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Australia To Build Fiber-To-the-Premises Network
candiman writes "The Australian PM, Kevin Rudd, has just announced that none of the private sector submissions to build a National Broadband Network was up to the standard, so instead the government is going to form a private company to build a fiber to the premises network. The network will connect to 90% of premises delivering 100Mb/s. The remaining 10% will be reached with wireless and satellite delivering up to 12Mb/s. The network cost has been estimated at 43 billion AU dollars over 8 years of construction — and is expected to employ 47,000 people at peak. It will be wholesale only and completely open access. As an Australian who voted for the other guys, all I can say is, wow."
8 Years?! Oh god won't someone please think of the pornography?!
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
Australia is a censor black hole. If anything this is a trick to install filtering equipment everywhere.
Wow, a fibre-to-the-home network by the same Government that wants to filter the internet out of existence.
90% of premises already HAVE access to high-speed internet in the form of ADSL2+ or cable. And these are the same premises which are going to get upgraded while those with only low-speed DSL and dialup are going to be ignored again. Rage.
And I am, I'd label this an attempt by Senator Conroy to backdoor his internet filtering into existence by tacking it onto a massive government controlled network. Also, being Australia, we'll likely have to pay $100/month for access and be limited to 20GB of data traffic (both up and downstream) per month.
I just hope they're not flushing money down the toilet clockwise.
They have the opportunity to do things right. The smart answer on this is for the feds to build a MINIMAL monopoly. Basically build out a fiber (or wireless) from a block-level, or even subdivision level green box to the end point. After that, allow the private enterprise to connect to the boxes and then provide various services. If they do that, they would see prices drop QUICKLY.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The best part about this story is politicians who are opposed to it.
One of the arguments was (I'm not kidding, I heard it on ABC Radio at lunchtime): " 100 'megabytes'!!! To the home!!! Who will ever need that. Kevin Rudd thinks its the year 2050. What a waste of money".
Wait ... what. 2050 until we'll need 100Mbit to the home? Really? Didn't people stop creating arbitrary future usage figures ever since Bill Gates said '640k will be enough'?
Thank God! Today the whole of Telstra's Northern Territory network (think - Darwin) died (17,000 voice lines, 33,000 data services etc... and it didn't hit the news??!!
But of course, everyone forgets that Telstra use to be known as "TELECOM" - and who owned/ran Telecom??
The australian government....
Anything to get better bandwidth here has got to be good!
It sounds great in theory, and I applaud the thought, but the cynic in me says "I'll believe it when I'm connected to it".
They give away $900 to everyone in the country. Decide to spend $43Billion on providing broadband Net access to everyone. Will spend $x to try and censor it. Does this not feel somewhat like misuse of taxpayer dollars? Surely there's a better solution.
took the Federal money that was to be used for fiber to the home, and used it for other things instead.
Now, they are complaining about Cable monopolies and the cost of taking fiber to the home, in order to combat cable.
Boo hoo. We have lots to complain about, with these cable companies. But the telcos are as guilty for creating the status quo as anyone else.
Too bad Australia needs a bigger pipe to the rest of the world first before this will be a decent benefit.
The troll with karma.
This sounds almost like the right direction, but the devil may be in the details. A private company that the government will later sell will end up with monopoly control over the last mile of everyone's internet connection. Whoever ends up owning this network will want to maximise profits and recoup the cost of their investment. This still has the potential to end up horribly wrong.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Not cynical enough good sir. The next Liberal government will just privatise the entire network just like they did to every other bit of government infrastructure to raise enough cash to give themselves a pay rise.
Actually, according to the Whirlpool homepage story they are already planning it's ultimate sale (in the not too distant future)
Ever stop to think
The other 10% will get satellite or wireless support, at 12 Mbps. It's still a big improvement for many.
Fact is, it's a big country, and running FTTH to every cattle station out in woop-woop is just silly. Can't please everyone.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Soon, people down under will be able to hit their download caps in a matter of minutes! Yay progress!!!!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
So Telstra got kicked out of the previous attempt, so they lean on a few of their mates in government and sure enough the old plan is scrapped and a new one is started.
Only the new plan is completely taxpayer-funded, subject to no open tendering process, and managed by some demonic clique of Aussie politicians.
Plus, Conroy can give up on his plan to make the commercial ISP's filter content when he can just wedge his filtering plans into this (and any vote becomes 'have nothing or have a filtered feed'). and once it's in it's a simple step to force all ISP's to use the govt's filtered backbone ('the only people using commercial ISP feeds are perverts and pedophiles and we need to stop them from doing that').
I don't know whether I'm too cynical, or not cynical enough.
But there's one last hope that this might actually be done right. I hope all the campaigning that went on to shut Conroy's first attempt down will work and we'll actually get it right.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Why bother? Did I miss the memo where Gigabit Ethernet was uninvented? For 8 years effort and billions of dollars I want fiber to my gigabit ethernet card, sheesh.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Voted for that Bush-toadie Howard (remeber how proud he was when W called him a deputy sheriff) and his slack-jawed lackeys? Guess it goes to show that you don't have to be smart to be a nerd.
President Obama should be looking over the shoulder of this guy and try to learn a thing or two.
I think that it is great to see a Government deciding to create an entity that delivers only "naked", "wholesale" service and then requires other entities to sell it. It opens the door in a serious way to everyone that wants to be an Internet provider or whatever.
What's really attractive about this press release is that it apperas the Government is willing to change the legislation if the incumbent telco (Telstra) attempts to use the courts to delay the deployment of the project - which of course threatens their copper network. he he.
There are soooo many things right about this... it just makes me wish I was living there when it is available!
... heard one of them? No, seriously, everyone get excited about THIS promise by a politician, all the other ones weren't about mega-fast pornband, sorry, i mean broadband.
This is the Australian equivalent of voting for Bush, so judge accordingly.
build out a fiber (or wireless) from a block-level, or even subdivision level green box to the end point. After that, allow the private enterprise to connect to the boxes and then provide various services.
Building out the last mile but not the backhaul would still entail spending 96% of the money, and wouldn't leave you with a working network. This way, the whole thing is out of the control of Telstra, so that access can be sold wholesale without any conflicts of interest. ISPs will still get to compete on price (even small ones), and the bigger ones could still replace the backhaul segment with their own connection if they felt it gave them a competitive advantage.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Do you live within 100m of an exchange?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Better hope that you have no more than 4 customers on your node, and that they think "torrents" are what you see in Fargo streets.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
All I can say is, wow!?
Someone should tell them that fibre to the premises doesn't mean sheep's wool. That'll piss on their barbie.
none of the private sector submissions to build a National Broadband Network was up to the standard,
Living in Australia at the moment, this phrase doesn't surprise me in the least. The best thing you can say about Telstra is. "Their incompetence is the only thing saving us from their evil.". Right now I'm paying $70 AUD for ADSL2 with a 150GB. There's no fuzziness on what's permissible use either; they do provide 150GB... Telstra on the other hand, for $80 gives 12GB at 1.5Mbit, $100 if you want ADSL2, $160 if you want 60GB. What's worse is that my company rents lines from Telstra, so you'd think they could be AT LEAST as good as their competitors.
How do you kill that which has no life?
How on earth do you expect them to keep track of you without sufficient bandwidth?
Deleted
This seems to me to be not just about getting better internet connections, but about ending Telstra's monopoly on wired communications.
At the moment, Telstra has a monopoly on the phone network due to their control over the copper lines, but as a company that's about the only thing it's got going for it. They sell access to the network both as a wholesaler and retailer. This new broadband network proposal won't be controlled by Telstra, so once users have an attractive high bandwidth alternative Telstra's business model might be in trouble.
The Aussies spend all that money to install high-capacity bandwidth, then they choke it off by slapping on content filtering.
100Mb/s isn't that fast once you factor in the drop in speed caused by the govt porn filter.
Call me a cynic but are we really going to be better off? Initially the network will be govt owned and prices regulated but then no doubt in ~10 years time it will be sold off and we will have a private company wholesaling broadband. That private company have a monopoly on the wholesaling market and we will end up paying a fortune.
Oh, that's right THE CUSTOMER DOES. This is the taxpayer paying off the taxpayers debt. The only way this is worthwhile is if it leads to an increase in production. Otherwise it is just bread and HD porn for the masses.
It isn't like I don't want high speed internet, but with some states nearly going broke and having trouble keeping the health system running, this is a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Both major parties have had plans and trials to filter the internet since before DSL and cable were available, still hasn't happened. The reason for this is that we have occasionally have independent senators who's votes need to be bought. It's sort of like 1984's continous war except it's aim is to keep censorship nuts running in circles.
Labor promised that a clean feed would be available to every connection a child could access, nowhere have they stated that their policy is a mandatory filter for everyone. It was and is a hollow promise since the previous government has already set up such a voluntary filter after a similar trial that included mandatory filters and an independent senator with a censorship platform.
In other words it's same political theater we Aussies have been watching for over a decade.
We don't have free speech enshrined in the constitution but our governments are theoretically bound by article 19 of the UN declaration on human rights. I say theoretically because there have been some specific instances of censorship over the last decade. One related to a senator's "right to die" website, the other to an Islamic fundementalist book in a university library. Kiddie porn is evidence of a crime and I have no problems with authorities following the trail to the perps and subsequently dismantling their distribution networks using due process.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's completely impossible to follow this discussion. Are you people talking about Mb/s, mb/s, mB/s, MB/s, mb/ps, Mb/ps, MB/ps, mB/ps, mb/Ps, Mb/Ps, MB/Ps, mB/Ps or one of the other combinations I've forgotten about?
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
I couldn't possibly care less.
We've got a global financial crises on our hands, we've got a water shortage in Melbourne, we're relying on non self sustaining fuels and all we can spend our money on is a 900$ handout to a tonne of taxpayers who will promptly donate the money to Sony, Microsoft, Apple, Panasonic, Samsung, Dolce and Gabana, Reebok, Nike or a plethora of other companies or we'll drop a tonne of coin on fibre internet.
Really?
I've got 15mbit now with ADSL2, I am happy with this, infact considering copper lines have been layed for years and are still maintained let's look at some ADSL 3 action and how about we look at somehow increasing our average download caps which seem to be between 5 and 50gb.
I want cleaner air, I want solar, wind and wave electricity, I want money put into Australian business's which will produce products internationally, I want to see poor bastard farmers looked after who have been doing it extremely tough for 10 years.
All this and I'm a selfish as hell geek!
Don't get me wrong I'd love fibre to my house but is this really a priority? 43billion isn't chump change, we only have a population of 20million, let's piss it away on something more important than people needing more bandwidth to update their twitter pages.
Oh and I guess at 31 I've finally reached enlightenment with government PR and the media, the first thing I thought to myself when I heard of this is, I'll believe it when I see it.
Is it just me, or is this quite a clever way to spend money in a recession?
Building dams and bridges is no longer work that requires thousands of relatively unskilled labourers (compared to skilled tradespeople).
You need a plan that's going to take a long time to complete, and employ a lot of people who have become recently unemployed from sectors like mining. So what do you do? Propose to dig a trench to every single house in Australia!
Brilliant!
"As an Australian who voted for the other guys, all I can say is, wow."
You expected more infrastructure building from the Liberal party? Which planet do you live on?
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
As an Aussie living in London, whenever I go back to Aus I cannot believe how slow everything is even, at places with fast local speeds. The government needs to spend more money on the intercontinental pipes before they do this!
We have fibre within our subdivision. The pricing is not competitive because the ISP has a monopoly on the fibre. The only way to get around them is via wireless. Yes, wireless is competitive. The plans push you towards the higher speed if you want a bigger cap. Lower speeds (around 1 MBs) have tiny caps. Higher speeds have higher caps with correspondingly higher prices. So don't count on the private enterprise people to give you a good deal if there's no competition.
great, now we can catch up with the rest of the world... in another 8 years time.
FTTH is in operation in many parts of the world, including developing countries. I think 100Mbps in a decade is an anti-climax.
See Wiki's 'Fiber to the premises by country'
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises_by_country
There are 21,262,641 people in Australia. Forty-three billion is 2,022 Australian dollars for every man, woman, and child in the country. It's difficult to believe that the government could spend that much money, particularly since I understand that Australia does not have sufficiently fast internet connections with the rest of the world.
Read the Australian government announcement.
LOL: "... if you're in Tasmania (and who isn't?)"
If the Aussie gov't in the guise of a private company is providing the fibre won't that make it very very easy (least from an ownership point of view) to implement their idea of a internet blacklist (leaving aside the technological issues)...?
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
could explain to me why we already have 2 cable networks that could be running at 100mbps already (telstra cable at my place is a bit over 30 atm) and theres never been much if any willingess by anyone to expand the network over the last 10 years or so?
I understand the old "oh but its shared" argument to the technology but arent all broadband infrastructures shared at some point? Is the performance that detrimental compared to others or is it an old wives tale?
I'm just curious what would be the cons of just expanding the already existing cable network that has two revenue streams already up and running (tv and internet)? As far as i know Telstra have already said their cable network will be running at 100mbps in Victoria this year with the other states to follow.
Wouldnt it make more sense, be cheaper (and i admit less "future proof") to encourage not only people onto cable for the speed but ontop i think they'd be more enclined to take up pay tv as well if they were bundled in some way also with some sort of voip service (i remember the trial of this like 5 years ago and then heard nothing more of it) so you get everything on the one cable at the same time, i'm kinda puzzled as to why this has never happened?
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has announced that the Australian government will build a new $43 billion national broadband network, connecting 90% of homes to 100-megabit fibre internet. "We believe that fast broadband is absolutely essential for our nation's future", he said.
"Telstra has raised issues with the amount of bandwidth usage this will produce, but our Great Firewall of Australia Internet filtering project should keep usage down to reasonable levels at near-dialup speeds."
The Great Firewall will reliably block all illegal material, child pornography, terrorism and unhappy thoughts on the network.
"Not only are the contents of the list illegal," said Senator Stephen Conroy, " but revealing the list is also illegal, as is linking to someone linking to someone purporting to reveal the list. So blocking Google Search is required. This will also help keep usage down to an acceptable level."
Calling it, the "single largest infrastructure decision in Australia's history," Mr Rudd said the project would employ up to 37,000 people a year scanning citizens' net access, reading their email and correcting spelling errors in their football forum posts.
A consultative process will occur to determine the regulatory framework for the network. "We're considering getting Senator Fielding to do it personally," said Senator Conroy, "since he's the dickhead who demanded the censorship in return for his vote. Hopefully it'll melt his brain. Bloody balance of power. At least Nick Xenophon's bloody sane."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
will route through the security organs of the State, packet by packet.
Aha! Someone who can actually see the trees in the forest. Well done!
This infrastructure building (and there's more in the pipeline), will benefit everyone.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
How much is that per household? According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there are 4.3M households that have broadband presently. This is 52% of all about 8.3M households. Now $43B / 8.3M is about $5200 per household. I wonder who is going to pay for this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i think the caps are for overseas traffic and they do have cap free zones there.
As an Australian who voted for the other guys, all I can say is, wow."
Grail Knight: He chose....poorly
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
the huge ones people are always talking about 'dropping as needed'
why the hell isn't there a mother large cache (squidlike) server just before each one of those 3 pipes.
even if it only kept the last 5 minutes of requests- for a NATIONAL sized pool of http requests, there have to be tons or redundant requests in any given 5 minutes. Even just the readership of websites like this one or the NY times...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Many ISPs already run transparent proxy servers for their own networks, I'd say this would continue, and be more important with ever faster connection speeds. (International capacity not keeping up. Even peering points like PIPE will have issues with 10 pairs of users able to max out two ISPs gigabit connections (at least in theory) and a lot of other infrastructure will need to be re-thunk)
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
"expected to employ 47,000 people at peak. It will be wholesale only and completely open access"
Well this is exactly how network infrastructure should be done. Provides jobs (economic stimulus) to provide a long-term benefit to the country as a whole, and it won't compete for customer sales because it's wholesale only, hence no unfair competition from the network owner.
I'm just surprised it's the Australians that are doing it. Maybe there will be deep packet inspection systems throughout in case you happen to see a picture of a woman's ankle, or exceed more than 1GB of traffic within a single year...
My parents live 40 minutes from the centre of Canberra (the capital city of Oz) and they can't even get basic broadband. How about the Oz govt does something about getting broadband to all instead?
pornband, sorry, i mean broadband.
Contraband?
Fiber optic is upgradeable cables that give a speed of 100mbs now maybe able give speeds of 10 times that in the future.
http://www.cablesondemand.com/InfoID/331/RedirectPath/Add1/FolderID/669/InfoGroup/Main/InfoType/Article/PageVars/Library/InfoManage/Zoom.htm
My hope is that this will really mean fiber to home. With a fiber optic port in every house.
Kevin Rudd you may be a penny pinching, potty mouthed, god fearing politician but you may have done something right.
Bottom line, the region that can demonstrate the most capacity in moving and handling data efficiently and securely is going to draw a lot of business in the information sector.
This could be an interesting way to boost jobs and economy. We know from Japan that bandwidth is a very good longterm investment. If you create a private entity within the government, give it a huge project of say 8 years, then when the 8 years are over the company goes public with all the employees sharing the stocks in the company.
Wouldn't this be one way of mitigating the crisis?
What good is a phone call if you are unable to share?
Screw the filter concerns. Conroy's got egg on his face and he's not popular with anyone lately. The internet filter's already being no-dealed by big ISP's, too; and ditching the filter is an ace-in-the-hole as far as election promises go if it ever gets to that.
On the note of Telstra, the seemingly overlooked fact of this /. discussion is that the fact that Telstra was completely excluded from this process will now break the Telstra monopoly completely when it comes to high speed data connections.
But the best thing is the upside to this, Telstra won't back down without a fight, and that is GREAT for Australian consumers! Think about it, over the next 8 years while the govt is spending $44B on this fiber network, Telstra is quickly and relatively cheaply upgrading it's cable infrastructure to DOCSIS3 (up to 444mb)!
Finally Australia might see some real competition in the last mile of fixed wires!
Seriously, this is the biggest waste of $43B we have ever had. Fiber is not the future - wireless is. All Rudd is trying to do is hobble the future of technology in Australia due to his belief that we need to move back in time to our Communist days. He is trying to keep people suppressed in their homes - where the only connection to the internet will be, rather than letting them move about freely like all civilized societies. This plan must be stopped at all costs.
Someone please mod up. I also saw this from the inside in my pre-IT days. It is pretty much bang on the money. And although I never liked unions or monopolies ... after seeing this I came to dislike privatisation even more. I saw a culture of quality turn into "let's pretend we are all capitalists now, so no more quality just profit." I kid you not. Then they brought out the 'razor gangs' to cut staff and increase workloads ... except of course the people who chose to leave were the most talented, not the deadwood as management expected. Big surprise. I use Telstra because I need a Telstra line to connect to my ISP (Internode) not because I like them ... as for the competition, Optus - fucktards ... kept on getting my name wrong, thought someone else was living at my address ... private enterprise is so wonderful. I was surprised to find that in many of these ex-government companies there are many highly talented, hard working and deeply committed people ... I always thought they were stabbed in the back.
OK. Rant over.
Bitter and proud of it.
i really dont understand one element of this plan - what is the benefit of privatising the company 5 years after completetion?
while the company is publicly owned the government can ensure the wholesale pricing to retailers (ISPs) remains reasonable. as soon as we sell the company arent we back in the same screwed situation we currently have with telstra?
am i missing something?
Yes, but for it to be that little, the babies have to pay the same amount.
The answer: Put the babies to work. When you call to talk to someone at your bank, you will hear, "Goo-goo". The bank didn't want to talk to you anyway.
Web caching hasn't been a particularly useful way to reduce traffic for some years now. In 1998, yes, HTTP was over 60% of traffic by volume. It's 2009, though, and HTTP is down to 30%, while p2p network traffic is up to 60%. If you want to have a measurable impact on today's traffic, you need to cache bittorrent and ed2k traffic. It can be done, though.
Here in Australia, you can expect to have a monthly quota of around 10-15GB, at least until you're prepared to pay over $100/month on it. 10GB quota on a 100mbit FTTP link? What a fucking joke. Less than 20 minutes to blow the entire quota allocated for that 43,000 minute period? What. A. Fucking. Joke.
Spend the $48bn on a new international pipe so I can use the 5mbit/sec link I have now, please, Mr Rudd.
Building more dams would actually be much more useful for Australia at the moment given our extreme water shortages and continual droughts. I would honestly rather see our money going there instead of upgrading Internet connections.
Building more dams would not actually increase the amount of available water. The dams are all under-full.
Instead other methods must be employed to secure Australia's water future.
Great this is what we already have in Japan to our homes, and it is for free to get it installed.
This is great but.. As one of our Aussie brethren posted the other day: The in country firehose is not helped by the fact that there are only 3 pipes going out of the country.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
used to, not so much any more, dunno about the other states but in WA the noncapped data for local peering groups no longer exists :( infact theyve even started including UPLOADS in our traffic quotas now..
things have infact gone backwards in this regard over the last few years
I hear a lot of people complaining about insufficient backhaul between Australia and the rest of the world. This is a problem, getting the data from one place to another is costly, and has some risks. Unless of course mirrors are set up in Australia. Think about it, big sites like youtube, metacafe, rapidshare, etc.. set up mirrors here, and every major ISP caches the data when it's accessed. The mirrors would be built using the cached data from the ISPs. Using local traffic would be far cheaper than wasting bandwidth over and over again on the international submarine cable, and could generate a higher profit margin with advertising. This would also create more jobs in IT, and would ease the strain on the flow of data between countries. It would also give more incentive for overseas companies to build cable out here, and vice-versa. If the content is all here on a high-speed fibre network, why not take advantage of it? This would also bring more profit into Australia, with other countries buying access to the data, and would lower the cost for Aussie consumers too.
Anybody thought about the potential for work in the centre of Oz over this?? Build a massive, solar-powered datacentre at Alice Springs where all the lines to the major cities converge, and rent out the data space. Voila! Payback bi*tch!
Wait! Whats a sig?
If they ensure the price remains competitive, they'll never make our money back.\n This is the only bit that worries me though. If this is a wholesale company, and they sell the company - won't that create a monopoly? I remember another government company that did that. Tel-something...
Wait! Whats a sig?