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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.
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".
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.
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
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"?
Well, they didn't give $900 to me. Despite the fact that my income for the year was zero, and all the rest of it. If they actually spent the money on infrastructure such as this, I would be much more convinced of their bona fides than I am with these much-hyped handouts which never eventuated.
Never believe a politician.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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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"?
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, $160 if you want 60GB. What's worse is that my company rents lines from Telstra, so you'd think they could be AT LEAST as good as their competitors.
How do you kill that which has no life?
How on earth do you expect them to keep track of you without sufficient bandwidth?
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This seems to me to be not just about getting better internet connections, but about ending Telstra's monopoly on wired communications.
At the moment, Telstra has a monopoly on the phone network due to their control over the copper lines, but as a company that's about the only thing it's got going for it. They sell access to the network both as a wholesaler and retailer. This new broadband network proposal won't be controlled by Telstra, so once users have an attractive high bandwidth alternative Telstra's business model might be in trouble.
"replace an inefficient public owned monopoly with an inefficient privately owned monopoly"
That's the problem, when the "privatisation" isn't truly private, so you still have a government protected (usually through strict regulation) monopoly. You end up with the worst of both worlds: private profits and public risks.
Oh, that's right THE CUSTOMER DOES. This is the taxpayer paying off the taxpayers debt. The only way this is worthwhile is if it leads to an increase in production. Otherwise it is just bread and HD porn for the masses.
It isn't like I don't want high speed internet, but with some states nearly going broke and having trouble keeping the health system running, this is a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
I couldn't possibly care less.
We've got a global financial crises on our hands, we've got a water shortage in Melbourne, we're relying on non self sustaining fuels and all we can spend our money on is a 900$ 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!
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?)"
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
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The lies and deceptions that accompanied it all were no better. For example, the prices were falling in real terms faster before privatisation than after it because most of the new exchanges had just paid for themselves. Instead of the lower effective overhead going back into the network or into customers pockets it went into shareholder's pockets. The press focused on the price reductions without referencing the falls that were already happening. Pure spin doctoring. It will come as no surprise to you to learn that the very first resellers were AAP (Australian Associated Press). In fact they used a loophole in the act to effectively resell space on their private networks before it was actually legalised.
The other thing that has occurred is a lack of routine maintenance. That is one thing that private companies rarely do but government departments always do. Speak to any tech or liney working in the field that was around in the Telecom days as well and he will tell you the same thing - things only get fixed when they break now. Now it's all about time and not about quality; get in and out as fast as possible. Private companies like going back later to fix things so they can make a buck, a public servant doesn't give a crap about the money - he just doesn't want to do go back and do more work, end of story. His boss doesn't care either, he wants good performance stats not good profit figures.
The unions told everybody these sorts of things would happen and it has all come to pass. Bowing to the great god of privatisation fills the pockets of the greedy, it does not improve the lot of the public regardless of how much the media try to spin it that way. Some things should be owned by the people (basically ALL essential services). The cables and pipes on government land in the streets should always be owned by the people. Privatise what is hooked up to them sure, but the actual infrastructure, no. Unfortunately though there is too much money spent on PR to convince the average idiot voter that he is better off if some corporation is able to suck money out of things instead of owning it himself. Apparently they prefer to swallow ads like mindless sheep than to retain the ability to hold the providers of their essential services accountable.
"A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist" - Sir Humphrey Appleby