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Comment by Cogito | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the context, the page itself was quite devoid of information.

I would love to see how this service compares to the roll out of fibre we are seeing in Australia at the moment. There is a lot of resistance from the opposition as the government is largely funding our new network.

In particular, many commentators claim that rolling out wireless technology is more financially viable then fibre to the home. In Australia we do have a sparse consumer distribution, so the context is a little different, however if google's model is viable (as you would assume) it might make a strong case study for our situation.

Looking forward to seeing how it all progresses.

EDIT: spelling

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> In Australia we do have a sparse consumer distribution

Nonsense, Australia is one of the most urbanised countries on Earth. We are less dispersed than the USA.

> There is a lot of resistance from the opposition as the government is largely funding our new network.

The government is right that FTTP is the most future-proof technology choice. But the way the project is being run is shameful -- they're carefully hiding the costs and debts behind "commercial-in-confidence" for a company wholly owned by the government.

And the dealing with Telstra, and creation of a new monopoly ... there's lots not to like.

EDIT: clarified in response to your edits :)

> Nonsense, Australia is one of the most urbanised countries on Earth. We are less dispersed than the USA.

That is a good point. To be fair, I am not fully aware of what our distribution looks like.

Perhaps I should clarify the point I was trying to make.

Whilst it is true that a large proportion of our population reside in urban environments, one of the aims of the fibre roll out here is to reach almost all of the population with fibre to the home.

For those not in urban environments (which is still significant), the geographic spacing is quite large, and I would imagine in that context we are sparsely distributed. Is running fibre to the home in that context a viable option? Hard to say, and perhaps even the google roll out will not give us much more information or real world example then we currently have.

> ... the way the project is being run is shameful

The thing I hope most to see out of the google roll out is how they handle it. I don't know of many data points regarding nation-wide roll out of fibre technology, or any similar infrastructure, in recent times, so the potential to 'see it done right' is an exciting one.

We have to define dispersion I guess.

Australia is a bit odd. It is among the lower ones in terms of average density but among the higher in median density. We're very clumped; 89% percent of the population is in urban areas. Compare with densely populated Netherlands, with only 61% percent in urban areas.

Sources: wikipedia, nationmaster.

In particular, many commenters claim that rolling out wireless technology is more financially viable then fibre to the home.

I don't think anyone claims that wireless isn't cheaper than fibre-to-the-home (FTTH). Some commentators claim it offers similar performance to fibre

(They are wrong: at scale, with a large number of geographically concentrated users wireless doesn't offer anything near fibre performance. Comparing the best wireless case performance - where there is a single client on an uncongested network, against the cheapest available - bandwidth capped - fibre plans is clearly an invalid comparison)

Thanks for the context, the page itself was quite devoid of information

I imagine that's because it says in big letters "Look out for an announcement at google.com/fiber on July 26" which is tomorrow.

True, however if you had no idea what Google Fibre was, the knowledge that an announcement is coming is not too exciting.

Be careful about how you phrase that, "government is largely funding our new network".

The government is LOANING the money and are expecting to make a profit out of the effort.

Isn't this how the term funding is normally used? For me 'funding' implies 'providing starting/ongoing capital'.

The clarification is a useful one though.

Well, governments fund roads, schools, etc, and they don't expect to make financial returns on those.

However, the national broadband network is funded through government loans, but expects to make a profit on the returns from it.

So there is quite a difference in terms of the Government budget. The former are a cost to the budget, with ongoing expense and no expectation of any monetary returns. The latter is forecast to take nothing out of the government budget.

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