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Business Tier For Australia's NBN Brings Big Possibilities For VoIP
An anonymous reader writes "Despite the cost blowing out to $37 billion and ongoing political debate, Australia's rollout of fibre optic cable to 93% of the country's homes, schools and businesses hit another milestone today. To encourage the use of VOIP, Australian small businesses lucky enough to get the fibre cable will have access to high-priority class 1 traffic speeds for multi-line telephony. As this article about the NBN explains, TC-1 speeds up to 5Mbps will be available, which the network builder says will support up to 50 simultaneous lines (separate to general Internet traffic, which is currently delivered at up to 100MBps). While the network is years away from reaching many Australians, this might nevertheless one day be seen as a watershed moment in the move from analogue telephone services to VOIP."
Why is an obscure technical decision about a network that will never be built considered news?
this might nevertheless one day be seen as a watershed moment in the move from analogue telephone services to VOIP
You .au people skipped the whole TDM era? We had about 3 to 4 decades (depending on how you count it) of T carrier hierarchy with everything from old fashioned robbed bit signalling thru the D4/D5 channel bank ESF era thru "modern" ISDN PRIs in the 90s and 00s. The best thing about standards is there's so many competing ones, so non-USA has E1 service etc, same idea just different enough to increase profits.
Its hard to believe you guys would deliver, say, 100 phone lines to a business in 2012 using a bunch of pairs. I hope you at least E+M or groundstart signal instead of having to deal with loopstart glare.
Also I heard you .au people being in the southern hemisphere need to twist your twisted pair wires in the opposite direction of us northerners and/or your 66-block color code standard is the same as ours but upside down, so white/blue at the bottom, then white/orange 2nd to bottom, etc. I did have a satellite guy going once that you need to switch from LHCP to RHCP if you're running a ckt to the southern hemisphere vs north. I guess telecom hemisphere jokes aren't as funny as I hoped.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
How does 5 Mbps of "TC-1 speed" differ from 5 Mbps over an ADSL 2+ connection with QoS?
I googled some info about TC-1 below.
[ From http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/ssrs-product-technical-specification.pdf (page 24) ]
Traffic Class: TC-1
Frame Delay (one way): < 350 ms
Frame Delay Variation: < 25 ms
Frame Loss: < 0.01 %
Availability / Connectivity: > 99.5 %
The TC-1 CIR performance attributes are dependent upon the following traffic characteristics, as enforced by Customer:
TC-1 CVC capacity operating at 70% utilisation
A TC-1 AVC to CVC oversubscription of greater than 10:1
A balanced distribution of CVC demand across the associated AVCs
Periodic frame arrivals, every 20ms
Frame length maximum of 150 bytes at NNI
I don't know how many of you actually remember talking on a TRUE analog phone line, but the experience vs. a digital or VOIP line is amazingly different. Besides the hollow sound of most digital lines (i.e. just about everything today), the biggest issue I have is the frustrating quality of duplex! On most lines it's almost impossible to speak and listen at the same time. On an old analog line that was no problem at all. I find that single issue makes phone conversations a pain in the ass - you can't interject, agree with a "yeah" without interrupting, etc.
If you add to that the delay that's present on most digital calls, even when local, it makes the phone a crappy form of communication.
I lament the old analog line for true phone conversations.
Am I alone in this - at least amongst those of us that actually have experienced true analog (end to end) phone service?
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
The uptake rate has been far from dismal... it was low when the first trial started in Tasmania for obvious reasons (most people there don't know what the internet is lol). Since then takeup has been pretty good. There are even towns throwing money at NBN Co. to go to them first or add them to the fibre build list if they weren't on it. Furthermore NBN Co. expected (and financed for) the majority of people to sign up to the 12Mbps plans, but the majority have signed up to the 50Mbps plans. Also If you read the NBN Co. website you will find that the $37 billion figure is not a blow out at all but less than the original costed value $43b. http://www.nbn.gov.au/2012/04/27/how-much-will-the-nbn-rollout-cost/ The opposition was claiming a while ago that it will blow out to $50m but that was just them trying political scare tactics and the cost blow out issue has been put to rest for some time.
Even though the project has been costed at $43 billion.
In the US, a business needing a bunch of phone lines would buy a T1 or multiple T1's, provisioned for 23 voice channels each, from the phone company. Don't know the Australian telco tariffs but they must've had this sort of service for the past 30+ years in Australia too. ???
They are more decentralized, and require less complex, prone to failure equipment to operate reliably. They function better under marginal conditions. I can usually hear through the static that will cause digital services to drop out completely. I don't need a separate power source from the electric company. We should never give them up. That would be a bad move. Unfortunately it's not possible to deliver over fibre, and loss of copper will bring about its ultimate demise.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is not a good thing, this is the tiered Internet that net neutrality is intended to stop.
And VoIP works just fine without it BTW.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
$43B was the total cost of the project. This figure is the amount being contributed by the government. Private investment makes up most of the rest.
The so-called blowout (about $1.4B, or 4%), is because NBNCo signed a deal with Optus to migrate all their cable customers. So costs will go up, because they're now installing fibre to more premises, but of course revenues will go up because they'll have more customers. Overall, projected returns increased slightly to 7.1%.
Doesn't stop the media jumping on any cost increase as a "blowout" though.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Thanks, the "blow out" thing struck me as strange too. The $37B figure is the cheapest quote I've heard so far. There are probably better things we could be doing with the nations nest egg but at least the NBN is useful and does offer tangible benefits to all Aussies. It's also much more sensible use of labour and capital than the stupid race the telco's had in the 90's that saw two separate sets of cables being hooked up to homes in the suburbs.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You mean like how internode's 25/5 NBN entry level plan (30Gb quota) is $5 cheaper than their equivalent Naked ADSL plan and their 300Gb quota plan is $15 cheaper than Naked ADSL.
And iiNet's 100Gb (Peak) + 100Gb (Off Peak) 25/5 plan is $5 cheaper than their 100Gb (any time) Naked ADSL plan, for more quota, and 500Gb+500Gb 25/5 NBN is cheaper than 400Gb Naked ADSL.
iPrimus's NBN plans aren't particularly competitive - their 25/2 plans are $10 more expensive than their equivalent naked ADSL plans (unless you "bundle" with an expensive VOIP phone service) and around $5 more expensive than the Internode & iiNet NBN plans, but their 12/1 plans are the same price as their Naked ADSL, so you can switch to NBN with no change in cost (but potentially slower speeds, depending on the length&quality of your current copper)
So what's this "hideous" cost you speak of?
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The traffic classes highlight that the fact that congestion is to be expected on the NBN. A 12/1Mbps service costs $24/month for the connection (AVC) plus CVC (data). IT managers who would already have routers with QOS are not going to pay $330 extra a month for TC1 traffic unless it can be justified, especially for a service that only provides TC1 between their NTU and their RSP;
In Australia we are being hit both ways by the NBNCo monopolist:
In other countries speed tiers make sense because data is unlimited, but in Australia they are not required because quotas constrain internet usage. The speed tiers mean that 4G operators are actively competing for low end users - $34.95 will buy a 30/10Mbps service with 10GB quota on 4G, compared with the cheapest NBN service costing $45 for 12/1Mbps with 50GB quota. People with 4G smart phones may even find the included quota adequate for their needs.
It's capital expenditure costs. Listen to this interview here to understand the $37 billion figure. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/nbn-costs-up-by-15-billion/4187274
Since they are not spending tax-payers money proper, if they wanted to use the money going to NBNco for something else it would have to go to something "private" like a pay-to-use (ie private) hospital, toll roads, private schools, etc - somewhere the government will get a direct return on the investment.
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no sig for you. come back one year.
The government don't have to make a monetary return on the investment, but it's good that it's set up that way. I don't begrudge the investment, but I could also see (say) "drought proofing" the Murry-Darling basin as a worthy investment for a "future fund". I just think the NBN idea came from nowhere and the opposition were asleep on the job as usual. Their job (as advertised in the democracy prospectus) is to come up with worthy alternatives or constructive criticism to what the government proposes/implements, but all we got was just more of the same old temper tantrums.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.