In Australia, the Liberal party leadership is clever enough to design national computer communication networks. Wait.... no they're not even close to that clever. But it doesn't stop them anyway.
What we can be sure of it now that Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull have completely ruined our chance at having a world class NBN, they'll not do what is needed to actually make it world class.
It's really strange that politicians simply are not driven by making things awesome. They're driven by something else and it's certainly not the goal of getting to the best possible outcome for the people and the country.
So I have HFC coming into my home right now.... where is my symmetric 10Gbps connection?
Don't waste that anger. Vote left (Or at least be very careful with your preference flows) at the next election. And get everyone you can to start talking/pushing for a Royal Commission into this.
I loathe all politicians including the left wing. I just loathe the right wing more.
None of them represent the citizens. They represent their own grasping self interest.
And I certainly don't agree with the far left who seem to have an anti corporate/anti capitalist whiff to them ... I'm a committed capitalist AND green and they is no political party aligned to that.
I disagree about the original plan being preferable. The original NBN plan was a pipe dream in terms of cost feasibility, the rollout was aligned electoral boundaries, and the country first mentality means you get 12 megabit per second ADSL2 across from the Telstra building in the Melbourne CBD, and 100mbit in a large number of country towns.
I live in the city but "country first" is exactly the right way to go. Internet service in Australia outside the cities is absolutely terrible. It would be a game changer for the whole of Australia if Internet was first class everywhere.
Then it truly wouldn't matter where you lived for certain classes of work.
And regarding cost, well I think this is precisely what the government should be spending OUR money on.
They make such a huge song and dance about $49Biliion for the NBN, but the government is desperate to throw our money at companies. Have you heard ANYTHING about the $50Bn tax cut the government has given to companies? http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/mal...
We'll just have to disagree. Last weekend I was at a farm in Glenburn with NBN, but since on the farm they get 4g which is easier they just use that instead, especially just for email and occasional agri-mapping software. Meanwhile software developers in Fitzroy working from home get ~5mbit - ~10mbit and actually need the data.
He was before he lost to Tony Abbot for running the LNP. As it stands he's a far cry from what his ideals once where.
I'm not informed enough to see how this came about but if I had to take a guess I'd suggest the influence of the Nationals on the LNP has taken it's toll.
They still run Senate candidates (in Victoria at least) but as independents because they lost party status. Not sure if they can be resurrected though - I think their good people all went to Labor and the Greens.
Sustainable Australia party is who you're looking for. William Bourke is eminently sensible. Dick Smith joined. The anti-corruption fighter who wrote "Game of Mates" Dr Cameron Murray is running for them too.
I’ve never really got the impression that Sustainable Australia (or any of its previous incarnations) was really anything more than an anti-population growth single issue party.
> None of them represent the citizens. They represent their own grasping self interest
That is a false and dangerous overstatement. I have met many parliamentarians in 3 nations. They have pretty much the same mix of ethical tendencies as in the general population. They higher they rise, the more compromises are forced on them, but they're no worse in general than their electors (many of whom are also entirely self-interested and grasping).
> I'm a committed capitalist AND green and they is no political party aligned to that
Most Green parties have been suckered by the long-discredited 'natural capital' story, so are unfortunately heavily committed to capitalism. Ipso facto, there are few genuinely Green parties, as capitalism is clearly incompatible with the continued healthy existence of a living planet.
> I'm a committed capitalist AND green and they is no political party aligned to that.
The Greens have an unofficial right faction (pro-capitalism, pro-green). Most of the recent Greens internal tension has been between this faction (which has a lot of ex-Liberal environmentalists and ex-Democrats) and the Left Renewal faction (many of whom are openly anti-capitalist). The pro-capitalism faction is certainly very strong and seems to control the party leadership at the moment.
And that's not even covering the reason why the NBN was necessary in the first place. Howard's/Costello's (former Liberal PM and treasurer) privatisation of the essentially monopoly government-run communications provider without any separation of retail from wholesale or HFC network from telephony network.
It was the equivalent of pre-breakup AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cox (and the only competition was Optus, probably equivalent in market share then to Charter now) all in one go without breaking up anything. Oh, and guess what, they're also in a 50%-50% joint venture with the only major Pay TV provider left, FOXTEL (so that's the equivalent of Dish and DirectTV on top of the above). And their partner in FOXTEL is Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp which also happens to own 70%, yes, 70% of daily newspaper circulation in the country. But in the light of that of course, the government has finally come to its senses and done something about media ownership regulations.
...
And they actually did, but what they did was just overturning the rules to allow Newscorp to also buy more radio or FTA TV assets. Which included a recently bankrupt FTA TV network run in and owned in substantial part (essentially as much as legally allowed by regulation at the time) by a certain James Murdoch. How did it go bankrupt? Credit withheld, guess by who. Well, not entirely, it was him and a guy who also owns a affiliated regional FTA network who wanted to take over the lot.
But in the only bit of actual hilarity in this whole thing, CBS bought that FTA TV network in bankruptcy. Outbidding Newscorp. So at least things are on the up and up. They may still have a complete and total stranglehold and perverted national infrastructure in collusion with a political party they're so strongly biassed towards. But at least an eternally bankrupt (they went bankrupt in the late 80s too) TV network at a time when TV is headed for terminal decline has escaped the grasp. Yay us :|
I truly fear the day the NBN comes to my area. I am currently with Telstra and fortunately have HFC, I get pretty reliable speeds between 112 and 115mbps, with ping of 9ms. I am a developer and I rely on my currently decent connection to make money, video call clients in other countries, transfer large files (to and fro) if speeds were to suffer resulting in the inability to communicate properly, it would be crushing.
The fact that retailers are not purchasing enough bandwidth means you're buying a Ferrari with a broken engine that is being pulled by a single horse. My area is slated for NBN 2019, let's hope they do something about the bandwidth before then (apparently at an estimates hearing a solution was promised by Christmas this year). What a joke.
When migrating from 56K modem to ADSL it was amazing. The same cannot be said from the migration from ADSL2+ to NBN Fiber to the home was nice, but wasn't WOW.
The whole NBN has turned into a complete joke. If they would of stuck to rolling out fiber everywhere it would solved everything. Nope we now have to have a hybrid of everything.
This depends on your ADSL2+ line. I'm paying for "up to 24mbit" but the line length means I get 3.
The rest of my street is now on HFC NBN but my house is an outlier, still waiting on additional work. Been waiting since May, I suspect it'll take until the next May.
With 3 people in the house, going from 3 mbit to 25 or 50 will make a pretty huge difference to us. Probably about as much as when we first jumped from 56k to 256k ADSL 15 years ago.
How far away are you from the nearest house w/ NBN connectivity?
Second important question: do you have fiber to the premises, ie an NBN box on each house? If you do...
Remember that the NBN box (unless they changed it) has 4 data ports, each of which can be associated with an isolated ISP plan. Presumably your neighbor is only using Port 1.
If you're close enough, you could probably get away with a couple amplified 802.11ac dongles. A Pi3 or modded router could handle the Wi-Fi point-to-point setup at the remote house.
If that wouldn't quite work, point to point microwave links (which don't require a license, and are basically a pair of boxes that you stick on REALLY tall poles, and which have Ethernet ports on the back) are around $450 a pair. (For example, http://store.freenet-antennas.com.au/product_info.php?cPath=...)
--
If you have fiber to the node (ie the street), I have no idea if extra connections can be added for a house NBN-box-style or what that looks like. It probably means provisioning an extra phone line, which obviously wouldn't work.
But you could viably rent the neighbor(s') actual bandwidth in this situation - in fact, if you can successfully describe and sell a "0% QoS" structure, where whatever bandwidth is not being otherwise used at any given moment is allocated to you, you could probably get away with paying very little. :P
You could also rent from multiple neighbors, too. Supposing an ideal scenario where you rent from 10 neighbors which have 100Mbps each (I know, I know...), you could get a VPS with decent bandwidth in a Real Country™, connect to the VPS from each borrowed connection, bond the resulting TUN interfaces together at both ends of the link, and hey presto - absolutely disasterous ping and jitter, but 1Gbps throughput at 1 o'clock in the morning.
I have the "good" NBN (FTTP) it is much faster than my old ADSL2 (eg Netflix youtube etc. don't buffer constantly anymore) but also less reliable there are semi regular outages. I've had 3 1 hour+ outages in October so far. I normally wouldn't have an issue except during one of the outages I was working remotely from home and needed to make a semi-important skype meeting.
Just go with an RSP that is honest and provides decent bandwidth. Aussie Broadband are great and won't even let you sign up if they don't believe they have enough capacity in your area.
Likewise, providing I had a connection with Telstra (I tried Optus and had nothing but issues), I regularly had D/L of 100MB/s almost all of the time but upload was never more than 2.5MB/s which... yeah. Sucked.
Telstra with added speed pack gives me 115mbps down and 2mbps up. I actually get a little over 2mb though. If I go onto the NBN and the bandwidth issues aren't sorted out, you can have the fastest speeds all you want but still experience ADSL speeds during peak congestion.
Having switched from Telstra HFC to NBN HFC my biggest complaint is variable latency. Ping to the same servers tends to vary from 20ms to 120ms. I haven't looked into too much but probably coincides with peak hours in the evening.
I'm still on ADSL2+, and even feel a little the same way. It's a rock solid 14 Mbps line speed for all hours. Was set for 2019 roll out of NBN HFC, but, quite coincidentally, noticed some guys out the front of our unit today, and they said they were NBN and we should be connected in 6-7 months.
Given the dramas with actually getting connected, the peak hour speed drops, and the higher monthly costs, there's a bit of trepidation.
The Liberal / National government has so much to answer for IMO. It truly is a monumental disaster that will negatively impact the economy for decades when we fall further and further behind the rest of the world, or spend many more billions to upgrade to what was going to be built in the first place.
I also have Telstra HFC 115/2, and our suburb is going through the NBN migration right now. We are getting the HFC NBN, and today we just got a call from Telstra saying that they can't actually guarantee even 50Mbps once we switch...
This article didn't mention what Australians are choosing to do when they have a range of speeds. According to the figures NBN released 80% of customers aren't even paying for the top speed they could. Similarly, this piece from Vox notes that fast internet just is not nearly as valuable as proponents claimed.
It really is on par with saying something like hard drives should never get bigger because we dont use the space.
The capabilities need the infrastructure in place first so that they can grow to use them, it's impossible for the other way around to occur as you cannot transfer something that requires faster connections before they exist.
That's at least partly because the speeds you pay for are "up to" 100mbps. Many who pay the extra (~double a normal adsl fee) don't get anywhere near the advertised max speed.
Besides, what people pay for and need in October 2017 is probably less than a child starting school will use in 2022 when they hit year 5. This is a national infrastructure project - surely it should be built with the future in mind?
This is without discussing upload speeds - not everyone is a purely downloading user. Viewing a population of civilians as a population of solely consumers seems a common folly.
I recommend the four corners tv show [1] (linked in the original piece), likely the cause of the extra media attention on the NBN lately.
The craziest part is that I was getting 100/60 that actually ran FASTER than it’s advertised speed, unlimited (truly) for $69 a month, with TPGs private FTTB network. But I had to move, and now I’m on an Opticom network; $99 a month for slower upload, but I do get a static v4 IP, so that’s a plus for what I use it for. And this is all in Fortitude Valley, basically the centre of Brisbane...
'tis true. Can vouch because that's the plan/infrastructure I'm on in Melbourne.
I can only extrapolate my own experience, but perhaps if there was some truth in advertising enforcement. I've had NBN plans elsewhere, and I never chose the top plan, because I'd still be limited by other parts of the internet I was communicating with in practice, and everyone knew the top rate plans quoted speeds are literal nonsense. Why pay extra when you get the same performance on the bottom/mid plan?
That happens in most countries. Consumers don't go with the most expensive options.
Romania has among the fastest Internet speeds mixed with the cheapest cost per mbps, yet consumers there frequently don't choose their fastest options because they can make do with less and save a bit of money.
Per Akamai's Q1 State of the Internet report, Romania doesn't make the top 10 in average mbps. Yet their % of connections above 10mbps is #8, and above 15 mbps is #9. Despite how inexpensive a faster connection is in Romania, people are often choosing not to bother with the fastest options. Despite that, Romania is still much faster than Australia - people there aren't choosing 5mbps options. If you hypothetically give a consumer a choice of a 100mbps connection at $50, and a 50mbps connection at $25, you're going to see a lot of people seek to save some money where they can (which doesn't mean they don't still want very fast Internet in that #2 price slot).
Romanian here. 5mbps cannot be chosen, not even for rural areas where fiber is being upgraded for free (e.g. the rural town of my parents was upgraded to fiber).
Lowest I know is from UPC which still has some weird 50mbps option but compare that to the biggest ISP, RDS, which has practically made 300mbps the default as you pay the same amount for 100mbps as for 300mbps since a year or so, both for 7$. And by 300mpbs I mean 300mpbs (the remote servers being the bottlenecks while good ones & tests max out).
I did originally opt for the more expensive 100/40 plan, but found that even in the middle of the night with no rain or line work I couldn’t get any better than about 50mbps sync. I’d be perfectly happy to pay for it if I actually got the promised service but until then I’m on the next best plan, 25/5...
From my perspective, they’re blaming the lack of uptake on a symptom of the change they themselves implemented. If they’d left it with fibre I propose many people like myself would pay for the higher tier plan.
That's an extremely misleading argument. The offerings are hobbled by the fact that most of the new connections (FTTN) can't achieve those high speeds, and secondly, the CVC pricing model discourages ISPs from providing a service generally that doesn't slow down at peak times, and the CVC also makes it more expensive. It's the perfect trifecta to discourage the higher tiers - and the growing uproar by the general population is an indication you're wrong.
Compare to a country with a more sane model (like NZ, the US in places or many Asian countries), and you'll find much higher uptake of fast internet. The Government could fix the NBN to encourage people to take up faster plans if they wanted, but their insistence to not fix any of the barriers makes me conclude they must be doing it intentionally...
Echoing the sentiment of other replies, this is because you don't actually get what you are paying for. I initially bought a 100Mbps Unlimited plan. I have never gotten close to that. I pay for the most expensive plan out of a hope that I will get prioritized by my ISP, but I have never seen anything faster than 26Mbps, ever.
The tl;dr is that Australia started a fibre-to-the-premises project for the whole country (93% of premises, plus rural 7% on wireless), then a conservative government got in power and decided to deliberately destroy it. To do this, they changed it to fibre-to-the-node (DSL) instead. Instead of gigabit to the home, they're spending more money providing people with connections anywhere between 4mbps and 100 at the absolute most, with no possibility of upgrades. The cost to do this, is, of course, far more money in the long term than installing the fibre. Some people in metropolitan areas will get connected to the existing coaxial network, which is going to have huge contention problems as it's stretched far beyond what it was ever intended for.
It's the biggest trainwreck of an infrastructure project in Australia's history and will set every person and business back for decades, and the blame lies squarely with the Liberal Party.
The current head of the project has gone on record saying that Australians don't want fast internet and wouldn't use it if it was free.
You're on the money, but just a bit out of date. We have a (very) new far-right party called the Australian Conservatives now. The creation of a former Liberal party senator.
> The Liberal party is the conservative party. No Conservative party in Australia AFAIK.
You a little behind the times. That was true many years ago, in the Fraser years. Now it's "The The Liberal party is the conservative party. There is currently no 'John Stuart Mill' liberal party in Australia".
Australia has what's referred to as 'big-L' Liberals, who are the conservative side, as opposed to 'small-l' liberals as you'd commonly describe 'liberal politics', i.e. progressive.
Our centre-right party is the Liberal party, our centre-left is called Labor.
"Liberals" does not mean "left-leaning" in most of the commonwealth or even the world outside the US, "social-liberal" does but "liberal" on its own is generally center-right and sometimes "conservative-right", the latter being the case for the Liberal Party of Australia (which always existed in opposition to Labour).
It was an unsteady ship that could be righted with some well-known and publicised fixes. Instead they filled it with more water and blamed everybody but themselves.
They did have to setup the whole company, negotiate with Telsta, run the backbone's and set everything else up.
They were behind on connections its true, but that was largely due to Telstra having to remediate the ducts filled with asbestos which halted large portions of the rollout. Had they continued I expect that the ramp up would have been similar to New Zealand.
What is biased is citing premises passed at an really phase in a project which deliberately planned to roll out difficult sites first. Of course there were not many premises passed, that is meaningless without context.
It wasn't though. The rollout follows political seats exactly to the street. In Brisbane this means that it followed the border of marginal ALP seats that cross the river and back again instead of doing adjacent houses.
It's also not meaningless 5 years into a project that was announced 7 years prior.
I don't even vote LNP, but you have to wonder about the efficiency of a rollout where you get faster internet driving an hour out of Melbourne than Fitzroy or a lot of the CBD. For a project originally estimated at 4.7 then 15 then 42 billion, dense paying customers early should probably have been prioritised.
If your concern is just with government expenditures, sure, but you can also make the argument that prioritising rural areas could give them a head start on the growth of digital services. Taking Australia from being a market where cities have ~okay~ internet and rural areas have poor internet to one where at first everyone has okay to great connectivity and later everyone has great connectivity has its merits.
> where you get faster internet driving an hour out of Melbourne than Fitzroy or a lot of the CBD
Melbourne already had awesome internet, the need was much less there. You can disagree with the decision to rollout to internet-disadvantaged areas if you want, but don't pretend that the conscious decision to do so was bad management when it was actually an attempt at equity (ie: addressing the most needy customers first).
The rollout didn't follow political seats. Numbers showed initial rollouts followed 67 labor, 61 coalition, 6 others. Anything more recent than that is really only attributable to the new NBN's MTM direction.
> It's also not meaningless 5 years into a project that was announced 7 years prior.
It's a once-in-100 years project to create infrastructure with a lifetime of the same order. It involved replacing nearly 100% of the country's telecommunications infrastructure. 5 years is not particularly long in that context, and trashing it because you can't wait 7 years or even 10 years instead of 5 in exchange for a vastly inferior outcome is just utter stupidity.
So yes, measuring rollout numbers 5 years in is meaningless.
> Some people in metropolitan areas will get connected to the existing coaxial network, which is going to have huge contention problems as it's stretched far beyond what it was ever intended for.
s/some/most/. HFC is the predominant plan for most of the capital cities (I think not... hobart? or was it adelaide?).
Don't forget the National Party who were instrumental in kowtowing to the liberals to build what they originally coined as "Fraudband". They had a once in a lifetime opportunity to deliver a decent internet service to much of rural Australia and they threw it away because it was a Labor idea.
By 'fit for service' they mean 12Mbps down, or average copper wire speeds. What's the point?
Although the original goal was great, in hindsight it appears that it could not be delivered anywhere near the original budget. For context, after a prolonged period of centre-right government, a centre-left government was elected, led by Kevin Rudd. He had a progressive agenda, but due to a combination of his unmitigated egotism and internal party conflicts, he instituted a variety of programs that were poorly conceived and executed, and was ultimately ousted by his own party in a fairly disasterous manner. The National Broadband network was a product of this highly disappointing and dysfunctional period of government. Since then the problems have continued across a change back to the centre-right government, who with a very slim majority have essentially stuffed around for the last few years with a lame duck leader who seems hamstrung by the ultra conservatives in his own party.
For my part, I'm dropping all wires and switching to 4G/LTE, where I can stream 4K content, get decent uploads and still pay less than I would on the National Broadband network.
There was a few major potholes in the original plan. The nobel aim was to wire up (and use satellite to augment) the majority of australia, including, critically a large part of the rural population. The appeal was to level the access for the population to high quality internet. From then on; however, it became a political football, with both parties internal reworking it and bike shedding the entire technology stack with no clue on implementation and a strong lobby from the incumbent privatised telco (Telstra) and other telcos to ensure their business is not threatened.
> For my part, I'm dropping all wires and switching to 4G/LTE, where I can stream 4K content, get decent uploads and still pay less than I would on the National Broadband network.
If everyone does that you'll be lucky to stream youtube videos at 240p. Wireless bandwidth is inherently shared between everyone, wired is dedicated.
Yeah, LTE capacity can definitely not meet everyone's needs. But in my part of an Australian major city, the only wired option at the moment is NBN over HFC, with a set up fee or a long contract, at a time when all the retailers are trying to undercut each other by buying insufficient capacity.
Under these conditions, LTE is the clear winner. That may change as you point out.
It's not exactly 'cheap', but if you need 100-140Gb a month there are data only sims for $70 monthly from Optus and resellers. They guarantee minimum 12Mbps supposedly. In metro areas with the latest LTE modems people are pulling 200Mbps down.
If you need lots of data though, the cost becomes less viable.
When I was investigating this stuff six months ago, I believe these plans were somewhat different (and indeed the Critical Information Summaries for them seem to have dates of May and July), with only the first month being cheaper or having as much data or something. (That the month-to-month one still uses the wording “$70 for the first month” on the marketing page makes me uneasy, but I don’t think there’s a catch, I think it’s merely outdated wording.)
Vivid Wireless offer unlimited 4G data capped at 12 Mbps for $90 a month. Its on the Optus network so your experience will depend on what the coverage is like where you live.
Useful to know. I was considering moving over to them to save money on my ADSL2+ connection. My area has fantastic 4G speeds without any congestion issues as its semi rural and I was expecting them to be quite good.
Have been with vivid for about 12 months, was supposed to be a temporary arrangement while I waited for my building's strata to fix the internal wiring between my apartment and the MDF in the basement. All of the NBN horror stories and the strata's malignant incompetence mean I'm still using it and it's pretty solid in my experience.
I'm in central Sydney and normally average around 10mbps down
> Whilst the Vividwireless service uses the Optus 4G Plus network, it is designed to be used in the home and its data speeds are different to mobile and mobile broadband speeds on the Optus 4G Plus network. In metropolitan areas where you connect to 2300 MHz coverage at your nominated address, download and upload speeds of up to 12/1Mbps are available.
> Otherwise in other compatible coverage areas, download and upload speeds of up to 5/1Mbps are available.
So, 12/1 or 5/1 rather than 23/12 or 45/15 as I tend to get out in the country on the same network.
Yes, hiding this information in there is misleading, because people aren’t generally aware of what the different frequency bands and relevant 4G technologies (TDD/FDD) mean and think that “4G” is just one thing.
I use amaysim’s 50GB data pack, at $65 for 28 days, and on the Optus network. In the country town of Stawell (a few thousand people), I get roughly 23/12Mbps. I’m moving to Navarre soon (about a hundred people), and get about 45/15Mbps there.
For me, living by myself and working from home most days, it’s substantially better than ADSL2+, as it’s faster, more reliable, doesn’t lock me into any contract, allows me to use my internet supply from other places as well, all for the same price as ADSL2+ (which is admittedly generally $10–20 per month dearer in the country for a given service level, and at this price point would include 100GB instead of my 50GB, but I simply don’t need that).
Hey Chris, I just moved from Ararat. I never would have expected to see another regional western Victorian on HN!
For reference, Stawell has a population of 6,000 while Ararat is about 8,000. The towns are approx 30 minutes drive distance away. The world is smaller than I thought.
In Ararat it’s almost better to go with 4G. While you get decent caps (1000G/m for AUD$90) the problem is that the internet drops out every time it rains.
I can’t imagine running a business that requires internet access in regional Australia, good on you for finding a way!
I grew up in Melbourne, but preferred the idea of living in the country, so I made it so. (I’m employed by FastMail and head into the office every couple of weeks or so; I told them of my plan to move into the country before they hired me.) When I was first planning it, I had been considering NBN essential, but shortly before actually moving here it occurred to me that regular 4G was actually quite suitable—better than ADSL2+, a test rapidly revealed. My experience with about five months of depending on 4G in Stawell is that apart from a period of about five days where the supply was dodgy (mostly usable, but no more), the Internet supply is at least as reliable than I ever got from ADSL2+ in two locations in Melbourne—where running a ping all day typically has zero packet loss. And ADSL2+’s reliability was never superb.
Your 1TB/$90 and rain dropout refers to ADSL2+, does it not? I haven’t noticed any problems with rain and haven’t seen any caps anywhere near that high on 4G.
Well, now I’m buying in Navarre, which isn’t covered by NBN at this stage (hence it wasn’t in my initial dragnet) but does have an Optus 4G tower, and thus great internet supply.
You're right, I was using ADSL2+ and we were connected to a pillar where we were the only ones using it (50 pair). We reported a fault but rather than fix the problem properly they just hooked us up to another pair. The justification was "well you'll have NBN soon".
This is a great summary, and a large number of people I know are doing exactly this. Using 4g since the 4g network in major cities on Telstra is extremely fast, and fits their lifestyle (really just using phones at home, or a hotspot in a pinch).
I think you are going way too easy on the current government. "Stuffing around" - more like active sabotage. Their policy has been consistent in the NBN all the way through, and has defied all independent technical advice. It was a political solution that never made any technical sense.
I thought he was going too hard on Turnbull (current PM). What has he done that justifies your appraisal of his brief term?
People seem to be forgetting about Abbott, who in my opinion did indeed fuck around with rubbish policy his entire term (helped into the grave by treasurer/idiot Joe Hockey).
>I thought he was going too hard on Turnbull (current PM).
The problem with Turnbull appears to be that either:
1) He has to balance his rather more radically right wing members of his party while keeping his further centre members happy else he loses his position. (Many peoples explanation).
or
2) He has significantly changed his opinions and position on many issues over the last 5 years.
And this is a problem because people cant really tell which it is.
Turnbull hasn't really changed many of the policies of his predecessor, he just wraps it up nicer and in a more statesman like fashion.
He was previously a more moderate right wing (by australian standards) but has since gone significantly more right wing.
Im not going into specifics because I don't want to go beyond the realms of the overall topic and end up talking about Gonski or something, but thats my take on why people are a bit bemused by Turnbull and not particularly forgiving despite his inheritance.
I'm well aware of those two popularly perceived problems, but I don't see how either justifies him being a bad PM.
I believe proposition (1), there being more evidence that supports this view and more rhetoric that supports (2).
If he were elected with a significant majority of both houses, and the party returned to a more centrist state, such that he didn't need to appease the more Right-wing faction of his party in the same way, would he not still be the perfect PM many of us thought he might be?
An aside -> his election strategy was mostly:
(1) use data to find popular buzz-words ("JOBS", "GROWTH", "INNOVATION");
(2) repeat those ad infinitum;
(3) shy away from any compelling political narrative or vision for the future of the country (e.g. "MAGA" narrative);
(4) ???;
(5) Lose House seats to Shorten and Senate seats to Pauline et al.
I agree that his actions as communications minister that contributed to this were horrible, but being given communications minister was essentially a punishment for crossing the line.
(1) The NBN falls under the portfolio, and the government knew they would have to deal with controlling the ever increasing costs of the program, which were hugely underestimated by Labour, and
(2) The person in the role of Communications minister would take the blame for the public realisation that the costs were going out of control and had to be cut.
(3) Any cut would result in a poorer NBN, because that's what cutting costs when you're building any product/service does.
So he was essentially handed that flaming pile of dog shit by Abbott, probably to lower the chance that Turnbull would ever be able to wrestle back power.
Turnbull's solution was to get the private sector to pay for a part of the network (FTTN instead of FTTH). So, costs would be managed, the 2020 target was still reachable, and it leaves the NBN open to improve the network to FTTH later on.
What could Turnbull have done better?
The bigger problem of the NBN is its business model, which charges Telcos for bandwidth on a total downloads basis rather than on a % use basis. This is what causes the poor service of the NBN. This could have been dealt with by Rudd, by using a different model for the NBN, as discussed above, but Turnbull couldn't do anything about that.
Not just that, but the Liberals presented Turnbull as some sort of masterful IT expert on the extremely flimsy pretext that he made a shitload of money flipping an ISP two decades ago.
He has a slightly better grasp on some areas of technology than the average person perhaps, but certainly no more than the absolute bare minimum any communications minister should be required to have.
Except that Turnbull was in charge of alot of this stuff in the Abbott gov't before he became PM. However, no one running this project to date has done a very good job.
> For my part, I'm dropping all wires and switching to 4G/LTE, where I can stream 4K content, get decent uploads and still pay less than I would on the National Broadband network.
No, you don't.
NBN is built using your tax money
NBN will be maintained using your future tax money
NBN is protected by laws from any potential competition from the private sector, those laws are passed using your names.
> in hindsight it appears that it could not be delivered anywhere near the original budget.
What makes you think that? It's on the public record that NBN Co were fairly well on-budget (after they'd upped the peak funding from $39bn to $44.1bn a few years earlier) up until to the 2013 election.
Of course, the media preached it was over budget, so that's what most people think, and Malcolm Turnbull was so suspicious that he commissioned a forensic review into their financials - which was very quietly released when it found "no material issues". There was also some evidence of the incoming NBN management choosing to keep quiet and shut down a cost reduction program that had successfully found efficiency gains and cost improvements ('Project Fox' which was leaked to the media).
All major fibre rollouts have tended to show that costs reduce over time - Chorus in NZ reported a 44% reduction in per-premises cost over their rollout so far, and Openreach in the UK have reported a 50% reduction from when they started.
Coupled with the fact that the Coalition's plan blew out by $15 billion, I think it would have actually been better to continue with the original plan and try to fix the problems. What they ended up doing was to not fix any of the existing problems, and try to 'fix' the things that were good about the NBN (the technology)...
This isn't counting that any upgrade to FTTN (which will be required in less than 10 years) would cost tens of billions of dollars more, or the much higher running cost of FTTN. In the end, the LNP really picked a dud and absolutely screwed up something that could have been fixed.
Before they self destructed and lost the election, the labour party's costings increased by nearly 10x (along with changing the model). Your comment even describes a budget increase of 5 billion?
Also, there are other reasons why the Chorus costs are coming down, that don't apply here:
First common mistake: Yes, Australia is geographically huge. No, it is not sparce. it is a highly urbanized economy in terms of geographic concentration of the population. Therefore, the oft-quoted extreme expense "oh, its so much more expensive to do it in OZ compared to ..." is bullshit: its not. There are of course some very expensive locations to service, but thats a USO problem. Overall, the cost of deployment of the CAN is within scale of any other urban economy. Higher than Singapore? Sure. But, comparable per head of population to NZ.
Second common mistake: The argument which led to the MTM replacing FTTP was not about technology. It was about the cost of capital works, and the economic model of recovery. Labor was stupid enough to float a mixed-economy pluralist argument hinting at a future independent non-utility model with zero cost (long term) to the government. This hung them because it allowed the Liberals to go hard on cost recovery and privatization. If the intent had been to reserve a national utility function in layers 1 and 2, and promote competition above this, we'd be in a different conversation.
That conversation was about structural separation of the former monopoly Telco. It was quashed by Labor, in a stupid reactive move. It was floated, and the banking sector indicated a preference. Reactively the union movement and Labor party moved to reject it: if the banks wanted it, it must be bad.
Talk about a huge missed opportunity.
The NZ model, by comparison is gold: structural separation. Crown holdings for the fiber. A pot of money, re-circulating to deploy to the cities, each region re-fills the pot to move to the next town. Far simpler. And.. fibre to (most) homes.
Other comments are blaming the Liberals, but the reality is if you are an effective leader trying to create a huge infrastructure project that you care deeply about, you need to come up with a solution that will last through a change in government, with aligned economic and political contingencies. If you are just governing for fun then you do what Rudd did. It always lets you blame the next government though, as he is doing now.
To the Aussie's credit the infrastructure and the regulations instilled on businesses there have always been Federally imposed.
Since the mid-90s the government has imposed many regulations for control that has impeded much of the free market progress for network infrastructure. Those regulations coupled with needed external transit installations have not helped. For a long period of time the government would pick and choose companies based on their ideals rather than their talent. This has hindered progress from both sides of the fence by liberal and conservative administrations.
I ran a semi successful ISP and consulting company for a decade in the US and I have always enjoyed the tiering system we setup vs other country Infrastructures. It wasn't until recently when the FCC gained control that states started to use the new regulation power to hinder progress. I am still on the fence about the whole thing because the exploitation has not been bad in my area but the horror stores I have heard in other states make me sad. Hopefully it will get back to normal.
I'm not personally sold on the baby bell model of regional monopoly. I think the whole FIOS debacle, and what happened when google started offering citywide fibre says a lot about how US telco industry operates. Lobby your way to the people who make rules and then get rules passed to shut down anything which freaks your own monopoly of indifference.
What was the "whole FIOS debacle, and what happened when google started offering citywide Fibre"?
Why the down votes? This sounds interesting, but I am not sure what to search for to learn more.
I do not live in the USA. What I am told by my colleagues who do, is that the post bell regional breakup created monopolies by location in order to prevent national dominance but give each region a reliable income in a time of voice call logistics. Fast forward to the emergence of fiber as a viable technology: either you live in a location serviced by a telco who is willing to re-engineer to fiber or you don't. Verizon exemplifies the quandary, it's a huge cost, they have to carve out special data models for cable companies to stop them refusing to drop coax, it's impossible to charge sanely, their shares tank. I am sure there are happy customers but there is no clear equality of service. It's a patchwork minefield.
> if you are an effective leader trying to create a huge infrastructure project that you care deeply about, you need to come up with a solution that will last through a change in government, with aligned economic and political contingencies.
On the other hand, the opposition can either try to work with or lie your ass off and sabotage everything, the latter being exactly what the liberals did with the NBN.
It's no secret that our political systems have problems, with this sort of thing. Factionalism, corporate interests and other monority special interest, continuity.
Sometimes policies have a chance of being coherent, usually through a small group of "authors" that have a clear idea of what they want to do. This is generally when a governing party gives free reign to some internal group.
The other option is bipartisan commitees & a "wide consulatation approach". This is how the vast majority of australian laws get made. There's an alarm-like flashing oof lights (red or green) in parliament when an attempt is made to do things otherwise (a split).
Anyways, the standard process means compromise. Specifically, comromise between all "relevant" participants. The two big parties, obviously. Several interested factions within those parties, and various corporate interests usually represented by specific industry chambers of commerce or similar. Everyone needs to get something.
Coherence and compromise just don't go together, not when it comes to policy/legislation.
Look at the americans. They've been fiddling with health policy for a decade. As far as I can tell, the more attention the issue gets, the worse it gets.
Anyway, apart from being "pro-internet" labour never really had a solid agenda. The parliamentary end of this sausage factory was basically "the internet is important!!" vs "why spend 100bn on streaming cat vids!?). The hyenas and crows did the rest.
My main issue is that the investment enables digital consumption, without much impact on production.
For example, a flaw I had with the NZ rollout: it was deployed to citizens before businesses. It feels kind of sad as a business owner when your business remains on VDSL while the suburbs are getting fibre (although lovely to get Netflix at home on fibre!).
This is a totally valid point. I'm on the consumers side, so to me it made sense to bulk out the build for eyeballs but not enabling SMEs to leverage high bandwidth was silly. The stuff they did in Wellington making a city heart fibre ring some years back had lots of upsides.
In NZ: At work we have 100mbps fibre shared by 50 people, at home quite a few of us have 1gbps fibre. It’s kind of amusing how bad our work internet situation is compared to consumer internet.
I'm glad it finally happened in NZ and as you say, it's awesome. I'm rocking 1000/500 - the biggest limitation is international throughput and latency which I suppose they are working on and improving all the time.
We need to get the physicists (general relativists?) working on upping the speed of light. Seriously though, how much larger is your latency than speed of light limitations? 2x?
TrueNet keeps track of a lot of good ISP performance measures, including one for international latency [1]. Looking at that average latency to the USA at least it seems pretty damn decent, only about 30-60% worse then the theoretical limit imposed by current fiber tech (speed of light in standard silicon glass fiber is about 30% slower then in vacuum), since direct line is about 7000-8000 miles. And of course as a practical matter fibers are not run directly between every destination, so add on extra for that and if TrueNet's numbers are reasonably accurate then everyone seems to be doing a reasonable job given the distance.
I remember reading years ago about interesting research being done to use photonic-bandgap rims to make fibers that would allow propagation approaching vacuum speed [2], and if deployed eventually that could drop latency by another 40-60ms. But at least back then there seemed to be enough loss (3.5 dB/km) that it'd be impractical over long distances without excessive boosters, even ignoring any cost/durability issues of the fiber itself. That may have been improved in the last 4 years though, but I'm not sure if it ever did make it to market (or if there are even plans still in progress for it, raw throughput was impressive too FWIW).
At any rate: the NZ ISPs seem to be offering pretty solid service on that front even internationally, at least in terms of pure latency. If there is increasing congestion or other issues those are just matters of capex, and between the ISP's servers and premise links there might be more lag being added in. But I don't see any glaring core inefficiencies there in terms of the international link part, unless I'm missing something entirely. Looks a lot better then I'd have expected taking a guess based on how it was a decade ago.
So, I do understand there are limitations, but I guess I think that once the data has started to flow, it should maximise available capacity.
However, I feel like `pacman -Syu` should be faster. I don't mind the latency, but the throughput should be better right? I only get 1-2 Mbyte/s average using US servers.
It's interesting to note that the compromises made with UFB would not fly in the U.S. Liberals would kill it as a handout to rich people ("if you can't afford to feed your family by the end of the month, you can't afford $75 a month for the broadband service")[1] and conservatives would kill it because it's not available more than 50 km from an urban area.
A few months ago I compared ISPs and found that Trustpower were one of the most expensive, especially if you don't get the bundle discount for getting power through them.
Vodafone currently offer 200Mbps unlimited data fibre (don't know what the upload speed is) for $110/month, and unlimited speed (up to 900Mbps, depending on location) for $120/month, and deduct $10/month if you go on a contract.
It's only in the last couple years that you can get unlimited data at a reasonable price here.
A large fraction of the cost of bandwidth in NZ is international transit, because there's only one significant undersea cable connecting NZ, the Southern Cross Cable. I couldn't find current prices, but in 2013 it cost about US$0.10/GB to go through that cable [1]
> The NZ model, by comparison is gold: structural separation. Crown holdings for the fiber. A pot of money, re-circulating to deploy to the cities, each region re-fills the pot to move to the next town. Far simpler. And.. fibre to (most) homes.
Only after A LOT of pain. Broadband uptake was pathetic in NZ until Telecom, formed out of the NZ Post Office and sold to overseas buyers in 1990, was split up into retail (Spark) and infrastructure (Chorus) ten years ago. It's smooth sailing now, but it could have been so much easier.
Wait... are you saying that dialup internet was slow until 1990 when ISDN came out?
Or that broadband uptake was pathetic until 2007 with the Spark/Chorus spilt?
One of those is really early for any internet, and the other 17 years later, is really late!
The latter. I think there was literally one overseas internet connection in 1990.
For years Telecom managed to get away with doing nothing other than charging exorbitant fees. It's just a coincidence the decision to unbundle came immediately after these comments in 2006:
> What has every telco in the world done in the past? It's used confusion as its chief marketing tool ... customers know that's what the game has been. They know we're not being straight up.
In my option, New Zealand internet didn't really get good until 2011.
That is when Chorus was finally 100% separated from telecom.
From 2006-2011, Chorus were inducing congestion in the ADSL backhaul to put non-telecom ISPs (particularly ISPs with all the high-bandwidth power-users) at a disadvantage. An ISP could buy unlimited bandwidth to the outside world, and give each customer ADSL 2+ connections of upto 24Mbit, but the backhaul between Chorus and the ISP to terminate all those ADSL connections was rate-limited to roughly 64kbps times the number of connections that ISP had.
If all an ISPs customers went online at the same time and started downloading, everyone's throughput would drop to 64kbps.
And Chorus would absolutely refuse to sell any extra backhaul bandwidth.
It was in the best interest for all ISPs to have a healthy base of non-skilled users who barely used their ADSL connections, just so the rest of their users wouldn't get too congested. It was also around this time ISPs implemented various perks to encourage power-users to only download at night time.
This all stopped in 2011, and the bandwidth caps that all ISPs were offering suddenly shot up.
> There are of course some very expensive locations to service, but thats a USO problem.
I don't know what the acronym USO means. But I do know that the expensive locations are politically important because there is pressure for the government to build various things out in just those locations. They political lobbying arises precisely because those locations are so expensive that the locals wouldn't pay for it themselves.
When the Liberals privatised the government owned monopoly telco (now called Tesltra), they didn't properly structurally seperate it in the first place. The government, like NZ, could have gotten the wholesale part of Telstra to start upgrading network infrastructure. If they had done it properly the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess.
> The government, like NZ, could have gotten the wholesale part of Telstra to start upgrading network infrastructure.
They couldn't, though, without a lot more difficulty.
You're missing the context that at the time of Rudd's election and the NBN design/build plan, Telstra was actively hostile towards the government. Solomon Trujillo was the CEO at the time, and actively fought against any suggestion that Telstra might be structurally separated (a-la Telecom NZ's split into Chorus and Spark), or be required to build a nationwide wholesale fibre network.
Telstra under Trujillo was the company that famously gave a last minute 13-page (non-compliant) response[1] to a call for bids to build the NBN, that was effectively a giant middle finger to the government.
Forcing a structural separation when the government own a minority stake in the company[2] would've required either re-purchasing it at market rates, or some kind of legislative change, and thus opening the government up to a shareholder lawsuit. At the time, the CAN and Fibre back-haul networks were considered some of Telstra's greatest assets, those would've been some major purchases.
There were a bunch of bad options, but having been backed into this corner by previous government decisions - there wasn't a whole lot they could've done.
You misunderstand, I'm saying that if Telstra were properly separated right from the start (when the Howard government privatised it), the Rudd government could have easily gotten Telstra wholesale to do what Chorus in NZ is doing now. Most of Australia would probably have FTTP by now, or at least FTTN/HFC.
Actually, the first mistake is saying the NBN was Rudd's idea.
The problem was created by the Libs in 1997, when they privatised a government monopoly, Telstra. Telstra promptly morphed into natural shape of private monopolies everywhere: a bloody great rent seeker, beholden to no one. They sat on the existing copper network assets, milking them for all their were worth and showing not the slightest interest investing to upgrade the asset when new technologies arrived. (The contrast with their actions in the mobile sector, where they didn't have a monopoly could not be more stark. We have a world class mobile network, and were the first to phase out 2G.)
10 years later, the prime minster who created this mess was still in power. It was only 10 years later, but by then it was obvious even to him something had to be done because we had this headline: “Australian Prime Minister John Howard on Monday announced a 2.0 billion dollar (1.68 billion US) plan to provide fast and affordable Internet access across the vast country”. http://www.smh.com.au/news/Technology/n/2007/06/18/118201899... Notice this was several years before Rudd "had" the same idea.
Turned out 1.68 billion was a bit of an underestimate, so it went nowhere. We've are now spending 20 times that amount to extract ourselves from the mess he created. I do hope the $14B they earned from the sale of Telstra (which is several times less than the cost of the fix) was worth it at the time.
Reminds me of Dave of EEVblog (in AU, obviously) discussing about how stupid the pricing, bureaucracy and outdated are on various, overlapping internet service providers, especially NBN.
Party A was in power, and having infighting problems. Party B was headed by an absolute arse of a man, who used the tactic "Say No! to EVERYTHING". Didn't matter how benign or banal, the opposition party would say no. A flagship policy like the NBN was particularly focused on - and if you look at interviews with the opposition communications minister at the time (now our prime minister), it was clear that he was toeing the party line and didn't think changing the policy was a good idea.
Fast-forward to the next exection, and Absolute Arse gets into power. Turns out he can't govern at all (despite 20 years on the front benches) and he definitely isn't going to backtrack on something he's attacked so routinely. He's kicked out by his own party. At this stage, the NBN has been gutted, and its doom is sealed.
In steps the comms minister as the new PM, but he is now beset by factionalism. He knows what a turkey the NBN is, but he doesn't have the political power to do an about-face on his party's policies.
In short, we're fucked. By the time any other party can get in, the NBN will be 'mostly complete'. The most annoying thing is that the folks who really need good internet is business, not residences (think graphic design, medical imagery, etc), and the party that fucked the NBN is the 'party of business'. Enterprises can already dictate their own network backbones, but small-to-medium businesses cannot.
"Enterprises can already dictate their own network backbones, but small-to-medium businesses cannot."
Before that election, I can remember having an argument about the need for the NBN with a friend who works for a very large company. He argued that the internet in Australia was fine because their teleconferencing video in the boardroom worked well. I told him that not only would they have had a very specialised connection, that in the very near future, households would see multiple, concurrent, hi-res video streams, and that business demands would be high too.
We're a home of four. It's not uncommon for the kids to be streaming Netflix while I work (with a basketball stream running), and my wife uploads large photos and streams a TV show on her phone while she works. We're still a year away from getting NBN and our internet absolutely crawls.
Tasmania got very lucky with the rollout, we are mostly covered with FTTP, Fixed Wireless and only some FTTN.
We are also lucky enough to have a local business (Launtel) pushing the constraints of the NBN by offering Gigabit at prices that aren't unreasonable ($14.50/day). They are treating it as a new pricing model, why bill the same as ADSL when there are no costs associated with setup and plan changes? They are billing daily which allows more flexibility meaning you could spin up a connection for a day (At an Airbnb for example) or change speed depending on your usage.
Wow. Just wow. My advice is buy cheap real estate and start an internatianal incubator. The weather alone should keep people indoors and focused... only half joking!
The fact that you get that where as the majority get up-to 12 Mbps is enough to make me cry. I am still waiting for any connection and happy that at least my ADSL2+ gets 15 Mbps solid pretty much 100% of the time.
I think the only way I could ever be happy with how the NBN story finishes if if Turnbull and Abbott serve gaol time for deliberately acting against the best interests of Australia and its people.
> After the conservative government attained power in 2013, the NBN struck more upheaval, with copper wire ordered for the final stretches of connection, surrounding neighbourhood broadband nodes.
How would pulling copper make it any better? It surely couldn't make it cheaper and at the same time would only use an inferior technology. Why would anyone pulling a new network today use anything but fiber optics?
They're trying to use existing copper for most of it, but as predicted by all the experts it's not working (the Government promised 50Mbps to all and up to 100Mbps but many people only get ~35Mbps - of course, the parts done by the old Government are capable of gigabit), and the cost has blown out by more than $15bn anyway... So yeah, should have just stayed with the fibre.
Running FTTH to every home was always a pipe dream (excuse the pun). Some kind of technology mix was a necessary compromise however the balance is wrong - percentage of FTTH is way too low. My home town is literally (and inexplicably!), divided down the middle - one half with FTTH, the other FTTN.
Because of the astronomical cost involved in running fibre to some premises. And not even talking about city vs bush - two city dwellings in close proximity can have vastly different cost of installing fibre.
I would qualify my original statement with 'as part of a NBN-like project'. I didn't intend to suggest that not every home should have fibre, or in deed will have fibre at some point in the future, just not at the tax payer's expense.
The BBC blamed, in part, "Australia's preference for underground wiring" as if it was a fashion statement.
In reality Britain simply lacks serious termites (and is in general underequipped in terms of dangerous animals, if you use Australia as a baseline).
I think this article buries the sins of the Liberal party (though the whole problem cannot be laid at their feet). I still have hope she'll be right in the end.
I will be moving to Melbourne next year. What kind of internet speed can I expect, what areas should I be looking at for a good connection at home? I currently have 200/20 in Berlin, presumably will need to downgrade my expectations...
Depends on the area but expect 10 Mbps or less. NBN has not really moved into capital cities yet. I am looking forward to them rolling out FTTN connections on copper laid 50 years ago and insulated using newspaper. Even if you get an area with NBN keep in mind they are not obligated to provide more than 12 Mbps during co existence and 25 Mbps after. With 5 dropouts a day considered acceptable service.
If you can find a unit with TPG FTTN go with that. It will be cheaper and uncongested.
I lived in Australia for 12 years, they fed me fake news about the progress of the NBN on weekly basis. In the end, they didn't deliver it at all - I was living in Sydney's inner city suburb but there is no way to get it 10 years after the promise was first made.
Moved back to Shanghai in 2017, was really happy about the fact that CCP didn't play the same game, they deliver concrete results. 500Mbps fiber costs me $450/year, with an extra $20/year, I can screw the GFW - streaming 4k from youtube is easy and I am watching it now.
I really like the fact that there was no general election topic or endless + meaningless debate on whether such a fiber network is good or not, CCP just deliver what they believe is good and take responsibility from there. Life is short, how many 10 years you have to waste on craps like that?
It is also worth pointing out that in Chinese definition, wasteful spending on tax money is serious corruption, you'd be seeing trucks load of CCP officials sent into jail should they dare to spend $49b without delivering the network on time.
> In 2013, Australia ranked 30th for average internet speeds. The NBN was meant to improve that, but the most recent standings ranked Australia 50th.
Well, I'm pretty sure 50th place today is a lot better than 30th back then still. They might not have the best internet around, but it probably got better for the users in that timespan. It smells to me like typical misused statistics in search of click-earning controversy.
How is this misusage of statistics? Given that internet speeds are a moving target, it really only makes sense to compare with other nations. If Australia doubles their internet speed that's great and all, but if the rest of the world makes a 10x improvement, sure doesn't seem like much of an accomplishment.
It’s interesting to compare Australia’s grand experiment with Stockholm’s. Australia’s proposal, before retrenching, was 93% coverage at 100 mbps (later, one gigabit), with a government investment around $30 billion AUD. Completion was promised on an eight-year timeline.
Stockholm, in comparison, followed a very different model: https://www.stokab.se/Documents/Stockholms%20Stokab%20-%20A%.... A city owned company was created. No public money was contributed; the network was financed by the utility taking loans. The government imposed no coverage requirement. Service was expanded based on demonstrated demand, and it took 17 years to cover 90% of the city. The utility started turning an overall profit in 2008, after 13 years of operation. The Stockholm system is expensive--customers are charged a set-up fee to recoup construction costs, and although prices must be transparent, they are not rate-regulated. NBN Co., in contrast, is subject to rate regulation and does not recover construction costs as part of a setup fee.
Broadly speaking, there are three lessons to take from this:
1) Urban areas and rural areas should not be part of the same program. "Universal service" sounds nice in theory, but in practice the challenges of deploying in rural areas can torpedo the project. In Sweden, the government did help deploy fiber in rural areas: http://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/Opinions/2013/Rural_FTTH.... Sweden required dark fiber to be deployed to within a few kilometers of rural areas, but rural residents had to pay for their own hookups. The government subsidized 50% of the cost of those hookups, up to about $600 USD per property.
2) Coverage requirements are a bad idea. When you force the operator to cover areas where the business case doesn't yet exist, you're forcing them to charge their existing customers more to subsidize new customers. That can make the product too expensive for existing customers.
3) It's okay for fiber to be expensive, at least at first. Charging more to early adopters to recoup large fixed costs is a basic business model in the tech industry. Telia in Sweden charges about $120/month for gigabit, and in many cases customers are liable for construction setup costs. That's okay--it allows the operator to quickly recoup construction costs and use ongoing revenues to expand the network. Sweden does not regulate rates to make fiber affordable for poor people, nor does it force fiber operators to subsidize service themselves.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadWhat we can be sure of it now that Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull have completely ruined our chance at having a world class NBN, they'll not do what is needed to actually make it world class.
It's really strange that politicians simply are not driven by making things awesome. They're driven by something else and it's certainly not the goal of getting to the best possible outcome for the people and the country.
So I have HFC coming into my home right now.... where is my symmetric 10Gbps connection?
https://www.nbnco.com.au/blog/industry/hfc-what-is-full-dupl...
I loathe politicians with the burning heat of a thousand supernovas.
None of them represent the citizens. They represent their own grasping self interest.
And I certainly don't agree with the far left who seem to have an anti corporate/anti capitalist whiff to them ... I'm a committed capitalist AND green and they is no political party aligned to that.
They are broadly Libertarian but more pro-environment than the Lib-Dems.
Case in point: the original plan for the NBN was vastly preferable to this scandal ;)
Then it truly wouldn't matter where you lived for certain classes of work.
And regarding cost, well I think this is precisely what the government should be spending OUR money on.
They make such a huge song and dance about $49Biliion for the NBN, but the government is desperate to throw our money at companies. Have you heard ANYTHING about the $50Bn tax cut the government has given to companies? http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/mal...
I'm not informed enough to see how this came about but if I had to take a guess I'd suggest the influence of the Nationals on the LNP has taken it's toll.
Sustainable Australia party is who you're looking for. William Bourke is eminently sensible. Dick Smith joined. The anti-corruption fighter who wrote "Game of Mates" Dr Cameron Murray is running for them too.
http://www.sustainableaustralia.org.au
http://www.sustainableaustralia.org.au/qld
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2017/08/17/hanson-dick-sm...
It's a shame the media has conflated any discussion of an immigration policy with racism (ie because of One Nation)
Dick's not running though, so checkout the candidates and party, they are academics and scientists for the common good.
I’ve never really got the impression that Sustainable Australia (or any of its previous incarnations) was really anything more than an anti-population growth single issue party.
- Stop undemocratic privatisation
- Establish an independent Federal commission against corruption
- Require more timely disclosure of political donations
- Invest more in renewable energy
- Moratorium on all fracking
- No new casinos
- Prioritise public transport funding over new tollways
- Lower immigration from its record level (over 200,000 p.a.) back to the long term average of 70,000 p.a.
- Tackle global population growth through increased foreign aid for female education and universal access to contraception
- Establish major community product repair and recycle centres
Public Assets http://www.sustainableaustralia.org.au/public_assets_utiliti...
Foreign Investment http://www.sustainableaustralia.org.au/foreign_investment/
Education http://www.sustainableaustralia.org.au/education/
Housing Affordability http://www.sustainableaustralia.org.au/housing_affordability...
Health http://www.sustainableaustralia.org.au/health/
Gambling http://www.sustainableaustralia.org.au/gambling/
Energy http://www.sustainableaustralia.org.au/energy/
Finite Resources http://www.sustainableaustralia.org.au/finite_non_renewable_...
Jobs http://www.sustainableaustralia.org.au/economy_jobs/
[0]: https://voteflux.org/
That is a false and dangerous overstatement. I have met many parliamentarians in 3 nations. They have pretty much the same mix of ethical tendencies as in the general population. They higher they rise, the more compromises are forced on them, but they're no worse in general than their electors (many of whom are also entirely self-interested and grasping).
> I'm a committed capitalist AND green and they is no political party aligned to that
Most Green parties have been suckered by the long-discredited 'natural capital' story, so are unfortunately heavily committed to capitalism. Ipso facto, there are few genuinely Green parties, as capitalism is clearly incompatible with the continued healthy existence of a living planet.
The Greens have an unofficial right faction (pro-capitalism, pro-green). Most of the recent Greens internal tension has been between this faction (which has a lot of ex-Liberal environmentalists and ex-Democrats) and the Left Renewal faction (many of whom are openly anti-capitalist). The pro-capitalism faction is certainly very strong and seems to control the party leadership at the moment.
It was the equivalent of pre-breakup AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cox (and the only competition was Optus, probably equivalent in market share then to Charter now) all in one go without breaking up anything. Oh, and guess what, they're also in a 50%-50% joint venture with the only major Pay TV provider left, FOXTEL (so that's the equivalent of Dish and DirectTV on top of the above). And their partner in FOXTEL is Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp which also happens to own 70%, yes, 70% of daily newspaper circulation in the country. But in the light of that of course, the government has finally come to its senses and done something about media ownership regulations.
...
And they actually did, but what they did was just overturning the rules to allow Newscorp to also buy more radio or FTA TV assets. Which included a recently bankrupt FTA TV network run in and owned in substantial part (essentially as much as legally allowed by regulation at the time) by a certain James Murdoch. How did it go bankrupt? Credit withheld, guess by who. Well, not entirely, it was him and a guy who also owns a affiliated regional FTA network who wanted to take over the lot.
But in the only bit of actual hilarity in this whole thing, CBS bought that FTA TV network in bankruptcy. Outbidding Newscorp. So at least things are on the up and up. They may still have a complete and total stranglehold and perverted national infrastructure in collusion with a political party they're so strongly biassed towards. But at least an eternally bankrupt (they went bankrupt in the late 80s too) TV network at a time when TV is headed for terminal decline has escaped the grasp. Yay us :|
The fact that retailers are not purchasing enough bandwidth means you're buying a Ferrari with a broken engine that is being pulled by a single horse. My area is slated for NBN 2019, let's hope they do something about the bandwidth before then (apparently at an estimates hearing a solution was promised by Christmas this year). What a joke.
The NBN has come to my area. I am on Telstra 100Mbps HFC and it has worked pretty much flawlessly for years.
I have heard from various people in the area how terrible the NBN is.
I'm not switching until as late as I possibly can.
The whole NBN has turned into a complete joke. If they would of stuck to rolling out fiber everywhere it would solved everything. Nope we now have to have a hybrid of everything.
The rest of my street is now on HFC NBN but my house is an outlier, still waiting on additional work. Been waiting since May, I suspect it'll take until the next May.
With 3 people in the house, going from 3 mbit to 25 or 50 will make a pretty huge difference to us. Probably about as much as when we first jumped from 56k to 256k ADSL 15 years ago.
Second important question: do you have fiber to the premises, ie an NBN box on each house? If you do...
Remember that the NBN box (unless they changed it) has 4 data ports, each of which can be associated with an isolated ISP plan. Presumably your neighbor is only using Port 1.
If you're close enough, you could probably get away with a couple amplified 802.11ac dongles. A Pi3 or modded router could handle the Wi-Fi point-to-point setup at the remote house.
If that wouldn't quite work, point to point microwave links (which don't require a license, and are basically a pair of boxes that you stick on REALLY tall poles, and which have Ethernet ports on the back) are around $450 a pair. (For example, http://store.freenet-antennas.com.au/product_info.php?cPath=...)
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If you have fiber to the node (ie the street), I have no idea if extra connections can be added for a house NBN-box-style or what that looks like. It probably means provisioning an extra phone line, which obviously wouldn't work.
But you could viably rent the neighbor(s') actual bandwidth in this situation - in fact, if you can successfully describe and sell a "0% QoS" structure, where whatever bandwidth is not being otherwise used at any given moment is allocated to you, you could probably get away with paying very little. :P
You could also rent from multiple neighbors, too. Supposing an ideal scenario where you rent from 10 neighbors which have 100Mbps each (I know, I know...), you could get a VPS with decent bandwidth in a Real Country™, connect to the VPS from each borrowed connection, bond the resulting TUN interfaces together at both ends of the link, and hey presto - absolutely disasterous ping and jitter, but 1Gbps throughput at 1 o'clock in the morning.
Given the dramas with actually getting connected, the peak hour speed drops, and the higher monthly costs, there's a bit of trepidation.
The Liberal / National government has so much to answer for IMO. It truly is a monumental disaster that will negatively impact the economy for decades when we fall further and further behind the rest of the world, or spend many more billions to upgrade to what was going to be built in the first place.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/only-17p...
https://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/17/13230500/gigabit-ne...
I have FTTN and won't pay above that because at peak netflix hours my 25/5 drops to 10/1. If i go higher, I can't break 35/8
The capabilities need the infrastructure in place first so that they can grow to use them, it's impossible for the other way around to occur as you cannot transfer something that requires faster connections before they exist.
Besides, what people pay for and need in October 2017 is probably less than a child starting school will use in 2022 when they hit year 5. This is a national infrastructure project - surely it should be built with the future in mind?
This is without discussing upload speeds - not everyone is a purely downloading user. Viewing a population of civilians as a population of solely consumers seems a common folly.
I recommend the four corners tv show [1] (linked in the original piece), likely the cause of the extra media attention on the NBN lately.
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/whats-wrong-with-the-nbn/9077...
I can only extrapolate my own experience, but perhaps if there was some truth in advertising enforcement. I've had NBN plans elsewhere, and I never chose the top plan, because I'd still be limited by other parts of the internet I was communicating with in practice, and everyone knew the top rate plans quoted speeds are literal nonsense. Why pay extra when you get the same performance on the bottom/mid plan?
Romania has among the fastest Internet speeds mixed with the cheapest cost per mbps, yet consumers there frequently don't choose their fastest options because they can make do with less and save a bit of money.
Per Akamai's Q1 State of the Internet report, Romania doesn't make the top 10 in average mbps. Yet their % of connections above 10mbps is #8, and above 15 mbps is #9. Despite how inexpensive a faster connection is in Romania, people are often choosing not to bother with the fastest options. Despite that, Romania is still much faster than Australia - people there aren't choosing 5mbps options. If you hypothetically give a consumer a choice of a 100mbps connection at $50, and a 50mbps connection at $25, you're going to see a lot of people seek to save some money where they can (which doesn't mean they don't still want very fast Internet in that #2 price slot).
Lowest I know is from UPC which still has some weird 50mbps option but compare that to the biggest ISP, RDS, which has practically made 300mbps the default as you pay the same amount for 100mbps as for 300mbps since a year or so, both for 7$. And by 300mpbs I mean 300mpbs (the remote servers being the bottlenecks while good ones & tests max out).
A lot of things are wrong in Romania but internet is not one of them :) but for those interested, /u/HoliGigi's explanation: https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/2ct58s/average_inter...
From my perspective, they’re blaming the lack of uptake on a symptom of the change they themselves implemented. If they’d left it with fibre I propose many people like myself would pay for the higher tier plan.
Compare to a country with a more sane model (like NZ, the US in places or many Asian countries), and you'll find much higher uptake of fast internet. The Government could fix the NBN to encourage people to take up faster plans if they wanted, but their insistence to not fix any of the barriers makes me conclude they must be doing it intentionally...
It's the biggest trainwreck of an infrastructure project in Australia's history and will set every person and business back for decades, and the blame lies squarely with the Liberal Party.
The current head of the project has gone on record saying that Australians don't want fast internet and wouldn't use it if it was free.
The Liberal party is broadly social-conservative, pro-business.
The Labor party is broadly speaking socially liberal and pro-labour.
There's the Family First Party, who merged with Cory Bernardi's Australian Conservatives. There's also the Christian Democratic Party (Fred Nile).
You a little behind the times. That was true many years ago, in the Fraser years. Now it's "The The Liberal party is the conservative party. There is currently no 'John Stuart Mill' liberal party in Australia".
Our centre-right party is the Liberal party, our centre-left is called Labor.
Look at premises passed when the LNP came into power.
https://www.nbnco.com.au/content/dam/nbnco2/documents/nbn-ro...
Total activated in mid 2014, ~250k. That is completely nuts, you make it sound like this was a steady ship the LNP tipped over.
They were behind on connections its true, but that was largely due to Telstra having to remediate the ducts filled with asbestos which halted large portions of the rollout. Had they continued I expect that the ramp up would have been similar to New Zealand.
It's also not meaningless 5 years into a project that was announced 7 years prior.
Melbourne already had awesome internet, the need was much less there. You can disagree with the decision to rollout to internet-disadvantaged areas if you want, but don't pretend that the conscious decision to do so was bad management when it was actually an attempt at equity (ie: addressing the most needy customers first).
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-29/government-announces-n...
It's a once-in-100 years project to create infrastructure with a lifetime of the same order. It involved replacing nearly 100% of the country's telecommunications infrastructure. 5 years is not particularly long in that context, and trashing it because you can't wait 7 years or even 10 years instead of 5 in exchange for a vastly inferior outcome is just utter stupidity.
So yes, measuring rollout numbers 5 years in is meaningless.
s/some/most/. HFC is the predominant plan for most of the capital cities (I think not... hobart? or was it adelaide?).
Although the original goal was great, in hindsight it appears that it could not be delivered anywhere near the original budget. For context, after a prolonged period of centre-right government, a centre-left government was elected, led by Kevin Rudd. He had a progressive agenda, but due to a combination of his unmitigated egotism and internal party conflicts, he instituted a variety of programs that were poorly conceived and executed, and was ultimately ousted by his own party in a fairly disasterous manner. The National Broadband network was a product of this highly disappointing and dysfunctional period of government. Since then the problems have continued across a change back to the centre-right government, who with a very slim majority have essentially stuffed around for the last few years with a lame duck leader who seems hamstrung by the ultra conservatives in his own party.
For my part, I'm dropping all wires and switching to 4G/LTE, where I can stream 4K content, get decent uploads and still pay less than I would on the National Broadband network.
There was a few major potholes in the original plan. The nobel aim was to wire up (and use satellite to augment) the majority of australia, including, critically a large part of the rural population. The appeal was to level the access for the population to high quality internet. From then on; however, it became a political football, with both parties internal reworking it and bike shedding the entire technology stack with no clue on implementation and a strong lobby from the incumbent privatised telco (Telstra) and other telcos to ensure their business is not threatened.
Bunch of muppets.
If everyone does that you'll be lucky to stream youtube videos at 240p. Wireless bandwidth is inherently shared between everyone, wired is dedicated.
Cable internet is shared. Most of the NBN rollout (HFC) is on ageing cable internet puchased from another vendor.
Under these conditions, LTE is the clear winner. That may change as you point out.
False. NBN FTTP connections use GPON which is a shared connection (https://www.nbnco.com.au/utility/glossary-of-terms.html#g).
once everyone is pushing video levels of data around then it will be miserable.
Best I can find is prohibitively expensive, especially if I wan't to stream 4K content...
If you need lots of data though, the cost becomes less viable.
When I was investigating this stuff six months ago, I believe these plans were somewhat different (and indeed the Critical Information Summaries for them seem to have dates of May and July), with only the first month being cheaper or having as much data or something. (That the month-to-month one still uses the wording “$70 for the first month” on the marketing page makes me uneasy, but I don’t think there’s a catch, I think it’s merely outdated wording.)
I shall consider switching from amaysim to Optus.
Actually it's a completely separate network to Optus' 4G network. Optus bought them several years ago.
It's also highly throttled and utterly shite for most users. I was one.
I'm in central Sydney and normally average around 10mbps down
> Whilst the Vividwireless service uses the Optus 4G Plus network, it is designed to be used in the home and its data speeds are different to mobile and mobile broadband speeds on the Optus 4G Plus network. In metropolitan areas where you connect to 2300 MHz coverage at your nominated address, download and upload speeds of up to 12/1Mbps are available.
And the cheaper 200GB plan CIS (https://static.vividwireless.com.au/online/Wireless-Broadban...) adds,
> Otherwise in other compatible coverage areas, download and upload speeds of up to 5/1Mbps are available.
So, 12/1 or 5/1 rather than 23/12 or 45/15 as I tend to get out in the country on the same network.
Yes, hiding this information in there is misleading, because people aren’t generally aware of what the different frequency bands and relevant 4G technologies (TDD/FDD) mean and think that “4G” is just one thing.
I used this for work and the kids shared the 4MBps DSL.
For me, living by myself and working from home most days, it’s substantially better than ADSL2+, as it’s faster, more reliable, doesn’t lock me into any contract, allows me to use my internet supply from other places as well, all for the same price as ADSL2+ (which is admittedly generally $10–20 per month dearer in the country for a given service level, and at this price point would include 100GB instead of my 50GB, but I simply don’t need that).
This arrangement works well for me.
For reference, Stawell has a population of 6,000 while Ararat is about 8,000. The towns are approx 30 minutes drive distance away. The world is smaller than I thought.
In Ararat it’s almost better to go with 4G. While you get decent caps (1000G/m for AUD$90) the problem is that the internet drops out every time it rains.
I can’t imagine running a business that requires internet access in regional Australia, good on you for finding a way!
Your 1TB/$90 and rain dropout refers to ADSL2+, does it not? I haven’t noticed any problems with rain and haven’t seen any caps anywhere near that high on 4G.
Well, now I’m buying in Navarre, which isn’t covered by NBN at this stage (hence it wasn’t in my initial dragnet) but does have an Optus 4G tower, and thus great internet supply.
Gee, I can't wait...
People seem to be forgetting about Abbott, who in my opinion did indeed fuck around with rubbish policy his entire term (helped into the grave by treasurer/idiot Joe Hockey).
The problem with Turnbull appears to be that either:
1) He has to balance his rather more radically right wing members of his party while keeping his further centre members happy else he loses his position. (Many peoples explanation).
or
2) He has significantly changed his opinions and position on many issues over the last 5 years.
And this is a problem because people cant really tell which it is.
Turnbull hasn't really changed many of the policies of his predecessor, he just wraps it up nicer and in a more statesman like fashion.
He was previously a more moderate right wing (by australian standards) but has since gone significantly more right wing.
Im not going into specifics because I don't want to go beyond the realms of the overall topic and end up talking about Gonski or something, but thats my take on why people are a bit bemused by Turnbull and not particularly forgiving despite his inheritance.
I believe proposition (1), there being more evidence that supports this view and more rhetoric that supports (2).
If he were elected with a significant majority of both houses, and the party returned to a more centrist state, such that he didn't need to appease the more Right-wing faction of his party in the same way, would he not still be the perfect PM many of us thought he might be?
An aside -> his election strategy was mostly: (1) use data to find popular buzz-words ("JOBS", "GROWTH", "INNOVATION"); (2) repeat those ad infinitum; (3) shy away from any compelling political narrative or vision for the future of the country (e.g. "MAGA" narrative); (4) ???; (5) Lose House seats to Shorten and Senate seats to Pauline et al.
(1) The NBN falls under the portfolio, and the government knew they would have to deal with controlling the ever increasing costs of the program, which were hugely underestimated by Labour, and (2) The person in the role of Communications minister would take the blame for the public realisation that the costs were going out of control and had to be cut. (3) Any cut would result in a poorer NBN, because that's what cutting costs when you're building any product/service does.
So he was essentially handed that flaming pile of dog shit by Abbott, probably to lower the chance that Turnbull would ever be able to wrestle back power.
Turnbull's solution was to get the private sector to pay for a part of the network (FTTN instead of FTTH). So, costs would be managed, the 2020 target was still reachable, and it leaves the NBN open to improve the network to FTTH later on.
What could Turnbull have done better?
The bigger problem of the NBN is its business model, which charges Telcos for bandwidth on a total downloads basis rather than on a % use basis. This is what causes the poor service of the NBN. This could have been dealt with by Rudd, by using a different model for the NBN, as discussed above, but Turnbull couldn't do anything about that.
He has a slightly better grasp on some areas of technology than the average person perhaps, but certainly no more than the absolute bare minimum any communications minister should be required to have.
No, you don't.
NBN is built using your tax money
NBN will be maintained using your future tax money
NBN is protected by laws from any potential competition from the private sector, those laws are passed using your names.
What makes you think that? It's on the public record that NBN Co were fairly well on-budget (after they'd upped the peak funding from $39bn to $44.1bn a few years earlier) up until to the 2013 election.
Of course, the media preached it was over budget, so that's what most people think, and Malcolm Turnbull was so suspicious that he commissioned a forensic review into their financials - which was very quietly released when it found "no material issues". There was also some evidence of the incoming NBN management choosing to keep quiet and shut down a cost reduction program that had successfully found efficiency gains and cost improvements ('Project Fox' which was leaked to the media).
All major fibre rollouts have tended to show that costs reduce over time - Chorus in NZ reported a 44% reduction in per-premises cost over their rollout so far, and Openreach in the UK have reported a 50% reduction from when they started.
Coupled with the fact that the Coalition's plan blew out by $15 billion, I think it would have actually been better to continue with the original plan and try to fix the problems. What they ended up doing was to not fix any of the existing problems, and try to 'fix' the things that were good about the NBN (the technology)...
This isn't counting that any upgrade to FTTN (which will be required in less than 10 years) would cost tens of billions of dollars more, or the much higher running cost of FTTN. In the end, the LNP really picked a dud and absolutely screwed up something that could have been fixed.
Also, there are other reasons why the Chorus costs are coming down, that don't apply here:
https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/10/nbn-co-comparisons-with-nz...
Second common mistake: The argument which led to the MTM replacing FTTP was not about technology. It was about the cost of capital works, and the economic model of recovery. Labor was stupid enough to float a mixed-economy pluralist argument hinting at a future independent non-utility model with zero cost (long term) to the government. This hung them because it allowed the Liberals to go hard on cost recovery and privatization. If the intent had been to reserve a national utility function in layers 1 and 2, and promote competition above this, we'd be in a different conversation.
That conversation was about structural separation of the former monopoly Telco. It was quashed by Labor, in a stupid reactive move. It was floated, and the banking sector indicated a preference. Reactively the union movement and Labor party moved to reject it: if the banks wanted it, it must be bad.
Talk about a huge missed opportunity.
The NZ model, by comparison is gold: structural separation. Crown holdings for the fiber. A pot of money, re-circulating to deploy to the cities, each region re-fills the pot to move to the next town. Far simpler. And.. fibre to (most) homes.
Other comments are blaming the Liberals, but the reality is if you are an effective leader trying to create a huge infrastructure project that you care deeply about, you need to come up with a solution that will last through a change in government, with aligned economic and political contingencies. If you are just governing for fun then you do what Rudd did. It always lets you blame the next government though, as he is doing now.
Since the mid-90s the government has imposed many regulations for control that has impeded much of the free market progress for network infrastructure. Those regulations coupled with needed external transit installations have not helped. For a long period of time the government would pick and choose companies based on their ideals rather than their talent. This has hindered progress from both sides of the fence by liberal and conservative administrations.
I ran a semi successful ISP and consulting company for a decade in the US and I have always enjoyed the tiering system we setup vs other country Infrastructures. It wasn't until recently when the FCC gained control that states started to use the new regulation power to hinder progress. I am still on the fence about the whole thing because the exploitation has not been bad in my area but the horror stores I have heard in other states make me sad. Hopefully it will get back to normal.
Perfectly rightfully.
> if you are an effective leader trying to create a huge infrastructure project that you care deeply about, you need to come up with a solution that will last through a change in government, with aligned economic and political contingencies.
On the other hand, the opposition can either try to work with or lie your ass off and sabotage everything, the latter being exactly what the liberals did with the NBN.
It's no secret that our political systems have problems, with this sort of thing. Factionalism, corporate interests and other monority special interest, continuity.
Sometimes policies have a chance of being coherent, usually through a small group of "authors" that have a clear idea of what they want to do. This is generally when a governing party gives free reign to some internal group.
The other option is bipartisan commitees & a "wide consulatation approach". This is how the vast majority of australian laws get made. There's an alarm-like flashing oof lights (red or green) in parliament when an attempt is made to do things otherwise (a split).
Anyways, the standard process means compromise. Specifically, comromise between all "relevant" participants. The two big parties, obviously. Several interested factions within those parties, and various corporate interests usually represented by specific industry chambers of commerce or similar. Everyone needs to get something.
Coherence and compromise just don't go together, not when it comes to policy/legislation.
Look at the americans. They've been fiddling with health policy for a decade. As far as I can tell, the more attention the issue gets, the worse it gets.
Anyway, apart from being "pro-internet" labour never really had a solid agenda. The parliamentary end of this sausage factory was basically "the internet is important!!" vs "why spend 100bn on streaming cat vids!?). The hyenas and crows did the rest.
For example, a flaw I had with the NZ rollout: it was deployed to citizens before businesses. It feels kind of sad as a business owner when your business remains on VDSL while the suburbs are getting fibre (although lovely to get Netflix at home on fibre!).
I remember reading years ago about interesting research being done to use photonic-bandgap rims to make fibers that would allow propagation approaching vacuum speed [2], and if deployed eventually that could drop latency by another 40-60ms. But at least back then there seemed to be enough loss (3.5 dB/km) that it'd be impractical over long distances without excessive boosters, even ignoring any cost/durability issues of the fiber itself. That may have been improved in the last 4 years though, but I'm not sure if it ever did make it to market (or if there are even plans still in progress for it, raw throughput was impressive too FWIW).
At any rate: the NZ ISPs seem to be offering pretty solid service on that front even internationally, at least in terms of pure latency. If there is increasing congestion or other issues those are just matters of capex, and between the ISP's servers and premise links there might be more lag being added in. But I don't see any glaring core inefficiencies there in terms of the international link part, unless I'm missing something entirely. Looks a lot better then I'd have expected taking a guess based on how it was a decade ago.
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1: https://truenet.nz/international-latency
2: "Towards high-capacity fibre-optic communications at the speed of light in vacuum": https://www.nature.com/articles/nphoton.2013.45 (DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2013.45)
However, I feel like `pacman -Syu` should be faster. I don't mind the latency, but the throughput should be better right? I only get 1-2 Mbyte/s average using US servers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Cross_Cable
It's interesting to note that the compromises made with UFB would not fly in the U.S. Liberals would kill it as a handout to rich people ("if you can't afford to feed your family by the end of the month, you can't afford $75 a month for the broadband service")[1] and conservatives would kill it because it's not available more than 50 km from an urban area.
[1] http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140219/TECHNOLOGY/140...
Vodafone currently offer 200Mbps unlimited data fibre (don't know what the upload speed is) for $110/month, and unlimited speed (up to 900Mbps, depending on location) for $120/month, and deduct $10/month if you go on a contract.
It's only in the last couple years that you can get unlimited data at a reasonable price here.
A large fraction of the cost of bandwidth in NZ is international transit, because there's only one significant undersea cable connecting NZ, the Southern Cross Cable. I couldn't find current prices, but in 2013 it cost about US$0.10/GB to go through that cable [1]
[1] http://www.strategies.nzl.com/wpapers/2013011.htm
Only after A LOT of pain. Broadband uptake was pathetic in NZ until Telecom, formed out of the NZ Post Office and sold to overseas buyers in 1990, was split up into retail (Spark) and infrastructure (Chorus) ten years ago. It's smooth sailing now, but it could have been so much easier.
One of those is really early for any internet, and the other 17 years later, is really late!
For years Telecom managed to get away with doing nothing other than charging exorbitant fees. It's just a coincidence the decision to unbundle came immediately after these comments in 2006:
> What has every telco in the world done in the past? It's used confusion as its chief marketing tool ... customers know that's what the game has been. They know we're not being straight up.
– Teresa Gattung, Telecom CEO
That is when Chorus was finally 100% separated from telecom.
From 2006-2011, Chorus were inducing congestion in the ADSL backhaul to put non-telecom ISPs (particularly ISPs with all the high-bandwidth power-users) at a disadvantage. An ISP could buy unlimited bandwidth to the outside world, and give each customer ADSL 2+ connections of upto 24Mbit, but the backhaul between Chorus and the ISP to terminate all those ADSL connections was rate-limited to roughly 64kbps times the number of connections that ISP had.
If all an ISPs customers went online at the same time and started downloading, everyone's throughput would drop to 64kbps.
And Chorus would absolutely refuse to sell any extra backhaul bandwidth.
It was in the best interest for all ISPs to have a healthy base of non-skilled users who barely used their ADSL connections, just so the rest of their users wouldn't get too congested. It was also around this time ISPs implemented various perks to encourage power-users to only download at night time.
This all stopped in 2011, and the bandwidth caps that all ISPs were offering suddenly shot up.
I don't know what the acronym USO means. But I do know that the expensive locations are politically important because there is pressure for the government to build various things out in just those locations. They political lobbying arises precisely because those locations are so expensive that the locals wouldn't pay for it themselves.
https://www.acma.gov.au/Industry/Telco/Carriers-and-service-...
They couldn't, though, without a lot more difficulty.
You're missing the context that at the time of Rudd's election and the NBN design/build plan, Telstra was actively hostile towards the government. Solomon Trujillo was the CEO at the time, and actively fought against any suggestion that Telstra might be structurally separated (a-la Telecom NZ's split into Chorus and Spark), or be required to build a nationwide wholesale fibre network.
Telstra under Trujillo was the company that famously gave a last minute 13-page (non-compliant) response[1] to a call for bids to build the NBN, that was effectively a giant middle finger to the government.
Forcing a structural separation when the government own a minority stake in the company[2] would've required either re-purchasing it at market rates, or some kind of legislative change, and thus opening the government up to a shareholder lawsuit. At the time, the CAN and Fibre back-haul networks were considered some of Telstra's greatest assets, those would've been some major purchases.
There were a bunch of bad options, but having been backed into this corner by previous government decisions - there wasn't a whole lot they could've done.
[1] https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/270911/telstra_bann...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstra#Privatisation
I do agree with the rest of your comment though.
The problem was created by the Libs in 1997, when they privatised a government monopoly, Telstra. Telstra promptly morphed into natural shape of private monopolies everywhere: a bloody great rent seeker, beholden to no one. They sat on the existing copper network assets, milking them for all their were worth and showing not the slightest interest investing to upgrade the asset when new technologies arrived. (The contrast with their actions in the mobile sector, where they didn't have a monopoly could not be more stark. We have a world class mobile network, and were the first to phase out 2G.)
10 years later, the prime minster who created this mess was still in power. It was only 10 years later, but by then it was obvious even to him something had to be done because we had this headline: “Australian Prime Minister John Howard on Monday announced a 2.0 billion dollar (1.68 billion US) plan to provide fast and affordable Internet access across the vast country”. http://www.smh.com.au/news/Technology/n/2007/06/18/118201899... Notice this was several years before Rudd "had" the same idea.
Turned out 1.68 billion was a bit of an underestimate, so it went nowhere. We've are now spending 20 times that amount to extract ourselves from the mess he created. I do hope the $14B they earned from the sale of Telstra (which is several times less than the cost of the fix) was worth it at the time.
https://youtu.be/haImi4cWau0 (2017)
https://youtu.be/nJxQZr4dz3g (2014)
Party A was in power, and having infighting problems. Party B was headed by an absolute arse of a man, who used the tactic "Say No! to EVERYTHING". Didn't matter how benign or banal, the opposition party would say no. A flagship policy like the NBN was particularly focused on - and if you look at interviews with the opposition communications minister at the time (now our prime minister), it was clear that he was toeing the party line and didn't think changing the policy was a good idea.
Fast-forward to the next exection, and Absolute Arse gets into power. Turns out he can't govern at all (despite 20 years on the front benches) and he definitely isn't going to backtrack on something he's attacked so routinely. He's kicked out by his own party. At this stage, the NBN has been gutted, and its doom is sealed.
In steps the comms minister as the new PM, but he is now beset by factionalism. He knows what a turkey the NBN is, but he doesn't have the political power to do an about-face on his party's policies.
In short, we're fucked. By the time any other party can get in, the NBN will be 'mostly complete'. The most annoying thing is that the folks who really need good internet is business, not residences (think graphic design, medical imagery, etc), and the party that fucked the NBN is the 'party of business'. Enterprises can already dictate their own network backbones, but small-to-medium businesses cannot.
Before that election, I can remember having an argument about the need for the NBN with a friend who works for a very large company. He argued that the internet in Australia was fine because their teleconferencing video in the boardroom worked well. I told him that not only would they have had a very specialised connection, that in the very near future, households would see multiple, concurrent, hi-res video streams, and that business demands would be high too.
We're a home of four. It's not uncommon for the kids to be streaming Netflix while I work (with a basketball stream running), and my wife uploads large photos and streams a TV show on her phone while she works. We're still a year away from getting NBN and our internet absolutely crawls.
We are also lucky enough to have a local business (Launtel) pushing the constraints of the NBN by offering Gigabit at prices that aren't unreasonable ($14.50/day). They are treating it as a new pricing model, why bill the same as ADSL when there are no costs associated with setup and plan changes? They are billing daily which allows more flexibility meaning you could spin up a connection for a day (At an Airbnb for example) or change speed depending on your usage.
This is all in beta for them at the moment and only available in Tasmania. Here is a speedtest I ran yesterday from my home FTTP connection https://www.speedtest.net/result/6738001151.png
The Tasmanian Government is actually offering grants to incubators at the moment http://www.startuptasmania.com/incubator-support
I think the only way I could ever be happy with how the NBN story finishes if if Turnbull and Abbott serve gaol time for deliberately acting against the best interests of Australia and its people.
$14.50/day = $450/mo. That sounds unreasonable to me.
How would pulling copper make it any better? It surely couldn't make it cheaper and at the same time would only use an inferior technology. Why would anyone pulling a new network today use anything but fiber optics?
They cannot change because it would cost him his job.
Why do you say this?
I would qualify my original statement with 'as part of a NBN-like project'. I didn't intend to suggest that not every home should have fibre, or in deed will have fibre at some point in the future, just not at the tax payer's expense.
In reality Britain simply lacks serious termites (and is in general underequipped in terms of dangerous animals, if you use Australia as a baseline).
I think this article buries the sins of the Liberal party (though the whole problem cannot be laid at their feet). I still have hope she'll be right in the end.
If you can find a unit with TPG FTTN go with that. It will be cheaper and uncongested.
Moved back to Shanghai in 2017, was really happy about the fact that CCP didn't play the same game, they deliver concrete results. 500Mbps fiber costs me $450/year, with an extra $20/year, I can screw the GFW - streaming 4k from youtube is easy and I am watching it now.
I really like the fact that there was no general election topic or endless + meaningless debate on whether such a fiber network is good or not, CCP just deliver what they believe is good and take responsibility from there. Life is short, how many 10 years you have to waste on craps like that?
It is also worth pointing out that in Chinese definition, wasteful spending on tax money is serious corruption, you'd be seeing trucks load of CCP officials sent into jail should they dare to spend $49b without delivering the network on time.
Well, I'm pretty sure 50th place today is a lot better than 30th back then still. They might not have the best internet around, but it probably got better for the users in that timespan. It smells to me like typical misused statistics in search of click-earning controversy.
Stockholm, in comparison, followed a very different model: https://www.stokab.se/Documents/Stockholms%20Stokab%20-%20A%.... A city owned company was created. No public money was contributed; the network was financed by the utility taking loans. The government imposed no coverage requirement. Service was expanded based on demonstrated demand, and it took 17 years to cover 90% of the city. The utility started turning an overall profit in 2008, after 13 years of operation. The Stockholm system is expensive--customers are charged a set-up fee to recoup construction costs, and although prices must be transparent, they are not rate-regulated. NBN Co., in contrast, is subject to rate regulation and does not recover construction costs as part of a setup fee.
Broadly speaking, there are three lessons to take from this:
1) Urban areas and rural areas should not be part of the same program. "Universal service" sounds nice in theory, but in practice the challenges of deploying in rural areas can torpedo the project. In Sweden, the government did help deploy fiber in rural areas: http://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/Opinions/2013/Rural_FTTH.... Sweden required dark fiber to be deployed to within a few kilometers of rural areas, but rural residents had to pay for their own hookups. The government subsidized 50% of the cost of those hookups, up to about $600 USD per property.
2) Coverage requirements are a bad idea. When you force the operator to cover areas where the business case doesn't yet exist, you're forcing them to charge their existing customers more to subsidize new customers. That can make the product too expensive for existing customers.
3) It's okay for fiber to be expensive, at least at first. Charging more to early adopters to recoup large fixed costs is a basic business model in the tech industry. Telia in Sweden charges about $120/month for gigabit, and in many cases customers are liable for construction setup costs. That's okay--it allows the operator to quickly recoup construction costs and use ongoing revenues to expand the network. Sweden does not regulate rates to make fiber affordable for poor people, nor does it force fiber operators to subsidize service themselves.