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Aussie National Broadband Network Will Be Gigabit

Posted by timothy on from the and-with-filtering-much-less-clogged dept.

schmidty-au writes "NBN Co, the Australian Government company established to build Australia's national fibre-optic broadband network, announced today that, instead of the previously announced 100 Mbps network, it will provide 1 Gbps, within the existing AU$43 billion budget. Meanwhile, the Australian opposition, which has announced that it will scrap the network if it wins the 21 August election, and instead provide incentives to the private sector to improve the existing copper network, and to install wireless broadband (with promised peak speeds of 12 Mbps), does not understand or believe that this would be possible. The man who wants to be Australia's next Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, said today 'This idea that "hey presto" we are suddenly going to get 10 times the speed from something that isn't even built yet I find utterly implausible.'"

29 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. implausible? it's magic! by kernkopje · · Score: 5, Funny

    The man who wants to be Australia's next Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, said today 'This idea that "hey presto" we are suddenly going to get 10 times the speed from something that isn't even built yet I find utterly implausible.'" "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke

    1. Re:implausible? it's magic! by ta+bu+shi+da+yu · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Hey... you know, I could have said that about Tony Abbott.

      This idea that "hey presto" we are suddenly going to get an improved economy, less waste and an excellent immigration policy from someone we haven't elected yet I find utterly implausible.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    2. Re:implausible? it's magic! by vidnet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      to get 10 times the speed from something that isn't even built yet

      Well, it's much easier to upgrade a design plan than an existing infrastructure.

    3. Re:implausible? it's magic! by sjwt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Lets put this in its propper context..

      From the second linked artical
      "It's very hard to take seriously a government which suddenly pulls yet another technological rabbit out of a hat just because it's under enormous pressure in the closing stages of an election campaign," the Liberal leader told reporters in western Sydney.

      "This idea that 'hey presto' we are suddenly going to get 10 times the speed from something that isn't even built yet I find utterly implausible."

      --
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      Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
    4. Re:implausible? it's magic! by delinear · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It seems he's only calling the leap from 100Mbps to 1Gbps implausible, rather than the plan to lay the 100Mbps infrastructure. I don't know what the cost differences are between 100Mbps and 1Gbps but I would have thought they'd be negligible compared to the cost of putting any infrastructure in place.

    5. Re:implausible? it's magic! by AHuxley · · Score: 3, Insightful

      We gave Telstra a decade and all they did was stall adsl2, milk the international interconnects, keep exchanges difficult to access, charge use up and down by the mb and muddy any NBN press.
      The idea that "private enterprise" will save us is cute but reality shows they kept the rust belt warm, rolling out the min of new tech for the max price.
      Tony is offering Australia more of the worst of a US Bell system.
      Julia is offering a faster internal network with faith based filtering, and Bell international interconnect pricing.
      "multiple businesses" will never get a look in on any Telstra property other than increasing long term rental deals, something that has kept Australian in a digital dark ages for years.
      That is what made the NBN (without faith based filtering) such a good idea, making a Bell just another big telco.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    6. Re:implausible? it's magic! by OeLeWaPpErKe · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You know, just one network engineer's opinion :

      While I agree that the price difference between 100 mbit and gigabit (both require a fiber network) is small, there is no way to build a nationwide network for a small US state for that budget. This network is not going to get built, no matter who gets elected. A national fiber network for australia with connections to even 10% of houses ... I seriously doubt it could be done with hundred times that budget.

      This is ignoring the obvious fact that the current international internet infrastructure most certainly cannot take a network with even a few million australians connected at 100 mbit, even if they only use 1% of their connection. Total international bandwidth available in Australia is about 1 terabit (theoretical peak capacity for currently deployed infrastructure - not actually operational connectivity, and brining the full capacity online won't be cheap at all). About 8 million Australians have internet service (and that this bill claims to double that), so that's 1 terabit / 16 million = 32 kbit per australian. You're just not going to get above that level. Consider that due to the previous round of government interference, there's barely anything hosted in Australia so to get at anything interesting they're going to need international bandwidth.

      It's just a false campaign promise. Money thrown at a black hole.

      And frankly people who let their votes be decided by "we'll give you more free stuff" deserve exactly what they'll get.

    7. Re:implausible? it's magic! by redemtionboy · · Score: 4, Funny

      Honestly it's just too much speed for Australia to handle. How can you expect the government to be able to censor these high speeds properly. We must protect our citizens from themselves!

    8. Re:implausible? it's magic! by ta+bu+shi+da+yu · · Score: 2, Informative

      I'm sure that more major network links will be created over time. There's no reason why they shouldn't be.

      Your problem is that you feel that everything is hosted overseas. It's not. Not everything runs through the International links, unless you are some sort of stupid corporation that uses an MPLS network to route your traffic - hi EMC network admins! There are vast numbers of servers and Internet based services within Australia that are required or are extremely useful to Australian organizations. That isn't just businesses, it's Universities, charitable organizations, government services, medical organizations - you name it, it will be used.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    9. Re:implausible? it's magic! by ThatOtherGuy435 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It isn't when you consider that those exact taxpayers get more than they could conceivably get spending individually.

    10. Re:implausible? it's magic! by mikkelm · · Score: 2, Informative

      "This network is not going to get built, no matter who gets elected. A national fiber network for australia with connections to even 10% of houses ... I seriously doubt it could be done with hundred times that budget."

      So you suggest that it would be unlikely to deploy GPON to about 800,000 households for $AUD 4.3 trillion, or approximately $AUD 5 million per household? You knowm just the opinion of one network engineer who has actually been involved in nationwide GPON deployments, the current assessment of about $AUD 5,500 per household is a very sensible budget for this kind of deployment.

  2. Somebody Tell Tony Abbott about Moore's Law by divide+overflow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The man who wants to be Australia's next Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, said today 'This idea that "hey presto" we are suddenly going to get 10 times the speed from something that isn't even built yet I find utterly implausible.'"

    Yeah, and computers will never get faster, cheaper or smaller. What a tool.

    1. Re:Somebody Tell Tony Abbott about Moore's Law by bertok · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The man who wants to be Australia's next Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, said today 'This idea that "hey presto" we are suddenly going to get 10 times the speed from something that isn't even built yet I find utterly implausible.'"

      Yeah, and computers will never get faster, cheaper or smaller. What a tool.

      It's a particularly stupid statement since the technology selected for the NBN was designed to scale to 1Gbps with only a simple upgrade. Fibre is insanely high-bandwidth, the limitation is mostly around the cost of the transponders and the core network routers, which have to handle huge aggregate speeds. Speeds of 100Mbps are doable now, many Asian countries have already deployed networks that fast, so given the equivalent of Moore's law for networking, I'm not surprised they've changed their targeted initial speed to 1Gbps.

    2. Re:Somebody Tell Tony Abbott about Moore's Law by c0lo · · Score: 4, Informative

      No, he won't understand: according to him, he's not Bill Gates

      --
      Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
    3. Re:Somebody Tell Tony Abbott about Moore's Law by loki_tiwaz · · Score: 5, Informative

      i don't know how it wasn't obvious it could go to gigabit with very little tinkering. it's OPTICAL right?

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Bandwidth-distance_product

      Through a combination of advances in dispersion management, wavelength-division multiplexing, and optical amplifiers, modern-day optical fibers can carry information at around 14 Terabits per second over 160 kilometers of fiber [4]. Engineers are always looking at current limitations in order to improve fiber-optic communication, and several of these restrictions are currently being researched

      14 terabits over 160km? does tony abbot's advisors do any research? presently, we have a copper network that can manage at best 24mbit at a max distance of 4km, at best. the NBN is an *optical* network, and is likely to be dispersed at network segments of less than 100km per run. lol. do i really need to point out the stupidity of saying it can't be gigabit? do i also need to point out the stupidity of saying a 100mbit network is not gonna be a piece of cake to roll out with optical in australian metro areas? what a retard.

      anyway, i'm voting for the sex party. you can bet they are all on for the NBN. super HD pr0n here we come :)

    4. Re:Somebody Tell Tony Abbott about Moore's Law by beelsebob · · Score: 3, Insightful

      All you have to do is grab a game which came out 15 years ago - lets say Doom 2 (which came out 17 years ago), and a game which came out lately - take your pick and compare the graphics. Or compare the (non-existant) physics with the physics of some modern FPS.

      The problem being that the average consumer sees that as "oh, it got a bit prettier" – they don't realise how many orders of magnitude more processing it requires to make it that much prettier.

    5. Re:Somebody Tell Tony Abbott about Moore's Law by Ash+Vince · · Score: 2, Funny

      14 terabits over 160km? does tony abbot's advisors do any research?

      Sort of. His advisers went and asked Telestra what they thought.

      --
      I dont read /. to RTFA, I read /. to offend people in ignorance.
  3. I think fibre to the home is insane by MichaelSmith · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Reorganise your spectrum so that you can deliver a gigabit per second over cellular protocols. Roll displaced services into cellular data. By all means pull fibre into the street, but then deploy microcells in high demand areas. The last step is always wireless anyway. In the future people won't install their own wifi if they can get a good service from a telco.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  4. That's why you use fiber by Jens+de+Smit · · Score: 2, Informative

    Tony Abbott apparently doesn't understand a thing about modern networking. Today's optic fibers can support frightening data rates, the limiting factor currenly is what the hardware on both sides is capable of. With the speeds of the high end of the market recently increasing to 40G and 100G (from 1G and 10G) per channel I would not be surprised if that jump suddenly made 1G FTTH possible. Investing in copper technology now is outrageous and a waste of money. Utilizing it for the last mile while you're not done rolling out fiber to each premise is acceptable at best. Wireless broadband might be acceptable for remote locations but even those base stations need a good fiber connection for their uplink.

  5. Re:Hmm... by Pento · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you don't want your preferences going to Labor, vote below the line.

    Greens are currently on course to hold the balance of power in the senate. They've said many times that they're for the NBN, but they will block any attempt to implement the net filter.

  6. Sex Party by duk242 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There's always the Sex Party, they've got decent enough policies, no internet filtering, no internet spying, R Rating for games... What more could you want? http://www.sexparty.org.au/index.php/policies

    1. Re:Sex Party by qazadex · · Score: 2, Informative

      Why is Slashdot so pro Sex Party and not greens? They have around 15% of the primary vote, compared to the 1% or so of the Sex Party, and have very similar, left leaning policies. http://greens.org.au/policies

  7. Re:I don't think aussies want to fork up that much by beelsebob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    $43bn for speeds faster than what the internet naturally provides... There isn't a need for gigabit connections when the average pipeline of a website is less than a megabit. I suppose if you want to watch 75 HD porn videos at a time, now you'd get the chance

    You're right, instead of spending $43bn on gigabit network now, we should spend $30bn on 1Mb now, then $30bn in 3 years on 5Mb, then $30bn in 6 years on 10Mb, then $30bn in 10 years on 100Mb, then...

  8. my Agency built a 200 user LAN segment for $40.000 by kubitus · · Score: 2, Interesting
    they used the "Industry Standard" to last for decades. (TR)

    -

    I built in our Lab a 200 user multisegment LAN for $ 10.000, but for 600 nodes

    as we have more computers than staff!

    -

    It was called Ethernet! -

    Bob Metcalf - one of my heroes along with R.P. Stalman, R.Knuth, L. Thorvald and many many others including Richard P. Feynman.

    For keeping Ethernet free I forgive you many design errors at 3COM ;-)

  9. Re:I don't think aussies want to fork up that much by Thanshin · · Score: 4, Funny

    $43bn for speeds faster than what the internet naturally provides... There isn't a need for gigabit connections when the average pipeline of a website is less than a megabit. I suppose if you want to watch 75 HD porn videos at a time, now you'd get the chance

    Are you trying to say that "1Mb should be enough for anybody."?

  10. Re:I don't think aussies want to fork up that much by delinear · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Considering we've gone from, what, 14.4k to approaching Gb speeds in the space of less than 20 years? I don't think it's unreasonable to build in some future redundancy - after all, the majority of the cost is going to be physically putting the cable in place, the cost to increase the capacity of said cable is likely to be close to incidental.

  11. Stars and Stripes? by MichaelSmith · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not sure why we have a picture of the US flag, in an article about Australian politics.

    Also I wonder why we aren't talking about Oracle taking google to court over patents in Java. Are the slashdot editors waiting to see if the topic goes away?

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  12. They can make Aussie content / data cap free! by Joe+The+Dragon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    They can make Aussie content / data cap free! Just cap over seas data.

  13. Tony abbots plan is no plan at all by jonwil · · Score: 2

    Tony abbots so-called "broadband plan" does NOTHING to address the market dominance of Telstra in so many areas of this country or the fact that so many areas of the country cant get ADSL at all because Telstra would rather push NextG than install more ADSL hardware (mostly because it has to allow other ISPs to provide service over the ADSL hardware but not over NextG wireless)