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Australia's $44B Broadband Network May Settle For Fiber Near the Home
Garabito writes "In April 2009, Australia's then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, dropped a bombshell on the press and the global technology community: His social democrat Labor administration was going to deliver broadband Internet to every single resident of Australia. It was an audacious goal, not least of all because Australia is one of the most sparsely populated countries on Earth. ... So now, after three years of planning and construction, during which workers connected some 210 000 premises (out of an anticipated 13.2 million), Australia's visionary and trailblazing initiative is at a crossroads. The new government plans to deploy fiber only to the premises of new housing developments. For the remaining homes and businesses — about 71 percent — it will bring fiber only as far as curbside cabinets, called nodes. Existing copper-wire pairs will cover the so-called last mile to individual buildings."
Don't they have an fiber to the node cable network in place now? why not just build off of that?
THAT'S SOCIALISM!... oh wait. ;)
yelling? me? no way, slashdot filter!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Fiber to the node is fine as long as whatever goes from the node to the end-user device can get the job done. If you are within 90 meters, CAT6 can do 1GHz.
Now, as for squeezing good speeds out of the existing telephone-grade "last mile," well, if there is money to be made, someone will be working on this problem.
Realistically though, most users would be fine if they could record a handful of HDTV-channels at once, surf the web or watch YouTube videos on 3-4 computers at once, and download Windows Updates in a timely manner, all at the same time. Those who need more should have the option of paying for a direct fiber line to their home.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
While FTTH everywhere is laudable, it might turn out to be impractical in the more rural areas and existing dense housing.
VDSL+ _should_ be enough for most uses if priced appropriately.
The Private Sector should be paying for this, not the government.
The Australian government used to own Telecom, thus owned the telecommunication infrastructure around Australia.
They then busily sold it off for a quick buck.
Now, they are doing it all again?
I'm in an estate, but the fibre connect, which I paid to connect to, is through Opticomm.
and I mean I paid to be connect my house, to the local fibre.... one off connection fee (I think $600 at the time)
receive FTA / payTV signals through this too, which is spit and run through coaxial when it gets to the house.
100Mbps connection, 1 Terra byte a month download.
Done....
It's funny watching the whole NBN roll-out, which is an absolute joke.....
struggling to maybe get 100mbps rolled out.
while google in the US is rolling out gigabit, and the private sector in UK is doing the same....
Rich prick didn't like the idea of losing his total control of media, so began a relentless attack of the previous government using the current media he has at his control. All sorts of brainwashing techniques were used. It worked.
We had a chance and we blew it.
.
was Labor's (the previous socialist government) voting carrot. With most Australians living in sprawling suburbia it was impossibly expensive. The current (conservative) government was forced to offer a modest substitute to compete for votes. Hopefully they will totally renege on this and then let private enterprise get on with supplying us affordable and innovative access to the internet.
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
No. Most people don't have cable, but instead have ADSL over copper phone lines from the interchange to the home. Pay TV is not ubiquitous, and AFAIK is mostly served via satellite. I live in a fairly typical suburb and the interchange is a few kilometres away, so max download speed is around 4-5 Kb/s.
It's not a bug, it's a lepidopter!
AN fiber?
What are you? American?
When you say 'cable', are you referring to cable as in US-style cable TV (and internet, using DOCSIS)?
If so, then no, most areas of Australia do not have this. Subscription TV is delivered by satellite in virtually all areas of Australia, save for small sections of urban Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Far more cost effective for such a big and sparsely settled continent. So the cable footprint would be lucky to cover 5 or 10% of the population.
Currently most people in Australia get their internet via ye olde copper phone line using ADSL2+ (which can provide up to 24 Mbps if you have a short line, but degrades rapidly and can barely push a few Mbps at distances of 4-6 km, depending on the quality and gauge of line).
FTTN rollout would thus require that nodes be built, branching out from or replacing the current telephone exchanges/central offices (where lines currently terminate) so that they would be no further than a few hundred metres from any given house, and leverage the existing phone lines as much as possible to cover the remaining distance. You can push 50-100 Mbps using VDSL2 over these kind of distances. But only if the lines are in good condition (which they aren't, in many cases).
It should also be pointed out that most newer areas (built in the last 10 years or so) already have fibre right to the door, and also that some parts of the original FTTH NBN network have already been completed (I have some friends that are already on it, at 100 Mbps). But the rollout is still only 10% complete at most.
physical network infrastructure, whether it be for roads, water, rail, electricity or data, will always be inherently monopolistic, since it does not make sense to build multiple parallel networks.
The physical network is best built and run b the government, with services run on top of the networks by multiple competing providers who pay a maintenance fee for use of the network.
If you think the physical internet infrastructure is better off built by private companies, then do you also think road networks and water networks should be 100% privately owned?
I should point out, if you're American, that some parts of AT&T's U-verse service are precisely this - fibre to the node, then VDSL to the premises. Not true in all areas though - U-verse also uses ADSL2+ and even some ADSL1 in some areas still, I believe.
Compare to Verizon FiOS which is a true FTTH service.
and unless you have a New York City density, it takes more money than you can ever get a return on to run FTTH to every hobbit hole and cabin. now, you can remote gig etherswitches and run spokes of fiber off that to cut the cost of cable placement, and you can subtend more dslams on short runs from a control unit, but if you have copper in the ground, it's still valuable. you can punch 100 Mbit/sec from a dslam from 750 or so feet on copper pair, perhaps bonding two pairs, and that's massively sufficient. if you can get within a mile of a house with a dslam, why not use the copper you've got?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
So if G.Fast can extend VDSL2 to 1 Gigabit at a couple hundred meters, are people really going to outgrow that by the end of the decade?
Copper links simply lack the capacity to support the massive growth in data consumption that analysts predict. Eventually, Australians will have no choice but to replace those links with fiber, probably before the end of this decade
Since the average speed in Australia is 4.8mbit now it seems unlikely that people are going to be demanding 10gigabit connections in 7 years. Even 100mbit would be about 20 times their current average and VDSL2 can already do 100mbit for short distances.
By the end of the decade, point-to-point (with high-gain directional antennas) wireless networking may be the way to go to get better bandwidth from the fiber cabinet to the home - put an antenna tower on the cabinet and hang an antenna on houses.
"while google in the US is rolling out gigabit, and the private sector in UK is doing the same...."
Google are not "rolling out gigabit". Google have realistically done nothing more than a very small-scale trial. Add together the population of everywhere Google Fiber covers or has promised to cover -- that's Kansas City, Austin, Provo, and one neighborhood in Palo Alto -- and make the erroneous assumption that every resident is covered, and you still have a "rollout" that touches only 3.3 million people in a nation of 313.9 million.
That's one percent of the population if you make an erroneous assumption, and far less than one percent in actual fact. More than 99% of the population has no access to Google Fiber, and is unlikely to have access to it in the next decade.
In fact, the vast majority of the US would *love* to have access to anything near 100mbps, because that, for most of us, would be a HUGE upgrade from what we have now. And even if it is available, it's typically accompanied by a ridiculous pricetag.
I'm in the 64th-largest metropolitan statistical area in the US, and I'm lucky to have 100mbps internet available to me -- but it's priced at US$115 per month (AU$127/month) BEFORE equipment charges, fees, taxes, etc. And that price tag also assumes I am paying at least another US$20 (AU$22) per month plus equipment charges, fees, and taxes for TV service, whether I want it or not. Last time I checked, the penalty for not having the TV service was higher than the cost of the TV service.
So realistically, just getting 100mbps internet in the US will set you back US$150 (AU$165) per month, if it's even available to you -- and chances are, it isn't. Gigabit in the US? It's a pipe dream for almost all of us.
max download speed is around 4-5 Kb/s.
Either you have a typo there, or you should consider upgrading to a modem from the 80's ;)
Congratulations Australia, you are going to get an internet similar to the USA. Mediocre DSL to the house, but fiber to the curb, just like AT&T has been hyping to gullible public for years. HAHAHAHA
AN fiber?
What are you? American?
Are you sure you know where America is?
Verizon FiOS is FTToutsideofTH, not fiber to the router. They actually use cable (as in nasty TV connectors) to link the fiber termination box to the TV cable box and the WiFi router.
It actually makes it more flexible to install and doesn't impact bandwidth given the reach, but it's fundamentally no different than fiber to the curb.
Does anyone actually know how much was actually spent on this fiber rollout? Because according to the info I can find there are 567,338 miles of roads in Australia, simply dividing that $44 Billion up amongst that comes out to ~$77,500 per mile of cable along the road. That seems exceedingly high, and that's if you were running cable down every single public street & highway. I realize that you can't just run cable and have to have switches, servers and associated hardware but my understanding has always been that those were the cheaper portions of the rollout. I think a local telco rolled out fiber for at least 40 miles of local roads and I don't think it cost them over a million (or about 25,000 per mile) with everything included.
5 Mbps should be enough for anybody.
What kind of upgrade path is their from FTTN to FTTH? After some googling, all the articles/discussion I've seen about this are marred with political ideology.
If paying for FTTN and then FTTH is individually cheaper then going straight to FTTH (even if the total is more expensive) it may be easier for a future government to sell as prudent policy.
Government finances work differently to normal finances, when you're guaranteed a certain level of tax income, two smaller payment (over a period of time) that sum up to be larger than one big payment can be regarded as easier on the budget and easier to sell politically - most people care about short term costs.
Copper can carry gigabit or higher and nobody has fiber optic cabling in their house's walls. So yeah, do that, obviously.
I think the Australian FTTH proposal technically only delivers fibre to the 'outside' of the house too. Or more exactly, it's fibre to the ONT (Optical Network Termination). The installers will then run CAT6/ethernet to a point inside the house for you (or multiple points if you want to pay for it).
Don't quote me on it but I believe the ONT can be placed either inside or outside the building, or in a garage etc. Depends on the particular house.
The HFC, like the copper, is not government owned.
Living in suburban Adelaide I can tell you that Subscription TV via cable is nearly universal here. Cable internet used to be huge here but has been replaced by DSL services.
And everyone knows wired data transfer is dying (and not in a BSD way), both governments plans are a waste of money.
Got Shadowrun? Awakened Worlds
Wouldn't bother me if roads or water were privately run....
electricity is being sold off....
again, the Australian government used to own all the infrastructure.....
they sold it all off, and are wasting money doing it all again.....
your idea is correct, but there is no reason why a privately run company can not do the exact same thing.....
one company own's the infrastructure, and private companies who want access to this, all pay an upkeep fee of the infrastructure....
no reason this needs to be government done at all.... and we all know about how much government run anything wastes a fuck load of money.
Problem is that the copper network is mostly very old, so, no , it won't carry 1G from the node to the home, in many areas, and most often those remote ones, just getting voice is a problem. Even in many of the urban areas the copper network is clapped out pile of shit - and expensive to maintain now.
I suspect that without interference Telstra would have been quietly replacing it's copper network with fibre as the copper fell apart anyway.
When we lived in Maryland in 2006, we had one of the earlier FIOS installations. The 'outside box' had three cables going into the house: Cat3 (or something like that) for phone, Cat5 for data and coax for TV. I think they've gone through a few generations of equipment since then, but I'd consider our configuration true FTTH.
I would have a contest where companies would be invited to compete to see who can do the best job for the most reasonable price. Each with a government team member to watch, document, and QC to make sure no shortcuts are made and the connections are good. Make it like the competition of the US Transcontinental Railroad. Make it like a reality show where companies are competing not only for future contracts but also so their companies don't look bad. Then assign the top 5 companies different cities to begin work.
You got me. Typo. Mb/s. :)
It's not a bug, it's a lepidopter!
Makes sense.
Pulling fiber through existing walls is a pain, when cable can just be rammed through, and most people can't be trusted with optical fibers and connectors: "look Ma, I can bend it along the edge of the shelf and then loop it around that nail, stop kneading and give me a hand"
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/bigger-than-google-fiber-la-plans-citywide-gigabit-for-homes-and-businesses/
seems to indicate google want to roll it out....
yes they would pick where people / businesses are first....
or do you expect them to trial it in a suburb where 10 people live?
Don't quote me on it but I believe the ONT can be placed either inside or outside the building, or in a garage etc. Depends on the particular house.
I can confirm that is generally correct for FIOS (so I can't imagine why it wouldn't be in Oz), since at my old house it was inside, my current one it is outside, and I've visited homes with it in the garage.
That'll likely be far better than the service the phone company wants to provide to our neighborhood. I wonder how much the carriers will be dinging the residents for this service? (Didn't see anything about that in the article.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
So New Zealand has better internal than Australia? Ha Ha.
We've got ADSL2+ and VDSL with fibre going to street cabinets where homes are more than a few km from exchanges.
TelstraClear was gloating about their fibre to the node before they pulled out of the country and sold themselves to Vodafone when the government said they would over-build their DOCSIS network.
Also, while observers in the US like to think Australia have expensive broadband.....
I'm paying smack on 100 AUD a month... 100Mbps, 1 TB a month....
but if you want less speeds through the fibre infrastructure, you can get it as cheap as $50 a month....
buy the equipment outright yourself.... no other fee's apart from your ISP
Telstra is the Australian telco monopoly. It's a bit like BT in the UK, but without the customer dedication, commitment to upgrades or ethics, fairness, and sense of social responsibility of its management team. The new government sacked the board of NBN Co and has stacked the new board with ex- and current Telstra insiders. It's pretty obvious that once the NBN Co has finished rolling out the fibre network, the plan is to sell it to Telstra. This will ensure a fairer outcome for all Telstra shareholders, but may be a drag on the rest of the country.
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
Install was $7k here
You can do Ethernet to the ONT if you want to, which can eliminate the Verizon router inside altogether (if you don't use them for TV). To upgrade to gigabit you need a new ONT usually, but the system can easily accommodate gigabit throughout.
AT&T's service is a mess in comparison. I've had several friends who needed the 30-year old copper replaced at least from the street to the demark point.
Today using FTTN as anything but a stopgap to FTTH is really a joke.
For Australia, the original goal and benefit of the NBN was that the physical infrastructure is independent of the service provider. FTTN makes that difficult.
Friend of mine just moved into a new house that has NBN on it in NW Sydney. Fibre goes all the way to a termination box inside the garage and then he has standard cat6 ethernet ports connected to the fibre modem. No ability to have a fibre switch in there according to him.
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton
Australia has thin copper to the exchange or digital loop carrier (DLC) (RIM Remote Integrated Multiplexer).
The copper is old, has be patched up over years. The fixes are usually to get the service working again - as in data and voice - not a real repair. So a lot of copper lines are now shared and the amount of spare lines has dropped over many years.
Back at the exchange you have an adsl 2+ card via your isp or the telco (rented). Hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) exists by only for the push of pay tv and internet via the telco who rolled it out.
Australia had looked at the options:
Copper to a powered, cooled node then onto optical at a cabinet in the street level. If you wanted optical to the node, you would have to pay extra and then pay more for 'rental' of the new optical line. Add too much optical to the home and the copper and the Node has to start to balance power, cooling and speed.
The other aspect is copper costs (buy or rent) and who pays for the upkeep and power given that its a telco's copper and they want 'rent' or a sale..
The other option was clean, new optical that needs less electrical power (and skilled workers for power/telco work per street). The speed of the optical can then be set well into the future.
The main points are the telco 'sale' of copper or long term 'rental' deal vs just been "another" isp/telco on optical.
Hybrid fiber-coaxial was also seen as been opened to 'other' telco/isp but the speed and congestion would not be useful over time.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Telstra.
GG
You didn't read your own article, did you? Google have nothing to do with that request for proposal, and the only mention of Google at all is that of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency GM Steve Reneker, who flat-out says what Google are offering with Google Fiber wouldn't be of interest as a proposal, even if they did offer it. (And they haven't, nor likely will they, as they've flat-out said they have no interest in a widespread rollout.)
Everyone knows ?
I don't.
Using cables has an enormous advantage:
It doesn't foul up the RF spectrum (or not as much as with Radio emitters).
Wireless may be a lot more convenient (in terms of equipment connectivity and installation), but has some serious capacity limitations:
- RF spectrum occupancy. (In which they will be in competition with : TV, radio, satellite, baby cams, wifi, Air traffic control, police, the list goes on and on and on...)
- Limited number of possible clients for each location and frequency. (if you need to enable access to more endpoints in the same location, you need another set of frequencies. In some cases you will also need both more antennas and more Radio equipment)
- Very expensive base station equipment.
Energy usage is also a lot lot higher.
Whatever advances you may get in RF that enable more bandwidth, you will almost certainly have the same with cable technologies.
It will be a long time (if ever) until we are fully wireless.
So you also didn't read my post, either. I didn't say that Australia had expensive broadband. I said it had *inexpensive* broadband, compared to the US. (But then, most places do.)
Grandparent suggested the US as a model for Australia to follow. I pointed out that the US is a cautionary tale, not a model to follow.
Not sure what you are calling a "typical suburb"? Fibre optic to the home is common in the major cities, there were two competing networks set up in the 90's for cable TV, Optus and Telstra. The 1990's cable rollout "race" by private telco's was an even more ridiculous state of affairs than the NBN, two companies hung wires in the same (profitable) places using the same poles, then ignored the rest of the country. In the 90's they were banging your door down to hook you up, offering free cable just to have the wire hooked to your house. The odd thing is that these days neither cable network operator will hook up an apartment/flat/unit to cable, but have no problems hooking up the house next door provided cable is already hung on that street..
The cable I am using from home to type this post is currently running at 19Mbps down and 0.5 Mbps up, I don't know anyone who has satellite TV but quite a few that have cable. I live in the burbs about 20km east of Melbourne CBD. It's a different story for my daughter who lives 300km east of Melbourne CBD, her experience is closer to what you describe. It costs me ~$70/m and last time I looked ~250GB limit.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Private sector has failed a minimum of 4 major times to service this country
1) Telstra, telecom used to work fine, had maintenance crews, kept it all going - telstra laid them all off, brought them back as contractors then pay them to do the minimum amount of work (Thanks LNP)
2) HiBIS - money thrown at businesses to connect people to broadband - private sector scammed it to it's maximum extent
3) Broadband Connect - even more money thrown at business to connect people to broadband - private sector scammed it to it's maximum extent
4) The Australian Broadband Guarantee.....
What is the obsession with fiber straight to your home? Pull in 10Gig to the neighborhood over fiber, connect 50 houses with 100m (330ft) of Cat6a UTP for Gigabit speeds. For difficult or longer runs, STP Cat6a could be ran, but STP is a bit more expensive and requires a bit of grounding know-how to avoid creating ground loops.
I could not survive in Australia and their evil bandwidth caps, that said, I wonder if they'll get a little more freedom after this?
Subscription TV is delivered by satellite in virtually all areas of Australia, save for small sections of urban Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Far more cost effective for such a big and sparsely settled continent. So the cable footprint would be lucky to cover 5 or 10% of the population.
It's actually about 28% of the population. http://delimiter.com.au/2013/02/15/turnbull-confirms-hfc-areas-last-to-get-fttn-if-at-all/
The state of the copper network in Australia is so poor that it may as well be replaced by fibre. Telstra is very secret about the level of faults but it's thought that they handle upwards of 1 million faults per year costing them over $A1 billion/year. Telstra's maintenance on the copper network has been predicated on its replacement by fibre so they haven't been doing upgrades for over a decade. In addition about 19% of all phone connections in Australia are on piggybacked pair gain lines which
can't do any form of ADSL. The whole FTTN bullsh*t is just the Liberal party responding to pressure from their owners, which include News Ltd (Rupert Murdoch).
Murdoch was seriously pissed that the ALP FTTH network would have been out his control as a government monopoly so Murdoch's cable TV company would have
to pay for bandwidth and compete with anyone else who wanted to distribute TV across the fibre network. The push back is happening in Australia - a petition on change.org got 270,000 signatures in 10 days - the politicians are starting to feel the heat from the electorate. There has been no explanation from the arrogant twat, Turnbull, who is minister of communications, where they are going to acquire the continuous 750 MWh of electricity to power the FTTN cabinets.
while google in the US is rolling out gigabit, and the private sector in UK is doing the same....
In a few small areas.
Most of suburbia in the UK is getting fiber to the cabinet from BT openreach, better than what we had before certainly but way off what fiber to the home can deliver. Openreach are planning to do a "fiber to the premisis on demand" service but it looks like it will be pretty expensive (installation charges predicted to be in the thousands iirc making it impractical for anyone who isn't well settled) and they don't seem to be planning to offer gigabit speeds, upstream in particular seems to be being artificially limited (presumablly to protect expensive buisness fiber services).
Many rural areas look like they will either continue to be stuck with ADSL or possiblly get fiber to the cabinet but not be able to take full advantage of it due to long subloops.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I used to live with an Optus cable technician and the Telstra and Optus networks are not Fibre to the Home. They are Hybrid Fibre-Coaxial networks, so fibre to a node point and then coaxial to the homes that node services, with only a few nodes per suburb. It's still better than ADSL but the copper component still limits the overall speeds.
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
That cable you have isn't the same as what the NBN was doing. It is a hybrid coax.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fibre-coaxial
The fibre is downstream only, not upstream.
My rubbish ADSL beats your upstream by double yet my downstream is 10Mbit.
Hence the massive flaw with HFC.
The problem with that idea is that they would have to run Cat6 cables directly to the houses and at that point, why not just go with fiber all the way. The FTTN plan as it stands will use Telstras ageing copper network for the last mile connections.
U-verse did include FTTP at one point: I had fiber to my router in an apartment I lived in 3 years ago. However, U-verse is now nothing in particular since AT&T have rolled all of their residential data offerings under the U-verse banner, including sub-1Mbps DSL that they will still sell as U-verse service.
The draft NBNCo Corporate Plan (2013) is available to understand what Labor were building. The reality is Labor turned the abundance of fibre into a scarce resource:
In Australia, Labor planned both quotas (1TB being the largest available from most RSPs) and speed tiers from 12/1Mbps to 1Gbps. The plan was for less than 5% to have 1Gbps speeds in 2028! This is because the high cost of data to RSPs ($20/Mbps) will make 1Gbps plans expensive.
Only a truly incompetent government could succeed in building a FTTP network where 50% of connections are slower than HFC, FTTN, 4G and approaching half of ADSL2+ connections. Sadly many in Australia were distracted by the headline speeds and failed to appreciate what was being promised.
The best suggestion I've heard yet is to simply loan Google $20 billion interest free for two decades and ask them to build a wholesale network.
It's also not available to all people within that area. I live in an area covered by both Telstra and Optus cable, but can connect to neither since I live in a unit. Neither Telstra nor Optus will connect their HFC network to units.
Get peanuts.
What we saw in this election was the other edge of the double edged blade which is democracy. There's wisdom of the crowds, then there's the complete opposite too.
As soon as you're visiting every single house to do Cat6a you might as well do fibre.
Surprise. Everyone will have to live with a variant on U-Verse.
Ah... conservatives. I SHUDDER to think of what privately owned and operated roads would be like. Eugh... No thank you. Oh, and I work for a large corporation. i assure you, they're not any brighter or better than government. Any large organization has beaurocracy and red tape. It's kind of an emergent property.
But I LIKE my basic services to be provided by the government, because then I at least have a little say in it. I can't vote out the CEO of a company. Nope. I'm a small business owner. I WANT my customers to be able to drive to me. I want those roads for shipping. I want to drive to work! I want public utilities..... Some things you just don't want profit motive in. Some things just aren't profitable, but need to be done anyway. So, we all chip in and get it done, and we all benefit from it FAR more than we put in.
Basic infrastructure creates business opportunities. I'm happy to pay taxes for that.
lets put your 100m in perspective my personal property is not large in Australian standards infact in my metropolitin town it is one of the smaller blocks (granted in new estates they tend to be about half the size of what mine is now) My front verge is about 40meters long about the same as all the houses on the street so if there was VDSL cabnet on the corner of my block it would only be able to service at most 3 houses on each side of the street in any all directions. So lets say that cabinet is in a crossroad and all blocks are the same typical size as mine each cabinet would only support 24 houses at best. Now that drops even more when you factor most of the houses are on slightly larger blocks that probably have 45-50m on the front verge and it also doesn't factor that the house is often 5-10m from the curb.
I have lived in many areas in both Brisbane and Melbourne. Cable is only available in certain areas, mainly inner suburbs. The current government last time they were in rolled out the cable (not fibre) but did a really bad job of it. They set a deadline of when it had to be completed by and no work was allowed to be done after that date. As a result, at my parents house, the cable was bundled in a loop on a power pole 50m from their house and has stayed like that for the past 15 years. To make matters worse, Telstra designated exchanges as country exchanges IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SUBURBS across Sydney and Melbourne, meaning that for those people they couldn't get speeds faster than ADSL1!
"not least of all because Australia is one of the most sparsely populated countries on Earth"
This statement is extremely misleading. Australia's population lives almost entirely in urban areas and has vast amounts of land that are not populated at all. This makes it a much, much easier task, not a much much harder task.
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And Perth.
I only add this becase there's a whackjob on one of the Australian tech forums who - despite living in Perth himself, repeatedly being presented with lists of suburbs that are cabled, and provided with first-hand information from customers connected to it - likes to claim there's no Foxtel cable in Perth.
He's such a whackjob that he's likely to use your comment as a citiation to support his claim in one of his forum posts - or, worse, one of his frequent submissions to the regulator ACMA.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
I dont know what you call common but if you dont live in expensive parts of Sydney or Melbourne, you have no cable.
Over 90% of the urban areas inside major cities (300,000+ population) have no cable, let alone fibre and are on ASDL which is at best 24 mbit down and 1 mbit up however the average is much lower, around 5 Mbit down for ADSL.
Fibre optic is not common in the major cities.
This laid no fibre to the home. What they used was copper coaxial cable for connecting the last mile and this coverage is extremely limited.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Modems from the 80s were far slower, try 0.3 kb/sec. Only in the 90s did you see speeds over 5kb/sec.
How much to put the PC in the node and remote desktop to it over the slow copper?
The current governments plan is to obey the order of Fox not-News boss Rupert Murdoch. That is stop broadband. So first step, stop new FTTH services, so they are only carrying out existing contracted services. Next step FTN, well, they are not going to do it, quite simply they are going to spend the next three odd years talking about doing it and then of course just prior to the next election change their minds and go back to FTTH, they really truly promise (After setting is place as many obstructions as possible).
Just to muddy up the waters, they intend to buy the incumbents rotting copper network after renting the conduits in which it resides initial for running fibre optic and no of course for nothing, that purchase is just a quick back hander for, well, no one is telling. A glaring example of the mismanagement the guy they put in charge of the NBN was the douche nozzle who got fired for losing so many customers after raising the monthly charge by $10 and dropping the cap from 20GB to 3GB and then telling his customers he only raised the price by 20% and trying to force the continuation of existing contracts, all under the protection of the same political party that is now killing the NBN.
So FTN will consist of;
Discussing FTN
Designing FTN
Tendering FTN
Discussing the FTN Tenders
Redesigning FTN
Re-Tendering FTN
Next Election - FTN sucks we promise to do FTTH.
As a bonus for Fox not-News corp the current government is also looking to destroy the public broadcaster the ABC http://www.abc.net.au/. Why does Rupert Murdoch hate broadband Fox not-News number one on cable and number 36 on the internet also Myspace as a glaring example of their inability to adapt to the internet. So Australia finally managed to get Fibre Optic Internet going only to have it killed by a corrupt government at the behest of a single corporation and months of the worst examples of biased news political coverage. JFC why haven't you locked up that bastard yet?
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Yes, and in apartment blocks there was to be one ONT per six apartments. The apartment owners could then chose what service and service provider to deliver the service to their apartment. This was intended to enable competition, rather than having the choice of either one cable company or no cable. American readers should understand that under Labor's plan the cable company was not permitted to retail direct to the end user, the cable company wholesaled the cable access to ISPs who were to compete with each other to provide the retail service.
Inner city Sydney is not a "typical suburb" of all major cities IMHO either. While a bit of Sydney got cable in 1996 before Telstra and Optus stopped their rollout a lot of other places didn't. I live about a thirty minute walk from the middle of Brisbane and there is nothing but rotting copper wire in the ground (wrapped in paper in parts!). Every time it rains I get a crackling sound on the phone and have completely lost the connection and had to get a tech out to do line work six times over the last few eight years.
Not unless you are almost close enough to spit on the node. Look up how far you can run ethernet for details. Not much good for sprawling suburbs, which is a lot of them. Those in rural areas can just forget about it.
Correct. Now the man that was in charge of that service provider back when it started being a problem is in charge of the NBN. I predict that a few people will make a lot of money "projecting" a rollout that will not happen, just like in 1996.
Meanwhile Ziggy, destroyer of Telstra, is already swinging the axe around in the NBN. Soon nothing will be standing apart from the accounts section that delivers millions into his bank account.
The ONT is typically placed in the building. I've had fiber in two locations - one had it run to the basement where I used the MOCA connection over the cable line to my router, the other it's in the closet by my apartment door where I run ethernet. They do have trouble with ethernet because they assume you use coax and don't all know how to activate it.
Not sure what you mean by common.....
Major cities have cable strung down some streets. The existing copper (held together by plastic bags) network is falling to pieces, and most people are receiving 3-8Mbps over their adsl.
Many people have issues when it rains (refer to plastic bag comment), and their phone line/adsl problems are "fixed" by patching them to a different cable pair, and someone else gets patched to the bad pair.
Replacement is needed, and the Telcos are running on a commercial manner and are preferring to milk the existing system until it's death, without upgrading to newer technology (which corporation wouldn't? ). The government N.B.N. was supposed to upgrade the network universally, since the Telcos have no interest.
The current government are business oriented, and common interest deficient.
That was a stupid time - telstra was just following optus street for street laying fibre/coax. A mate of mine lives in brisbane, and his side of the street can't get cable, but the other side can.
It's the obsession you get when a monopoly has been letting the copper network rot since 1996.
Australia is a little bit bigger than Texas and the houses are a bit spread out by close to an order of magnitude what you are suggesting in what is considered relatively densely populated suburbs.
Good for you. However, you're not in the majority. In reality, what you have depends on your suburb. All the new developments (ie. in the last 10 years) are serviced by Satelite for Pay-TV and DSL for Internet. It's only the really new developments (last 2 years) that have fibre.
Everyone in my suburb has a DSLproblem. The DSLAMs in most areas are full and Telstra won't upgrade. Mine is about 5km away (as the crow flies), so give it about 7km of crappy copper. Every time it rains, I lose my internet and VoIP, but Telstra don't care, as my service is not through them.
You misunderstand the urban environment here. :)
Most of these places are single homes and not apartment buildings. Also even most of the apartment don't have basements
Sometimes a minute after hopping onto the PC I think "Gee the internet's a bit slow", and I logon to the ADSL modem (I don't get ADSL2 as there is too much copper between our house and the exchange - I might get 1Mbs on ADSL2 if it worked) and look at the front page. Often my upload bandwidth is higher than the download speed. Once I had ~60k down, 800k up! After rebooting the modem I get anywhere from 1.5M/s to 2.5M/s with ~500k/s down, and it's only a matter of minutes before it will typically log a retrain event because of a problem with the flimsy copper cable somewhere between my house and the exchange. My ISP has never been Telstra, but they're the ones looking after that stretch of phone line.
Since Telstra was privatised (as a whole, not sold off as infrastructure and service separately) I've observed a number of pits left to crumble with temporary safety barriers around them for many months on end, at least one seemed to be there for a couple of years... (or at least replaced regularly over that time as kids like to pick these things up and use them for their own purposes). At my previous address I also had a somewhat shouted phone conversation with one of the neighbours when I was calling someone else, thanks to crosstalk. I've had family with a phone line that dropped out intermittently thanks to a corroded connection in the pit (how many others have mentioned water in the pits? It happens all the time, everywhere) and it took 4 van visits to the premises to find that fault.
NBN was going to not only give us an awesome experience "on the interwebs" but was going to fix the reliability of the crud that is our PSTN. Since they do not have a majority in the lower house (though they're negotiating) I've got my fingers crossed that the government is forced to call a double dissolution next year and the people can once again vote for the future...
The biggest issue with HFC is the shared medium. NBNCo fibre uses a 2.5/1.2Gbit OLT with a 32 or 64-split GPON local loop, a design that shares many of the same issues and has a maximum design speed compariable with FTTN w/VDSL local loops (~100Mbit). The biggest benefit of fibre is being able to deliver 100Mbit over 20KMs instead of 300m with DSL technology.
NBN doesn't use compatible GigE technology, so you wouldn't be able to use an fibre SFP or switch anyway. NBN's even heavily customised the firmware on the NTUs so nothing is quite standard.
Fibre to the home might be common in Melbourne but it sure as hell isn't in Perth. We have several areas that can't even get ADSL and about 2 or 3 suburbs *in total* that can get cable.
It's not the fibre that's expensive - it's running new cabling of any type to the premises.
typical of the Australian Luddite party run by Prime Minister Mr Rabbit.even his communications minister was against their national fraudband fibre to the bowel plan.
What killed the NBN was that it was nothing more than a krudd brain fart, uncosted, unfeasible and just another labor mess that the grownups now in power have to clean up. Fuck Rupert Murdoch you say? Well fuck you and all the other treasonous labor/greens voters that have left australia with 300+ billion dollar debt. Why not get all your Kev07 t-shirts, tie them into a noose and do the gene pool a favour?
Wish I had mod points as you neatly some up the actual reason for the debate rather than the bullshit spun by the government and the supporting Murdoch media. Remember when 56k modems first come out and people were saying how incredible it was and we would never need faster? This is the crap they are spinning while trying to hobble the NBN by forcing it to buy into H(t)elstras decayed and rotten copper network for the last link to the homes. We build you a 400 hp engine but let the diff only cope with 25hp so you can't actually use the grunt you installed. Murdoch is fully aware that 1st world internet would be the death knock for the abysmal excuse for bundled cable (pay) tv he has as people would by streamed sessions of what they want without his overcooked advertising and re-re-re-re-runs. Tony Abbott (our Prime Minister; known as Toned Abs) owes him for the fox news type support he got before, during and after the election so has stacked Ziggy (who fucked up Telstra) onto the NBN to work his magic... I want fibre to my house so I can actually have real internet as my crap speed on the decayed copper network sucks, even worse when it rains. Fibre to the node aint fixing that.
Thanks for this. Now I understand why I can't just assume Oz's urban and suburban infrastructure or lack of it is comparable to that of where I live.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I will stand by that sweeping statement until you can give me 1, and it only needs to be 1, large publicly funded project that was delivered under budget in the last 20 years.
How big is large? I live in an area that has seen several local and regional projects (regional = serving a mostly-urban/suburban population of 5-15 million people - bigger than some countries) in the $0.1-2.0b range that came in under-budget and before-deadline, and that's just in the last 3-4 years.
There's a thing about high-profile publicly-funded projects: They tend to attract people who want to be in charge, which leads to costs related to fighting over how things will or won't be done and costs associated with the "losing" side either sabotaging the effort or just "auditing it to death" in hopes of finding some reason to either kill it or to make the proponents look bad so they (the proponents) will be politically weaker when the next high-profile project comes around. Since high-dollar non-black-budget projects tend to be high-profile, well, you get the picture.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Put a medium-sized antenna mast in every neighborhood with a few hundred highly-directional antennae pointing a clusters of 4-16 houses and put highly-directional rooftop antennae on each roof, and you can re-use the spectrum many times over.
Serve these neighborhood antennae with fibre if you can or highly-directional wireless if you can't.
The issues under this system will be that it's a whole new infrastructure including antenna sites, you will need to pick radio frequencies that are largely unaffected by weather and which don't compete with existing frequencies, etc. etc.
But assuming a weather-resistant block of frequencies that can feed lots of bandwidth to dozens of users at once is available, you won't have a frequency-allocation problem.
Another solution, one that may be more practical, is to just chuck the whole wire-to-the-home infrastructure and beef up the cell phone system so everyone can feed their home internet via cellular. Heck, in areas where the cellular network is already robust customers can simply "vote with their feet" now and cancel their land-line service entirely. You guys do have "number portability," don't you? If not, you should. It's nice.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.