I want the NBN
iwantthenbn.com
iwantthenbn.com
English people. English! I'm not even sure if this is a parody.
The Liberal Party of Australia: Reconsider your plan for a 'FTTN' NBN in favour of a superior 'FTTH' NBN
Australia needs the right NBN.
Vote at change.org if you agree!
Oh, 25 Mbps is fast enough? So if I were to offer you $25 or $1000 which would you take?
Ugh. The NBN is a good idea, but poorly sold to the older generation who cannot seem to grasp the idea of its importance,
Of course it's fast enough! You can fill your entire 640 kB of RAM (who needs that much anyway?) in 200ms with that raw speed.
So if I were to offer you $25 or $1000 which
would you take?
For much of the life of the internet, we had the experience where everything was slow and awkward. Modems sucked. But now, people have things they want to do online and they find it's fine - they can access their email, and websites, and youtube, and play games.
There was a similar transition with computers. All computers used to be slow, and they used to suck. Then during the Windows XP era, the slowness and suckiness of a computer started to decline, and people didn't think about it any more. They stopped buying new desktops and wanting OS upgrades.
You can point out things that would be possible with faster computers or bandwidth - fine. Regardless, for the things that people are doing now, people tend to be content about things where ten years ago they were unhappy, often very unhappy.
The opposition case to the NBN claim that the government was forcing taxpayers into a vast, unbudgeted public works scheme, and that it wouldn't even be delivering something that was strongly needed by the people. The opinion of the man in the street about their current internet is a reasonable metric in estimating the value of the NBN.
Maybe the reason that Australians only have the speed that they currently have is because there isn't a pressing need for more speed. Imagine that. Billions of dollars saved with no effort.
What do you need to do at 1Gbps that you can't do at 25Mbps?
Which is, you know - a lot. In the age of user created content, telecommuting and cloud services being unable to upload faster then 128 kilobytes per second is a killer.
If you're dealing with any type of multimedia content you can be needing to move 10-20 megabytes per cycle between a few people with ease - that time adds up, and it constrains how you work.
Mobile devices have been used as misdirection throughout the NBN debate, because very few people are uploading large YouTube videos from their smartphones over 3G and for anything that's got some level of production to it they'll be working on it on laptops and desktops at home and the like.
Maybe in the future we'll all need 1 gbit backbones, but not today.
If we were talking about enabling everyone to buy say, 10/10 or 20/20 symmetric service then I would not particularly care - in fact a lot of people advocating for FTTH would be placated. But it is not possible to do that with current infrastructure because current infrastructure sucks. Symmetric DSL tops out at 2/2 for about $600 a month.
For reference, I'm in the UK and have a 6Mbps connection, which I could upgrade if I thought it was worth paying more.
This is an important lesson for ANY sort of activism or public outreach (or marketing): people know a LOT less about your area of concern than you think they do.
National Broadband Network.
In 2009, the Australian Labor Party, in power as the federal government of Australia, initiated construction of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN). The network is replacing copper phone lines across Australia with a new fibre to the home (FTTH), also known as fibre to the premises (FTTP) network, meaning optical fibre will be run around the country, down every street, through every front yard, and into our houses (except some regional areas, where satellite will be used).
Two days ago, a federal election was held. The Australian Labor Party was defeated by the Coalition, an alliance led by the other major political party in Australia - the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party's policy for the NBN is to build fibre to the node (FTTN) instead, meaning optical fibre will be run to cabinets on street corners, which will service small areas, but the existing copper lines will still be used for the "last mile".
The petition is to convince the Liberal Party, now in power, to stick with the original plan of FTTH.
I think they did another one too (Fibre To The Boat) but can't seem to find it.
FTTN - Fibre To The Node
FTTH - Fibre To The Home
NBN - National Broadband Network
Arguments should not be as one-sided as either "the Coalition's plan is crap, because it's slower" or "Labor's plan is crap, because it costs more". Instead, the debate needs to be about whether or not the extra speed is worth the cost.
We aren't currently seeing this sort of debate. The Coalition says "give us some benefits to quantify". Labor says "giving all of the benefits would be impossible". I believe Labor should at least try. If they fail, they can fall back to their current position; no ground lost. At this point, Labor need only give benefits from the speed difference to support the cost difference - not the entire project cost.
P.s., the change.org petition is full of flaws. For example: "Broadband internet is an ‘infrastructure’ and should be considered in the same light as highways, water management, electricity and so forth; it should be a ‘right’ available ‘equally’ to all Australians."
But surely, better roads exist where they are needed more- where the cost justifies such? My parent's farm runs off of tank water and a self-sufficient sewerage system, not town water. The cost to provide the same service I receive at my apartment building as to their farm would be ludicrous.
Why are we not seeing a proper debate on this issue?
It requires comprehending civil works project scale, scope, duration and expected lifetimes, the logistics and finances of managing large infrastructure works and a mind open to the idea that the internet isn't "just for games or something".
So, not going to happen ever - but for what it's worth, I fully expect the Coalition to quietly keep going with FTTP since winding back the NBN doesn't save them any money with it spooling up - the money has been borrowed, but not borrowing it doesn't suddenly put the budget in the black. Instead you just don't get a future major asset, and do get to keep the maintenance costs of the old network.
There are two reasons.
First is the coalition, who started on the wrong footing: arguing about technology choice. This made it pretty easy for the ALP to take attention away from the project itself.
Second is a vocal band of people who want super fast internet, dammit. Now that it has been promised, there is a constituency for it. Public debt seems rather abstract and besides, the NBNco promises that it's all going to be profitable somehow (without actually releasing their modelling to the public).
As a properly-run public infrastructure project over a decade or 15 years it could have been the envy of the world. Instead we are going to get something that will be an expensive mess, no matter how you slice it.
How about this: the coalitions plan is crap because it provides less service and less future adaptability at almost three times the unit cost.
$44.1b/100mbps estimated FTTH = $0.441b/mbps $29.5b/25mbps estimated FTTN = $1.18b/mbps
The numbers get even worse for the coalition when you factor in an additional $2B to the NBN plan to move everyone from 100mbps to 1000mbps.
Your analogy of town water vs tank water is not relevant as the plan is not to provide the same service (ie fibre) to all areas. That debate happened 3-4 years ago and has been NBN policy for almost as long. Fibre in dense areas, Wimax in less dense areas and satellite in rural settings. Wider roads exist for more capacity but I guarantee your parents farm has at least one road around it. That is what the change.org petition is talking about.
The problem we're running in to is our physical plant (the copper) is antiquated in standard and age. The coalition has loved talking up how bad the plant is as a negative for the NBN plan (asbestos boxes and viaducts, tree roots, electrical shorts, flooding, etc).
The NBN has planned and has budgeted to replace this plant with newer, modern equipment and techniques.
The coalition plan attempts to bend reality and ignore the dilapidated state of most of the inner city/suburban Telstra equipment. Instead they are going to buy 60,000+ new DSLAMs and just magically integrate them without having to deal with 50 years of bad maintenance.
The Coalition plan likely involves VDSL2+, which is supposed to do 250 Mbps at the node, and 50 Mbps 1 km from the node, so likely 90%+ of the population would get 50-100 Mbps by 2016. 25 Mbps is the minimum, not the average.
And the NBN was supposed to do 1 Gbps within a few years. But the rollout might be slower.
Add to that that once FTTN is rolled out, it could be upgraded to FTTH/FTTP, for a lot less money, these numbers are really not as easy to compare.
Interesting point about the state of the existing exchanges, copper, etc..
The plan did make a brief comparison to other FTTN roll outs worldwide, e.g. AT&T uVerse. Wonder what problems they faced.
I've been running http://www.weneedthenbn.com/ since Saturday night, and it's been getting a bit of traction, too.
My phone call to my local MP wasn't exactly promising - while I couldn't talk directly to the MP (although I didn't expect to), the person who answered seemed generally uninterested in anything that I had to say, and was unaware of the technical differences (other than "the LNP plan is cheaper").
I hope we can make a difference here, and there seems to be a lot of support for it. Even if 1% of the people who signed the petition called/emailed/wrote to their local member, we might have a chance of making a difference.
I've heard that it's cheaper to build, but significantly more complicated and expensive to run because of the maintenance of the copper network and the fact that the nodes require power under the LNP NBN, but not the ALP NBN.
(I'd like confirmation/anti-confirmation of this if anyone happens to know more.)
Here in Belsize Park I have access to Virgin Media, which is fibre to a closeby yet remote center nearby (FTTN).
This is easily good enough for me on the 120Mbit plan. I often get 12 MB/s with suitably fast peers.
So I reckon that FTTN would be just fine.
Because there is no way you are getting 120 mbit's through telephone copper. If it's not fiber then you're on HFC which means shared coax. In which case, well, that's not happening here because you'd still have to run coax to millions of premises. The type of wiring is not the expensive part.
Step 2 (later, on an incremental basis): Fibre to the home
Why do we need to do both steps at the same time? The last mile is incredibly expensive and difficult (as the slow rollout of Labour's scheme has demonstrated). Doing fibre to the node now doesn't stop us from having it to the home at a later point in time, as demands increase.
One of the benefits of having an NBN Co. is you don't have the retailer/wholesaler conflict of interest as we did with Telstra and as the UK did with BT
The solution in the UK was to mandate open access in regulation with BT OpenReach. The solution in Australia is NBN Co.
Well, it does work out cheaper in the long run, doing FTTN now involves buying the copper from Telstra, then later on pulling it out and replacing it with fibre. This article does a nice job of going into more details on the costs of it: http://theconversation.com/can-australia-afford-the-coalitio...
> as the slow rollout of Labour's scheme has demonstrated
I can't really comment as I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the rollout progress, but this may be worth a read: http://delimiter.com.au/2013/09/05/factcheck-will-nbn-take-a...
NBN Co allegedly signed a an awful lot of new contracts prior to entering caretaker mode. During the election campaign Turnbull promised that these contracts will be honoured. I'm more concerned that this will result in a two-tier NBN, with over a million homes with FTTH, and the rest left behind on a 2nd tier system.
Perhaps Ziggy will set the Government straight...
It is about the tradeoff between delivering higher speeds and the time taken to implement. The coalition plan is prominently technology agnostic[0]. The reason why Australia ranks 40th[1] globally with an average broadband speed of 4.1Mbit is not because we haven't rolled out fiber to every home, but rather because of mistakes made during deregulation and the delays in implementing a new plan have meant that large sections of the population have fallen behind international standards and are unable to access even a decent ADSL service, let alone a better VDSL or fiber based service.
This has left the country in a situation where because of a lack of basic service, 47% of the country currently access the internet using mobile broadband[2]. This is beyond unacceptable.
The two approaches to solving this problems are 1) build a nation wide network that delivers a satellite and wireless service to 7% of the population and a fiber to the home service to the other 93% of the population. ETA 2021. or 2) set a bandwidth target of delivering at least 25Mbit and up to 100Mbit to all households by 2016 and then upgrade to 100Mbit by 2019 using a mix of technologies
The 25-100Mbit by 2016 plan would bring Australia into the top 3 or 4 nations worldwide for internet access speeds, where we belong (neither plan would solve high bandwidth prices - the NBN only reaches from your home to your nearest point of interconnect, it does nothing to resolve the current poor state of internet bandwidth/backhaul access in Aus which has a lot of existing broadband connections struggling with international speeds).
The new approach is about applying the best technology to fit the situation and to get more bandwidth out sooner. This means that in new housing areas (known as greenfields) where new trenches have to be dug fiber to the home will be deployed (this doesn't change). In remote areas it will be a mix of satellite and wireless service (this doesn't change). In existing suburbs (brownfields) there will be a mix of fiber to the home, fiber to the basement, and fiber to the node with VDSL (and later GFast) delivering the last hundreds of meters.
There is yet another rollout case that is the most complicated and that is multi-dwelling unit's (or MDU's) - apartments, town houses, retirement villages, office buildings etc. The old plan was that in these instances the existing copper within a building would be pulled out and replaced with fiber. The problem is that co-ordinated the millions of residents, strata bodies, building co-ops, owners, etc. is a bureaucratic nightmare. When Optus and Telstra rolled out their HFC networks in the 90s they bypassed many of these residences because of the problems it involves. I think even the most strident Labor NBN supporter would concede that MDU's require a new plan and a different approach (not coincidently a report by NBN Co. on the MDU problem was due out a couple of months ago but its release was delayed until after the election).
This is why technological decisions should not be dictated by online petitions that at best oversimplify the situation and at worse misrepresent it. I was hoping that with the election now behind us that the toxic partizan debate surrounding the NBN would be over and that people that are best suited to finding a solution - engineers, network architects etc. could set about working out how to achieve the aim of delivering 25-100Mbit to Australian by the end of the first term of this new government.
The solution is using a mix of technologies - FTTH in new areas, FTTN in existing areas, an option to upgrade to fiber for businesses, fiber to the basement in MDU's, satellite and wireless in remote areas, etc. Whatever works, just get more bandwidth out there sooner.
As a technologist I can only support using a practical approach to finding the best solutions to hitting targets.
Off course we all want fiber to the home, off course we all want gigabit speeds, but there is a much more immediate problem of solving the blackspots in existing services. It is about taking smaller steps and delivering more bandwidth to more people sooner rather than a clean slate approach of an entirely new network, and all the risks that involves.
I personally know many people who are stuck using 3G modems to access the web and who not only have terrible data speeds but also have usage caps that are a few gigabytes a month. I struggle to explain to them why my area, where I already have an ADSL2+ service at 16Mbit+, is on the roadmap to receive an NBN service this year while their area, closer to the city than I live, is scheduled to start construction of the NBN in 3 years time.
I think it is much more important to get at least 25Mbit to those 47% of households before I get my connection upgraded from 16Mbit to 50 or 100Mbit.
There are no doubt still a lot of problems with the new plan. I wouldn't count myself as an ardent supporter of the coalition plan (I don't think I even like the very idea of there being an NBN and an NBN Co., but I digress), but I do believe that taking immediate small steps to solve the most critical problem is much more important than rolling out fiber to every home. What is certainly the case is that many, many people are overreacting to the change in government and the new broadband plan. The sky definitely isn't falling and we aren't tearing out what was built and dissolving NBN co. I wish more and more Australians would take a more pragmatic and less partizan approach to the problem.
As an aside, the coalition policy document [3], at 37 pages, is definitely worth a read. It goes into all of the background into how they made their decision, their research, etc. It is articulated, thought out, thoroughly referenced and well researched - I recommend everybody with an interest in the NBN read it and contrast to how this petition is presenting the 'problem'.
see also: "Will FTTN advances delay FTTH?": http://www.lightwaveonline.com/articles/print/volume-30/issu...
on how advances in squeezing more bandwidth out of copper (a technology that is far from dead or antiquated) is causing more telco's to forgoe ambitious FTTH plans in favor of FTTN.
[0] http://www.afr.com/p/technology/turnbull_cut_price_broadband...
[1] http://www.news.com.au/technology/state-of-the-internet-aust...
[2] http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/03/aussies-nuts-for-mobile-br...
[3] http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/assets/Coalition_NBN_polic...
There is a huge amount of ignorance in Australia regarding broadband policy. I enjoy talking to people about the NBN, and I came to suspect that no-one in my sample payed any tax. Or they are just really bad at accounting.
Very, very few Australians would/should actually trade the cost of connecting their premise for the speed upgrade from ADSL2+ to fiber (edit: which is in the range of about $2k/person or $8k for a 4 person family unit according to the back of my nearest envelope). There aren't enough uses for speeds >=1MBps. A typical household is YouTube, Skype, gaming (and I don't think a fibre has any special implications on gaming that ADSL2+ doesn't have) and downloading stuff illegally.
There are more important research/infrastructure projects than a broadband network. Basically anything transit related for a country like Australia - the money could easily have gone into public transport.
I was stuck in a situation where I could only get dial-up speeds in a rental property. My theory was that Telstra (the local owner of all the network infrastructure) weren't going to invest in any upgrades that would be wiped out by federal spending - but the upgrade wasn't going to be for years. 12 months on mobile broadband is very, very unpleasant if you are a heavy Internet user. Speed of rollout is much more important, and the new policy can be enacted very, very quickly.
I live in a MDU now, as it happens, so the liberal policy is great news for me.
The internet is an evolving system and the bandwidth required to get the most use out of it will increase into the future. In ways that smarter people than I can't even predict.
Perhaps with >=1MBps connections we wouldn't need so many people transiting to and from offices?
Also, this isn't a "we could spend the money elsewhere" situation. The NBN was a business plan. An investment which would turn a profit down the line.
If it comes with a profitable business plan, it is a good time to leave it to private enterprise. I'd happily invest in a fibre-laying company if someone offered me the chance. I don't want the Federal government to choose for me.
That's a piece of infrastructure which will exist 50 years from now. In fact, if technology is any guide, even with upgrades it'll likely exist 200 years from now even if the light going through it is used for very different purposes.
So take that $2k, divide by, let's say the life of the cable until some idiot hacks it with a backhoe, which is about 20 years: so it's a $100, per house, for 20 years - transferring seamlessly to future occupants from old occupants.
"typical" always fails to describe the point of things like this. Typical is the broadest conceivable average of use cases, and ignores the fact that it's typical because across a country everyone does different specific things in smaller conceivable groups.
And then of course there's the other important issue: if you spend $20-40 billion rather then $60 billion, and at the end wind up with just ADSL2+ but no RIMs or other bollocks, have we really gotten ourselves a good deal?
The NBN would be a good piece of long-term infrastructure, no argument there. It is better than a cash handout.
I don't think it is sensible to divide up-front cost by years of service. $100/year for 20 years is much cheaper than $2k up front (as a Net Present Value).
If we save the taxpayer $20 billion? Yes, that is a much better deal. Everyone gets 25 Mbps ADSL2+, and people who want fibre (happens to include me, but not the rest of my family) can pay for the last bit of cable work themselves if it makes sense.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network#Expe...
It's saving $20 billion, but still spending $20 billion and possibly more. Spending 2/3rd's the cost, with no upgrade path (FTTN does not upgrade to FTTP easily) is a terrible deal. We're keeping power and maintenance costs of the old copper network, you're splitting the type of plant you need to keep (since you have fiber, copper and coax all over the place), and you still haven't escaped the need to trench cable (since a huge amount of that copper needs to come out of the ducts to ever support 25mbit ADSL2, or needs to be completely rerouted to get the distance to the exchange to under 1.5km).
One huge benefit of fiber is that we don't need to worry about distances from exchange to premise - as long as it's under about 60km it'll work.
You might note that the Australian recently ran an article crowing about how they deployed hybrid solutions to a big apartment block, when in reality it was simply the MDU solution of FTTH - you trunk in fiber lines to the central switchboard, then run ethernet using 4-wires of the existing phone cabling. It delivers 100mbit, but you haven't escaped the problem of needing a fiber network to connect it too.
I guess a lot of this depends on how well NBNCo executes the new vision. Are we steering a speedboat or Clive's Titanic 2?
To be honest with you, the things I am planning to do when I get a gigabit line are not exactly in the 'nation-building' category, either. I'm not sure how to fix that PR problem.
Labor was not able to communicate its vision or its successes. Rudd was brought I. Far too late to undo the damage. They are now in the wilderness for some time. Yet again.
Lawyers or former law students are the most numerous profession in Parliament. Gillard was a lawyer. Abbott studied Law as an undergraduate, as did Howard and Hawke.
The professional training of a lawyer equips them to vigorously argue a case they may not themselves agree with, and to do so in forensic detail. The skillset and subject matter has a strong overlap with the work of politics.
That doesn't mean we couldn't do with some more professional diversity in Parliament and the Cabinet. It'd be nice to see some more scientists, engineers and the like on both sides of the chamber.