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Australia's $44B Broadband Network May Settle For Fiber Near the Home

Posted by timothy on from the first-order-approximation dept.

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."

3 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. Fuck you Rupert Murdoch! by kramulous · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Fuck you Rupert Murdoch! by GumphMaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What killed the National Broadband Network as a progressive fibre-based infrastructure project was the politicisation of a technical project. The Parliament (not the Government), having decided to do the project should have allocated the money to the project for the next ten years, got the **** out of the way, and stayed there. However, at the time we had a corrosive opposition party that saw an opportunity to pester an internally fragile, and later minority, government. They could not let cheap political points lie for the greater good. That they had the help of certain vested commercial interests is not surprising, but that was only possible while the political division continued. Had the same politcial effort been put into constructive endeavours aimed at furthering the project we would still have a fibre-to-the-home network project, that was not in danger of being canned entirely (my prediction), and Murdoch and the shock-jocks would have been neutered.

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      Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
  2. Re:Not an issue, provided... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is infrastructure for the future of the nation. We are paying for this now to last the next fifty to a hundred years just like the copper network has. The issue is not that it will provide a service that is 'fine'. The issue is that what is provided relies on a slow, outdated and highly degraded copper network. The copper network in australia is almost at the brink of failure, network engineers have described it as non-repairable. The new Government wants to save a few million dollars now by installing fiber to the node only, unfortunately this is going to cost billions of dollars ion the near future when we have to rip up all the old fiber connections to the nodes and re-run fiber to replace copper.
    Yes the solution may be fine now for most Australians, getting a full 10-22 meg broadband service will let most people "record a handful of HDTV-channels at once, surf the web or watch YouTube videos on 3-4 computers at once", However in ten or twenty years what kind of bandwidth requirements will we have? I know twenty years ago I was happy with 56 kbps dialup... now I shudder at the thought of that kind of bandwidth.