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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.
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.
.
Well it was never going to be FTTH ~everywhere~. The original plan proposed by the Labor government was for every town with more than 1000 people to have FTTH, with the remainder being served with either fixed wireless, or for the most remote 1% or so, satellite (which is already available of course, but the plan included a significant upgrade of satellite speeds and capacity). Doing the calculations, it essentially meant 93% of the population would get FTTH.
The Liberal government from the outset said that if they got elected, they'd scale back the FTTH and rely mostly on FTTN/VDSL for existing developed areas (though, still supporting FTTH for new greenfields development, since if you have to lay cable anyway it may as well be fibre). As you say, that's probably fast enough for most purposes provided you can keep copper line lengths down to a few hundred metres at most.
The criticisms of this revised plan, broadly speaking, are that:
1. Much of the existing copper is in bad condition and would need to be replaced anyway anyway to deliver decent VDSL speeds and reliability. Telstra, responsible for managing the copper network, has publicly stated that they consider the copper network at end of life.
2. The Liberals' plan, compared to the original Labor plan, would only result in cost savings of 20-30%, yet deliver an outcome that is a lot more than 20-30% worse (in terms of speeds, reliability and future capacity for growth and upgrades).
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!
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 ;)
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.
Problem is, private enterprise will simply cherry pick the few dense and/or wealthy suburbs to roll out to that will generate them the biggest return on investment and cover only those areas (see: Foxtel and Optus cable). While I support an appropriate mix of public and private investment in such things, if it were left to the private sector alone, many smaller and even mid-sized settlements wouldn't have ANY form of broadband today.
Australia, despite its large size and small population, is actually significantly more urbanised than, say, the US. Cover the dozen or so largest cities (capitals plus Newcastle, Wollongong, Gold Coast etc.) and you've got 90%+ of the population (unlike the US which has hundreds of mid-sized cities dotted across the whole country and a much higher percentage living in rural areas). Sprawling suburbia is indeed rampant but at least it's clustered together in a relatively small number of locations.
The Liberal proposal is cheaper and more modest than Labors, but only by 20-30%. Yet it will be finished only a year or two earlier and the outcomes are more than 20-30% inferior (think not only in terms of speed, but future capacity to expand and upgrade the service, and maintenance costs etc.). Labor's proposal was more expensive but actually gets you more bang for buck over the long term, I think.
I'm pretty technologically and politically agnostic on the matter. I don't really care which plan gets up at the end of the day. And if private enterprise covers my area then I'm happy that they do so. But realistically I think the government needs some role in this, if not in actually delivering the network, then at least in mandating certain basic standards of access and rules about geographic coverage.
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.
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.
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"
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.
For most present-day purposes, perhaps. If 100Mb/s+ broadband is ubiquitous in a few years, along with whatever other technology is coming along, no-one knows today what opportunities will be created.
It's not a bug, it's a lepidopter!
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.
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.
1. Much of the existing copper is in bad condition and would need to be replaced anyway anyway to deliver decent VDSL speeds and reliability. Telstra, responsible for managing the copper network, has publicly stated that they consider the copper network at end of life.
I have three questions:
1. Does Telestra still own the copper?
2. As part of the NBN, does Telestra have to lease their copper to anyone that wants to provide service over it?
2. The Liberals' plan, compared to the original Labor plan, would only result in cost savings of 20-30%, yet deliver an outcome that is a lot more than 20-30% worse (in terms of speeds, reliability and future capacity for growth and upgrades).
I recall reading a few months ago that Rupert Murdoch was trying to screw with the elections so that Rudd (Labor) would lose and his 90%+ FTTH plan would die and be replaced by FTTN.
3. So how did it come to pass that Rudd won, yet Labor's FTTH plan died and got replaced by the Liberal Party's FTTN?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
100Mb/s+ has been ubiquitous in countries with far bigger populations and economies than australia for a long time now, I keep hearing this excuse that once Australia has 100mbs all sorts of new technologies will be created. It hasn't happened elsewhere, why would such a tiny population suddenly create this surge in technology when more advanced and economically viable areas haven't. Australia will NEVER be a catalyst for technical advancement, the population base is simply too small, every house could have 100 gig connections it would still change nothing except put us in even more debt.
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"
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.
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.
It *wont* be enough, but it's not because the technology isnt sufficient.
See the fiber to the home is sold as a panacea for problems that it wont actually address. If your uplink is throttled back to nearly nothing it doesnt matter a bit how wide your pipe is otherwise, it's still inadequate. A simple 1gb symmetrical dsl link over copper wire is something the ISPs have the ability to offer but absolutely refuse to. So what will they offer over fibre? 40mbps!!!! (But read the fine print, it's 256k up, and absolutely worthless except for 'consuming' their 'premium' offerings.)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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 answer to illogically high costs is always the same: government.
As I recall this happened when the South Brisbane exchange was relocated a few years ago. Everyone who was on that exchange ended up with a brand new fibre to the premises connection to replace the copper.
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 have to ask, what could you possibly be downloading to consume 950GB+ a month. I use netflix Hulu, download torrents daily and play a huge amount of games and I struggle to do more than 200-250gb a month.
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.
3. So how did it come to pass that Rudd won, yet Labor's FTTH plan died and got replaced by the Liberal Party's FTTN?
The Labor party lost and Rudd has subsequently quit as a Member of Parliament
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
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.
that's probably fast enough for most purposes
There is one major problem with this statement that I saw summed up in a comment on this article pretty well:
http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/nbn-petitioners-target-turnbull-mps-20131126-hv3t1.html
GMan:
"1925: Here's our new plan for the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It'll be a bit cheaper and we'll finish it sooner. And 2 lanes will be plenty..."
Going cheap on the NBN is just another case of a political party fucking things up for future generations for short term political gain (i.e. a better bottom line in their budget). Their justification being that the previous government forced their hand into doing so by economic mis-management is cop out at best.
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.
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.
"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.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
You, sir, are an idiot.
The FTTH GPON was going to be deployed as 2.48Gbit downstream and 1.24Gbit upstream, servivcing 32 users. The contention ratios and upstream capabilities are freaking awesome.
By comparison the cheap FTTN proposal is being designed with 2GBit backhaul servicing 200 users. This sucks. Now, even if they upgraded to 2 x 10G fibres, you are still heavily limited in your upstream bandwidth by the nature of VDSL - all of those signal converging together cause significant co-interference.
Finally, I'd like to see how a "simple copper can do 1Gb" in any real world conditions. Good quality Cat5E can 1GB over 4 pairs (not a single pair), and only for 100M. When you start looking at single pairs of shitty corroded cable low diameter cable, bundled together in groups of 100, all co-interfereing, and having to travel 500M to 1km, it's a completely different story.
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.
1. Much of the existing copper is in bad condition and would need to be replaced anyway anyway to deliver decent VDSL speeds and reliability. Telstra, responsible for managing the copper network, has publicly stated that they consider the copper network at end of life.
I have three questions:
1. Does Telestra still own the copper?
2. As part of the NBN, does Telestra have to lease their copper to anyone that wants to provide service over it?
1. Yes.
2. Short answer: No.
2 Long answer: Telstra is obligated to provide access to that coper under the a previous service agreement but the federal government is attempting to bypass this because it makes their FTTN project more expensive than existing ADSL or the Labor governments FTTH project. What happed was that the previous government negotiated a contract with Telstra for access to their pits and ducts in order to lay fibre to the home alongside copper an the copper network would be retired. The current government thinks that they will get ownership of the copper (and I see this going to the high court).
2. The Liberals' plan, compared to the original Labor plan, would only result in cost savings of 20-30%, yet deliver an outcome that is a lot more than 20-30% worse (in terms of speeds, reliability and future capacity for growth and upgrades).
I recall reading a few months ago that Rupert Murdoch was trying to screw with the elections so that Rudd (Labor) would lose and his 90%+ FTTH plan would die and be replaced by FTTN.
3. So how did it come to pass that Rudd won, yet Labor's FTTH plan died and got replaced by the Liberal Party's FTTN?
Unfortunately Labor didn't win, they lost by the narrowest of margins primarily due to some really dodgy preference deals.
The Liberal party thinks this gives them the right to rule by fiat, the NBN is only one of their abuses. They have broken the school funding promise (Gonski) they made before the election, they are running a military operation targeting asylum seekers that has no oversight, no reporting to the public and is completely ineffective as indicated by the asylum seekers that were living on a beach on Christmas Island for a week before being discovered by the locals and finally, after making such a big song and dance about Labor's debt, have increased the debt ceiling for themselves.
Australia has realised its mistake and Tony Abbott's popularity has dropped like a brick shaped asylum seeker boat. Sadly it realised its mistake too late
Fortunately, the Liberals dont take control of the senate for several months, so we have the hope of a double dissolution election and beyond that, minor parties will control the senate.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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
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.
The reason for their refusal is given as "physics".
10M/10M requires more wires than are univerally available and has a short range from the exchange.
Precisely because the population is so sparse, decent speeds could be a catalyst for, say, better telemedicine, better online learning...
Much as Murdoch tried to buy the last US elections, he DID buy the last Australian elections (owns 60-70% of the press here) - installing a puppet leader who would stop FTTH which threatens Murdoch's cable network.
is not happening either. The NBN is being killed off to be painted as a failed project of the previous government. What happens after that is still in limbo, but IMHO will be "let the market decide" which does not work when a government protected monopoly is only thing allowed in the market.
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
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.
"Australia will NEVER be a catalyst for technical advancement, the population base is simply too small..." Yep, just like Israel and Sweden couldn't be either.
"(But read the fine print, it's 256k up, and absolutely worthless except for 'consuming' their 'premium' offerings.)" Rubbish. Platinum - 100/40 Mbps - http://www.internode.on.net/residential/fibre_to_the_home/nbn_plans/
It's not the fibre that's expensive - it's running new cabling of any type to the premises.
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.
Unless you plan to fit each home with medical-grade equipment - you do not want misdiagnosis due to incorrect color calibration, telemedicine would be mostly between medical offices and remote exam offices where adequate equipment is available. For a simple video consultations, even 5Mbps would get the job done in HD since encoding mostly static scenes requires almost no bandwidth.
As for higher learning, what does higher learning requires so much more bandwidth for? Classroom presentations show little more than a blackboard and the teacher which are practically static and require almost no bandwidth to encode even at UHD resolutions. Most other classroom materials are text and images, nothing specially bandwidth-intensive there either. The only sort-of-bandwidth-intensive application I can think of is remote desktop and for most CAD and other software I have used from remote, 5Mbps was already enough to be usable under most circumstances. With a lot of specialized software, you can also simply setup a campus license server to lease out floating licenses to students running the software locally on their PC instead of having to host, build and maintain a large server farm.
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.