Hacker News Reader

Comment by njepa | Hacker News Reader

Gigabit is a bit overkill, it doesn't do much that 100 Mbit can't. However the real game changer is low latency 10 Gbit+. That is when the paradigm changes, and you no longer need storage. That is when you can do high resolution, high refresh rate, even stereoscopic video. Where game consoles can play every game. 100 Mbit technology doesn't really scale to that and the difference isn't going to be big enough to warrant a technology change for a long time. So you want gigabit now so you can have something better in the future. Otherwise whatever you have now will be good enough, and so will less than that as well. So you will miss out on the next thing.

View on HN

Given how it has actually turned out; that is a great argument for wiring up the CBDs in Melbourne and Sydney and finding a nice upgrade path for replacing copper wiring with fiber in a rolling maintenance fashion for everyone else. Not what actually happened, which was sun-setting a perfectly functional copper network in the hope that maybe that would trigger a paradigm shift.

If the aim is to engineer a 'paradigm change', maybe it should have been tested a bit more first. Something like the old charter-city idea. It is a mistake to look to the political sphere to sustain a grand paradigm shift. They change direction every couple of years, and they aren't very technologically inclined right from the get go.

As it was, the NBN rollout looked a lot like a desperate and poorly planned giveaway to the independent electorates where it was first rolled out. Might even have been able to do it in a bipartisan way, although that is a lot to ask for, if not for that. As it happened the NBN was a political stunt on introduction.

There was no perfectly-functional copper network, you are simply making up rubbish. It was not functional then and it is not functional now as part of the NBN. The fact that my internet disconnects every time there is wind or rain and maxes out too slow to watch Netflix is proof.

Careful with all that cynicism, it'll do you a number.

I spent 6 months living in a house with no internet, waiting to get connected to the NBN. The house I rented before that had ADSL and was fine. I couldn't really tell the difference between ADSL and fiber, but the 6 month break from the internet in between does make a comparison hard.

Some people get unlucky and don't have a good copper cable. They aren't normal cases. The copper network was fine. I hope your troubles on rainy evenings isn't too bad, but it isn't proof of anything much. Except maybe that nobody is stupid enough to maintain a cable that is about to be ripped up by the government.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com