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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."
What do you mean 'will never be built'?
It started last year and will continue over a 10-year time frame to replace the entire copper telephony network in Australia.
And while it is quite a technical detail, it does serve to re-iterate that this is telephony&internet project ie. supplying the equivalent of 50-line telephony via FTTH.
No sure how many other countries have rolled out a full fibre telephone network - so not sure if this is really news though ...
actually that is hardly certain at this point. The poor uptake combined with a possible liklihood of the next government canceling altogether make it about a 50-50 bet.
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
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.
But not really at an affordable level to almost every premises. This is piggybacking onto an existing fibre service (when it gets installed over the next 10 years) without a separate line needing to be installed. The same Fibre can be used for Internet, TV & Voice. This is an enhancement to the Voice traffic to make sure the Internet and TV traffic does not take priority which would reduce call quality.
I moved just as my old suburb was getting connected, and a friend had her house burn down after she had enjoyed the sweetness for half a year or so (no joke!). Another friend lives about fifty paces beyond the current active area in my city. I'm still waiting for a trench to come past my new place with bated breath.
I'll be glad to get rid of my crackly copper line. I've already been using VoIP for outgoing calls for years so I'm not as leery as some about moving off copper as some of my more conservative nerdy friends, though I'm sure widespread VoIP will have its own special problems. VPN bandwidth may actually become acceptable over a standard connection, and I know a few businesses looking forward to this. I have mixed feelings about the cloud services goldrush that will inevitably follow, but I guess this will make things more "efficient" ie. centralised. Still it will also make hosting your own services at a reasonable speed easy, and I'll certainly be taking advantage of this.
This isn't for today. This isn't for tomorrow. This is for the next 20-30 years you f*ckstick.
Imagine if the government of the time had the same thinking when they built the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We'd have 1 lane each way, totally inadequate. Technology expands to fill limitations and if something beneficial doesn't come of investing in those 50 lines within the next 30 years, I will personally reimburse the Australian public for all expenses incurred in providing the service.
Good infrastructure isn't laid by asking "what is adequate for now?".
This isn't for today. This isn't for tomorrow. This is for the next 20-30 years you f*ckstick.
Then why are they picking already obsolete GPON technology to do it? You can't upgrade GPON without great expense and lengthy outages. And the max performance isn't significantly different than something like DOCSIS 3.0.
I'm not sure how a technology that requires massive outages and great expense to get upgraded and starts with a max performance well below other available technologies that have zero-downtime upgrade possibilies at lower expense with more than 1000 times the performance of GPON (and more like 10,000 times the performance of a loaded GPON network).
GPON is expensive shit. The *only* reason it was selected is that Alcatel-Lucent has a better lobbying department than product development. They were even so good, they managed to get the GPON-only requirement, then get the largest provider of low-cost GPON (Huaewi) excluded from consideration for equipment buying.
Good infrastructure isn't laid by asking "what is adequate for now?".
If the people who selected this thought that, they wouldn't have selected obsolete and expensive GPON.
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