

gizmodo.com.au

It's an important issue... I think it's success or failure will define the discussion over government involvement in infrastructure for decades to come.

Thank god for politicians like Xenophon demanding some transparency to the process. Whatever you might think about the merits of the plan itself, the government's handling of the discussion has been amateur at best - shady at worst.

As for the plan - my prediction (for what it's worth, and that's not very much): the network will either ruin the business case for the deployment of the newer tech that comes along in the next 10 years, or will be made redundant by such developments. Honestly, massive 10 year infrastructure plans in the telco/tech sector is just asking for fail.

They should have only mandated the plan for country areas and left the better economies of scale in the cities do the job for them. Here in Sydney I already get 12mb plus. Yet my connection is still being forced onto the new fibre? What for? That's just wasted expenditure.

> Yet my connection is still being forced onto the new fibre? What for? That's just wasted expenditure.

That would be creating a baseline of availability. People would scream bloody murder if you were told "no we will not provide you with capability for the future as your current capability is fine for what you need it for now".

Not sure I understand the point. How does anyone know what their usage habits are going to be like in 10 years time? That's part of what I mean by the government framing the debate so poorly. If they are stupid enough to set a benchmark of what the future shall be like - then it's their own fault if people start complaining that what they are being offered doesn't match that benchmark.

No idea what you mean. They're setting a benchmark of an expandable fibre connection to 93% of Australia. How can you spin that as bad? As for usage: more. Technology use always expands to fill capacity.

Personally, I'm all for it because of Moore's Law. Particularly because we seem to be approaching a plateau (he says hesitantly) in hardware growth that may invalidate it for hardware, but we've only just started the exponential spurt in network, connectivity and bandwidth increases that proves it for networking.

Imagine the ability to connect to anyone in the country from anywhere at 100Mb/s. Imagine the apps and cloud stuff that currently is infeasible but won't be then. We are already at the conjunction of the browser being the app and this bandwidth speed will help that. Imagine apps that we just can't imagine right now because we're constrained to 1.5Mb/s thinking.

I think this will be the equivalent to communications that was the hugely expensive push of rail networks from the US East coast across to the West coast proved to be. Hugely expensive at the time, and cheap in comparison to the benefits in hindsight.

Some more coverage here: http://www.theage.com.au/business/nbn-bill-to-come-in-7b-che...

Even though this is a predominantly American dominated site, I thought it might be interesting to discuss such a bold public infrastructure project. Especially now since $1.0AUD = $0.98USD which makes cost comparisons a bit easier.

The summary still doesn't provide any pricing information. A rough estimate: Paying back $27B over 14 years (2020-2034) is about $2B p.a. (ignoring interest!) & with about 20M Australians = $100 p.a. per capita earnings for NBN Co. Pretty ambitious for a wholesaler, but perhaps possible for a monopoly.

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