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Australia's National Broadband Network To Go Ahead
angry tapir writes "After weeks of a hung parliament following the Australian federal election, the incumbent Labor Party has garnered enough support among independent MPs to form a minority government. Broadband was central to clinching the independents' support. Labor's victory means the $43 billion National Broadband Network will push ahead. The policy has generally been popular among ISPs and telcos — though some rebel operators preferred a policy that emphasized wireless technologies, similar to the proposals put forward by Labor's opponents. The primarily fiber-based NBN is set to offer Australians 1Gbps broadband."
Of having broadband if you can't watch some good ol' small breasted porn?
This person is a pedophile. Please report him to the police.
Greens/Liberals/Independants hold the balance of power and are all dead set against the filter. It's a dead scheme stop mentioning it. There will be no mandatory net filter in Australia. The ETS and mining tax are probably also going to get blocked. They don't have the numbers to pass that sort of legislation anymore.
Anyone who lives in Australia and supports this doesn't get to complain when the government begins to censor their "right" that they demanded the government give them.
OK, so this seems like a good idea - but what can we do with it? Having that kind of speed is great, but only if you have infrastructure that can serve you data that fast. We're a long way from anywhere and have only a limited amount of fibre connections to other countries (where I imagine most data will come from), this is reflected in the silly high prices we pay for data already.
So whilst it's great that we will have these kinds of speeds, how are we going to get data services fast enough to take advantage of them?
We're a long way from anywhere and have only a limited amount of fibre connections to other countries (where I imagine most data will come from), this is reflected in the silly high prices we pay for data already ... So whilst it's great that we will have these kinds of speeds, how are we going to get data services fast enough to take advantage of them?
A lot of data/content can be cached on continent. Akamai claims that:
"Akamai routinely delivers between fifteen and thirty percent of all Web traffic, reaching more than 4 Terabits per second."
http://www.akamai.com/html/customers/index.html
NBN (Fibre Network) is supported by:
All independants
The Greens
Labor Pary
Therefore it is guaranteed to pass throught the upper and lower houses :)
Censorhip is supported by:
Labor
Therefore it will not be able to pass through either house of parliament unless the Liberal/National Coalition switch their position (which wouldnt surprise me)
Are Aussie Liberals the same as US Liberals?
No. Liberal here is supposed to refer to people with a somewhat Libertarian outlook. Small government, letting the market take care of things. That sort of thing.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
On all the internet forums I'm on, people from Australia complain constantly about their slow speeds and Draconian caps.
Now they're on their way to being the best! Congrats, entire country of Australia!
It's classical liberalism, so it's primarily referring to their economic platform. In the US it applies to social platforms.
Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home!
Good because the NBN is going ahead (Liberals broadband plan was a joke). Bad because Senator Conroy is still in a position to put in the internet filter. As a side note, and I don't have a reference right now, but I recall reading/hearing somewhere that it will be much cheaper to build (in the order or $7B or so if i recall correctly) than originally planned based on the trial performed in some suburbs. I don't know how accurate/reliable that report was though.
But they aren't, that's the problem. They're neo-cons these days. Someone like Malcolm Turnbull would be a true "Liberal", Tony Abbott (the guy who knifed Malcolm Turnbull to run the Liberals) is definitely a neo-con. They run the party these days and cop a lot of shit from Malcolm Fraser (one of the Liberal greats) for it.
I have a legitimate question for any Aussies on /. Here in the US, the title "Liberal" refers to spineless douchebags who act like conservatives with their own money, property, etc., but who love to micromanage other people's money, property, and selves. Are Aussie Liberals the same as US Liberals?
Find out from the Liberal Party website. They have an overview of their party covering their beliefs, history, and party structure. They're conservatives who like liberal economics.
4. Australians will stick with their (possibly) slower current technology services when given the alternative of a faster, but significantly more expensive solution.
Not possible. Remember that "agreement" that the government reached with Telstra? They agreed to "sell" their customers to NBN Co. when NBN rollout is complete in an area. This means that once NBN is available in your area you will be forced to use it or use nothing, because all alternatives will be removed by law.
Or to paraphrase, "I have no idea about the NBN but the Liberals opposed it and therefore so do I so it must be crap."
1. Conjecture
2. Conjecture
3. Something better than fibre? WTF?
4. The copper network is being phased out so it's either fibre or shitty wireless for most people.
5. We have excess international capacity at the moment with extra capacity planned.
6. 93% fibre, 4% wireless, 3% satellite. Are you one of these tards that think the roll-out is crap because the Simpson desert won't be fibred up?
What is your alternative? Stay with our current infrastructure that is among the slowest in the developed world?
3. The NBN will be superseded by newer technologies within its implementation timeframe, and we'll be stuck with expensive crap.
WRONG! fibre is a future-proof tech, upgrades are done at communication ports such as at exchanges, once the cable is laid, nothing really needs to be changed. (for example ALL THE DAMN CABLE ON THE SEA FLOOR) with new advances such as replacing white-light with coloured they can increase the bandwidth exponentially.
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
Great. We're to be shafted by a massive white elephant.
Well, some people would say that Australia itself is a Great White Elephant - maybe it is looking forward to said shafting.
1. The true cost will be much greater than $43 billion. This figure - guaranteed to blow out anyway - includes no allowance for the interest and other borrowing charges that will be incurred by the project. The true cost may be greater than $200 billion.
Anybody with a keyboard can pontificate mindlessly. The fact is that the "magic 43 billion dollars" was *always* "the government are willing to spend up to", it was not a budget it was not a costing estimate it was a "we will not contribute more than". It's entirely possible it may cost more, it may cost less, but The Government said THEY will not spend more than 43B.
2. Funding sources for the project have not been defined. The Government's exposure is 20-something million in initial investment, with the remainder supposed to come from the private sector. Especially given the failure of other public-private-partnerships (Brisbane, Sydney ...) who would be foolish enough to tip billions into another government stuff-up?
You're all a pack of retards! This is an infrastructure build, it will cost more money than it directly generates as revenue. Like ROADS, RAIL, ELECTRICITY and WATER/SEWERAGE infratructure projects. However, it will NOT be worth NOT BUILDING IT (in the long term).
3. The NBN will be superseded by newer technologies within its implementation timeframe, and we'll be stuck with expensive crap.
Sure, eventually we'll have The Ansible communications, enabling real-time infinite-bandwidth communications between points many many light years apart, but not in my lifetime. *EVENTUALLY* Fibre as a communications medium will be superseeded, but not in my lifetime, not in yours, not in your great-grandchildrens.
4. Australians will stick with their (possibly) slower current technology services when given the alternative of a faster, but significantly more expensive solution.
Sure some people will. The world is full of retards and the poor. You will*never* achieve 100% market-penetration. NEVER!
5. While the projected NBN speeds look good on paper, they'll be constrained by overseas pipes for the content people REALLY want to see.
Yes, to an extent, but recently that has begun to change a lot.
6. The projected NBN speeds still won't be delivered to most of the Australian continent. City users may get high speeds, but a very large number of rural citizens will get nothing.
Most of the continent has literally zero population per square kilometer, so yes MOST of the continent (by area) will not be covered.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
With their budget surplus, handled economy, and this? I may be moving my ass there.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
We don't say "coloured." That's African-American light, thank you.
Here in the US, the title "Liberal" refers to spineless douchebags who act like conservatives...Are Aussie Liberals the same as US Liberals?
Australian Liberals are liberal in name only. At best they are conservative, and at worst they are fascist bigots. Any reference to "liberal" (lowercase L) is entirely fictional.
That's fantastic, a country with a serious water crises in at least 3 states, with a housing price epidemic and using sweet fuck all sustainable power - but hey we can get really fast internet! Even though our international links aren't even that good and a heap of city dwelling people can get from 8 to 24mb/s now,.......
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In the interests of accuracy, it wasn't abbott who knifed turnbull in the back (although I can't stand Abbott). Another MP triggered a leadership spill (Maybe Costello?) but Abbott was the third candidate and he skated in on the backs of both factions hating the 'other guy' more than they hated Abbott.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
I have a legitimate question for any Aussies on /. Here in the US, the title "Liberal" refers to spineless douchebags who act like conservatives with their own money, property, etc., but who love to micromanage other people's money, property, and selves. Are Aussie Liberals the same as US Liberals?
Actually, looking in from the outside, it seems to me that in the USA the term "liberal" is a meaningless epithet applied by the conservative media to anyone that they don't like.
In Australia the term "Liberal" means "a member of the Liberal Party of Australia", or a person who regularly votes for the same.
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
This article just came out. It definitely looks dead. Thank goodness. I must admit, I'm rather enjoying good ol' Stephen Conroy trying in vain to introduce the filter!
You have to remember the big difference between the USA (where policies like this tend to NOT work out) and the rest of the world (where socialized medicine, shared infrastrcuture, etc tend to work):
The rest of the world is not filled with Americans.
I think the argument is in the sense that the Menzies Liberals represent the "true Liberals", and that Turnbull upholds this tradition more so than Abbott et al., who are far more in the Howard-post-9/11 Liberal mould.
The veracity of this judgement is left to your own political views as to what represents "true Liberal" and how closely Turnbull matches it.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Senator Minchin pushed for the spill, with a view to getting Hockey into the top spot. Abbott snuck through as the surprise/compromise candidate.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Sigh... How can people actually post on Slashdot and not have the slightest clue how this technology stuff works.
1 - You're pulling numbers out of your ass. From the accounts I've seen, they actually seem to have over-estimated the cost of this thing, by possibly a factor of 2. The deployment in Tasmania is under budget so far. Sure, I have no evidence or references, but neither do you.
2 - Based on what information, exactly?
3 - No. Just no. The copper phone network is based on technologies from 100 years ago. It's been upgraded by sticking new equipment on either end of the copper cables, at comparatively little cost. It's kept up reasonably well. However, it's a dead end - not only are we getting diminishing returns, but there won't BE any more development on ADSL and the like. Fibre is already way better than anything that can be delivered over a copper phone cable, and that's where new development is going.
A fibre network should have the same kind of lifespan as the old copper network it's replacing (verging on a century, basically), and can be upgraded the same way - just stick new equipment on either end. That's where that maximum speed jump from 100Mbit/s to 1Gbit/s came from - the equipment to do 1Gbit/s dropped in price significantly, to match the price of the 100Mbit/s equipment they budgeted for. And that 1Gbit/s is slow for fibre. 100Gbit/s is quite doable, with the same cables. The equipment to do so is just insanely expensive right now, but it will come down.
The alternatives (wireless) WILL be completely obsolete within 5 or 10 years, even if we deployed some pre-standard 4G network. There is no upgrade path - the entire network needs to be pulled down, and replaced. Every decade or so.
4 - First, it's replacing the copper phone network. That means there won't BE a copper phone network to stick to. Secondly, what gives you the impression that the NBN will be significantly more expensive? You're just pulling numbers out of your ass again.
5 - True enough, but this is fixable. Building or upgrading thove overseas pipes isn't nearly as expensive as the domestic NBN project. Besides, that's what caching and CDNs were invented for.
6 - Basically, that's a cost thing. Running fibre to every inhabited part of the continent is prohibitively expensive. That's why it has a secondary wireless footprint, where there's no fibre coverage. That wireless coverage still beats anything you could get out there right now.
And how is that different to Labor?
This means that once NBN is available in your area you will be forced to use it or use nothing, because all alternatives will be removed by law.
Not only by law, by physical effort too - the copper is going to be ripped up, since this is a fiber to the home solution. That's what makes the NBN a revolution in communication, not just an upgrade of infrastructure.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Only if you consider less than the average working week "enormous". It was nothing but a couple of days to set up for a photo-op to repair the damage to his reputation he took as a Minister when he was supposed to try to fix the problems in remote communities. The guy is a carboard cutout on pretty well every issue - for instance he's only a Catholic in front of an audience. He wasn't called the "mad monk" for being thrown out of a seminary - it was because he acted like Rasputin (or for those who don't catch the reference, like a deranged Clinton on viagra).
The Liberal Party can do better.
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Well, you're in luck, two fold!
a) I've done the research you couldn't be bothered to (google is so complicated, I know), to find out that there has indeed been an indication of minimum speeds!
a) as pointed out here, satellite and wireless are expected to be 12mbps (at peak usage, so a 'real' 12mbps). I've read a more authoratitive source than that, but I couldn't be bothered doing more research for you. Oh, and finally - I also read somewhere that optical will be cross subsidising satellite and wireless to the extent that Australia wide, you will be paying the same cost for xGB downloads on a 12mbit plan. The only difference between wireless & satellite is that higher bandwidth plans won't be available.
That's what SHE said. Seriously, it's great to see broadband being pondered as a national infrastructure priority somewhere -- 'cause it sure as hell isn't in the states.
oooh wonderful, so we are paying 43 BILLION of tax payers money to create a private company...
Reality check: whatever the cost, it's money that the Government has ALREADY TAKEN from us, and will continue to take. Much better that they spend the money on something worthwhile that will endure, rather than piss it against the wall at election time.
Hockey didn't initially take the position because the liberal leadership had a half-life around 6 month. He was expecting Abbott to be a caretaker and be thrown out 12 months prior to the election, at which point he would take the reins.
Abbott proved to be what the hoards wanted.
.
Bollocks.
Howard gave tax cuts to all sections of society. He also delivered family benefits and child care subsidies through a tightly means tested welfare system. This meant that the benefits of the boom were shared and low income families got their share. Australia has had no increase in inequality over period of Howard's government (as measured by the ABS Gini co-efficient).
Of course this was achieved by taking the benefits of the boom caused by selling resources to China and handing all of it out. Which leaves nothing in reserve, may over heat the economy and cause serious problems if the boom runs out.