Australia's bad broadband punchline | Hacker News Reader

Australia's bad broadband punchline

sbs.com.au

45 pointssamuellevy14 comments

My take: Living in Australia, the best thing that we can do to increase the perceived quality of web services in Australia is to subsidise the local hosting of international web companies. It's latency that is killing our experience right now.

The latency between Australia and the internet (hear AWS data centre in Virginia where most startups live, or rely on an API that exists this region) is crazy! It's especially so as companies are starting to push "regular traffic" over to https (even HN is https now). The 4+ requests required to establish an encrypted connection adds up.

Whenever I'm in the Bay Area it feels like the internet is on localhost!

The cost of hosting in Australia is 5-10x that of the states[1].

Whilst it's fun to bash the Coalition’s NBN policy, the Labour party's plan topped out at only 100Mbps (which I'm already getting on Telstra Cable). What really annoys me is that

Australia's cable network is Fibre to the node already[2], and it is already capable of 1Gbps speeds. I hear that Telstra is not offering 1Gbps per second as part of an agreement with NBN Co.

[1] My friends over at orionvm.com gave me a lesson in hosting economics when I wanted to white label their service.

[2] My next door neighbour designed and sold the underlying hardware used on Telstra's coaxial network.

Markus (assuming that's you given the username and proximity to OrionVM) - Labour's plan didn't "top out" at 100Mbps. They merely offered that as the practical maximum when first talking about what hardware they would place in the points of interconnect. About two years ago NBNCo made another announcement that 1Gbps hardware was now cost-effective and they switched to that almost immediately.

I also have not heard the same rumours as you, and would be interested to know more about Telstra's artificial limiting of fibre speeds.

> The results of the strategic review announced that not only will the Coalition’s plan cost almost as much as the originally announced NBN plan

That isn't because it is more expensive, it is because the estimate on the original plan was wrong.

The old peak funding requirement on the original plan was $43.6 Billion with 3.5 million households passed by June 2016. There was supposed to be an update of those figures published this July but they sat on the report until after the election. We now know that those figures are now $73 billion peak funding and 1.7 million residences passed [0].

> The Coalition’s NBN is a joke. It will not arrive faster, cheaper, or better.

It will be faster (as in, rolled out faster) and cheaper. Despite the political vitriol surrounding this topic in Australia, you can't bend the technical and economic reality that rolling out a fiber to the node solution (FTTN) is both cheaper and faster than rolling out fiber to the premises (FTTP) with existing households:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=638167...

You rollout fiber to the home where it is more economical (dense areas, new developments) you roll fiber to the curb where it is more economical and faster (apartment buildings) and you roll the fiber to a cabinet where it is more economical and faster (existing suburban areas).

Attaching each plan to a rollout strategy was a mistake in the first place, as a national network requires a mix of technology (this isn't FTTN v FTTH, its about where to apply each).

[0] Here is a nice table the lays out the old/new estimates: http://www.zdnet.com/au/nbn-strategic-review-by-the-numbers-...

FTTN will always be cheaper, and I've always looked at it as part of a 2 stage deployment, it gets fiber into residential neighborhoods where there is often no fiber, providing a jumping off point to hook it to the premises.

So you have to send all the techs and teams out twice to dig up the road? The end-of-the-line has always been the most expensive part, that's why it made more economic and technical sense to do it all at the same time rather than double your work to save 25% cost. And with a projected finish date of 2020 (which is highly unlikely), you'll only begin to start rolling out the second stage at 2022, to replace technology that would be outdated if it were finished today.

And the second stage will never ever happen anyway, because it took us 30 years to replace the crappy copper network and even that could very well have been the straw the broke the camel's back for the government. In 2022 when everything is "finished" (shifted goalposts included) it will take another thirty years for the government to finally admit that 25 mbps in a 2gbps world isn't enough. And Australia will still stagnate as the anti-investment, anti-intellectual, FYGM backwater that it is today.

e: I'd love to see where those figures in the earlier link came from.

Revenue at completion date AU$21.7 billion AU$10 billion AU$18 billion

That's, side by side, the FTTH, FTTH (revised), and the coalition's estimates.

Either the coalition is flat out lying through its teeth (and it could be lying about the whole thing to absolve itself of its responsibilities or to foreward any criticism -- its standard LNP/government policy to take over and make out that things were way worse than you could ever have dreamed)... or they're planning to sell a much worse service at a far higher cost, which means it doesn't even benefit the people who paid for it in the first place, the taxpayer.

Ideally you can deploy FTTN/VDSL without replacing anything, you'd have to get fiber out to these places otherwise, and often enough here (the US) its aerial cable.

Like I'd said in my original post, most of the places that would get fiber as part of an FTTN deployment have no fiber at all right now, so even getting the fiber into those areas is important to the later deployment of FTTP.

With pair bonding VDSL has the potential of more than 25 mbps - plus the speeds they can pull out of copper over less that 1000m loops is quite promising, and continues to improve.

My concern is how they are calculating maintenance costs of the copper tail. Telstra's linesmen are some of the few equipped/trained to maintain these lines, and in areas > 30 years old much of the copper is in poor condition or direct buried (read: $$$ to replace). Flooded pits causing comms connectivity issues, radio interference, etc all impact copper performance too.

Speed is often the argument for FTTN vs FTTH, when reliability should be.

The flooded lines is a funny one. When I lived in Bondi my DSL would drop out or start seeing massive slow downs every time it rained. It took me half a year before I realized the correlation too.

> You rollout fiber to the home where it is more economical (dense areas, new developments) you roll fiber to the curb where it is more economical and faster (apartment buildings) and you roll the fiber to a cabinet where it is more economical and faster (existing suburban areas).

This new reports says that if you have HFC available (or near you) that's your only option. FTTP is being offered for new developments, or already areas where construction has already started. What this essentially means is dense, dense suburban areas will be on HFC cable.

What the report does not elaborate on is how the government will get access to the HFC cable, as it's privately owned by (predominantly) Telstra and Optus, or how much it will cost.

Additionally the report has some wonderful wording regarding previously guaranteed 25Mb/s speed:

> NBN Co will be designing the new-look NBN to provide these speeds to NBN Co's wholesale customers (internet service providers). End-user experience, including the speeds actually achieved over the NBN, will continue to depend on a number of factors outside our control including end-user equipment quality, software, broadband plans and how each service provider designs its network.

I think a big issue that some Australian's have is that after we spend $44b on this NBN, to upgrade the remaining 69% premises on HFC/FTTN we need to start this all over again and deploy FTTP.

Everyone already knows the NBN is now going to 1) take forever to build (~10 years), and 2) deliver terribly retarded service that will be obsolete once it exists.

I can't wait for them to pull a Telstra as well, and try to sell it off to the public in shares to 'mum and dad investors'.

Its embarrassing to watch the farce unfold.

(and will, I predict, continue to be, for years to come...)

(the irony is, there is NBN fiber in the ground outside my apartment right now, up and down all over. ...but we're still on the '2-3 years' waiting list, and so is everyone else here, because maybe 40% of the homes in this area are apartments. Stupid doesn't even begin to cover it.)

Yep, it's disgraceful. The fibre was laid outside my house about 6 months ago and I'm still told that "construction is yet to commence" in my area.

They might want to tell that to the friendly workers who were digging the road up and running fibre reels into it for almost a week.

I'm sure they'd be happy to know that the job they just finished hasn't actually started yet.

I just got the NBN installed the other day(insane speeds, at a very high monthly price). The technician was at my house several times and his opinion as a contractor on the ground level is that no one at the top is aware of the impracticality of scaling the home installation in the time frame they are proposing. Furthermore, many people do not yet require such high speeds but are having it installed just because they are not required to pay for the installation, especially older folk who don’t understand what they are being ask to sign up for. There is a massive disconnect between who need such services (and what type of services at what cost) and what sounds good on a policy paper and in a press briefing.

It sounds almost as bad as what's going on in the UK. The current "superfast broadband" contracts have been offered to BT (former state run telecoms monopoly) across England and Wales and local projects for innovation have been turned away. [0]

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24919148

No, not really. Its certain areas where there are broad band black spots. Your post implies is a UK thing.

On top of that, the idea is to get it done, as opposed to mucking around waiting for "innovation", which was happening to fill the gap. That gap is being closed. People in BB black spots want a decent connection at a reasonable price, not innovation. And frankly they want and need it ASAP.

As for the innovators, they can still innovate if they like. Just not off the premium backs of people in black spots.

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