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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."
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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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).
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.
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.