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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?
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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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 The issue is that what is provided relies on a slow, outdated and highly degraded copper network.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.
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.
However in ten or twenty years what kind of bandwidth requirements will we have?
In the United States, the analog "plain old telephone" network was designed to handle 300 to 3400Hz voice traffic, which in practice allowed for 9600bps communication at 2400 baud even if the telephone switches were using 1970s (or older?) technology and the wire from the switch to the end user was who-knows-how-old. By the 1980s, we had developed mathematics and modems that could use the same lines to get up to about 33.6kbps at 3,429 baud.
Disclaimer: The above is from unreferenced text available at Wikipedia (Modem, as of 22:53, 26 November 2013). Caveat reader.
In any case, odds are, whatever we put in the ground today, in 20 years we'll be able to do more with it than we can today.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
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.
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.
Actually it IS an issue. The previous government was planning to spend $37bn to provide FTTH which gives a future proof network and guarantees a starting speed of 100Mbps. By that I mean the next logical upgrade is a simple change of gear either end of the fibre making the network future proof. They were anticipating that most households would be able to cheaply upgrade to 1Gbps internet in the future.
Compared to that the current government wants to spend $20bn and provide FTTN at 25Mbps which I don't consider much of an upgrade from the current 25Mbps.
The previous government's plan was to spend double the amount to upgrade the internet for most Australians, and the current government is still spending a fortune for what will not be an upgrade for people in major cities, is in fact slower than the two major telcos current cable networks, gives benefit of a fast cabled connection to a few coastal towns, and then sticks the of rural Australian on either high latency satellite, or an overly congested wireless link.
As for upgrading the last mile if there's money to be made, you don't really understand the way these networks here work. We live in a country where some of the installation of the last mile was so cheap that people couldn't get more than one phone line to their house. That's right they split the 2pair phone line between 2 houses. It's a country where the last mile of copper is rapidly corroding due to cheap maintenance over the last 20 years. Even in major city centres its somewhat accepted in areas that your internet will drop out when it rains. Oh better yet the last mile is owned by one company.
I am still wondering how the coalition promoted the former Telstra CEO who absolutely destroyed the value of Telstra, who accepted that fines from the Ombudsman were a cost of doing business, to the CEO of NBN Co. It's almost like they deliberately want this to fail. I can think of better things to do with $20bn than waste it on nothing.
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.
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Having FTTH was to also not be reliant on the ageing copper network that has been shown to be temporarily fixed at areas with grocery shopping bags. There are regular outages as the copper fails and millions are spent in maintaining patchwork solutions.
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!
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.
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.
Note: this post is from a UK perspective, things may vary a little arround the world.
By the 1980s, we had developed mathematics and modems that could use the same lines to get up to about 33.6kbps at 3,429 baud.
And then things more or less stopped there. There was one more marginal speed increase (56K) but they had pretty much hit fundamental limits of the phone system. Pushing speeds further required bypassing parts of the phone network.
ISDN BRI delivered slightly better speeds in the 90s but the way it was priced (if you wanted a 128k connection you had to pay for two phone calls in addition to the ISDN line itself costing more than twice what an analog phone line did, AIUI most unmetered dialup packages allowed single channel ISDN but not dual channel ISDN) made it an expensive option. ADSL turned up in the early 2000s but again it was initially expensive.
ADSL gradually improved through the 00s first with the providers getting more confident and taking the artificial limits off and then by the providers moving to ADSL2. However while speeds improved so did the gap between the haves and the have nots. Those close to the phone exchange could get 20mpbs, those stuck a long way from the exchange got less than 1mbps and we have pretty much hit the limit of what phone cables can carry over long distances even with advanced modulation techniques.
In any case, odds are, whatever we put in the ground today, in 20 years we'll be able to do more with it than we can today.
The problems with mixed fiber/dsl systems don't really have anything to do with the fiber that is being put in the ground.
1: it still relies on that old phone wiring for the last hop. There are a few tricks we can pull but we have pretty much hit the limits of what those cables can carry over those distances. You still have the "cable length lottery" except now it's distance from the point of fiber to copper transition to the house rather than distance from the phone exchange to your house.
2: having all that infrastructure spread out like that makes it very difficult to do incremental upgrades. When ADSL was introduced they could start by putting one DSLAM in a phone exchange and patching the subscribers to it, when one DSLAM filled up they could add another. It didn't matter that only a few percent of customers were taking DSL intitially because the phone exchange was large. On the other hand there were places in the UK that had their POTs and ISDN delivered over an early fiber to the cabinet system and these were among the last to get ADSL because it wasn't worth putting a DSLAM in a cabinet for a handful of subscribers. So even if there was a system that could get a slight improvement over the current VDSL gear rolling it out would be very expensive.
The only real way to substantially improve a "partial fiber" system (fiber to the cabinet, fiber to the distribution point etc) is to push the fiber closer to the subscriber but each time you do that your infrastructure ends up even more spread out. Eventually you get to the point that you may as well just take the fiber all the way.
On the other hand with a fiber to the home system all you have to upgrade to deliver faster speeds is the consumer premises equipment and the exchange equipment. All the outdoor infrastructure can remain the same. Plus current fiber to the home equipment has a much wider margin over current needs than the VDSL that is being deployed in current fiber to the cabient system.
Deploying fiber to the cabinet now means in a few years time either internet speeds will stagnate again or a fiber to the home project will be needed anyway making the fiber to the cabinet equiment redundant.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The latter. Currently the most prevailing school of thought is that Rupert Murdoch's's media empire was instrumental in ensuring the coalition wins. Heck he sent a special advisor out with the sole purpose of ensuring his media empire did their best to discredit the labour government, also a document put on wikileaks about 8 months ago showed his support for the coalition was conditional on them ripping the NBN to shreds.
Mind you I don't blame him. With a 50% ownership of the largest and most over priced cable TV provider in the country he stood to loose a lot if all of Australia suddenly had the bandwidth to support HD movies on demand.
"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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Are you cherry picking your stats? By the time Ziggy turned Telstra over to Sol Trujilio (who I admit was no better) Telstra's share price had already collapsed. He insisted on investing the proceeeds of the sale in Asia and stupidly tried to turn Telstra into a Pacific multinational. Under his reign investment in infrastructure was greatly reduced in favour of instead implementing the world's first broadband caps (3GB per month on a 10mbps connection, you just can't make stupid shit like that up) and internet became steadily more expensive until the ACCC slapped them really hard (Although Sol was at the reigns when the ACCC finally ruled that Telstra must share it's shitty infrastructure). What else did he do.... ahh yes Ziggy was at the reigns when they started massively downsizing and outsourcing. The maintenance of the entire network was outsourced to third party contractors which not only saw the quality of installations deteriorate, but lead times for repair rise astronomically. I remember a time where a telephone line would be fixed within 2 days. Yet in 2002 when our line was broken we waited for over a month due to availability of maintenance staff. Stephen Conroy shat on Telstra after Ziggy had already done his best to ruin the company. You must really be wearing rose coloured glasses.
As for infrastructure there was never an estimate that the NBN was going to cost over $100bn that wasn't published by the coalition and then subsequently discredited. They were behind and slightly over budget but then many major projects typically will be. Mind you I'd be much happier spending $100bn on something that is future proof and brings benefit for all then spending $20bn on something that half Australians will see zero benefit from. At this point I would be happier if they scrapped the NBN completely and put the money back into schools. At least that's of benefit to Australians.
The reality is Nodes are few and far between in Australia. It's not like some European cities where nodes were at every street corner. Telstra was setup on the principle of lots of small exchanges, and in this situation FTTN doesn't make financial sense. I'm sorry to hear that you live on the outer rim but in every major city and many towns too the majority of people live within 400m of their exchange and get well in excess of 15mbps. Funny how you're happy to pay $800 for every man woman and child and get no benefit but cry foul for *allegedly* spending $4000 for something that not only offers 4x the speed of the best connection currently, but has a plan to offer 40x that speed in the future.
We as a country need to stop treating an internet connection as a nice little private project and should start treating it as critical infrastructure, because that's exactly where the future is heading. I fully expect to grow old in a world where loss of internet service is something more critical than a blocked sewage pipe.
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.
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.
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.
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.