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Australia's National Broadband Network Downgraded
RobHart writes "Following election promises to create a 'better, cheaper, sooner' National Broadband Network (NBN), the new Australian government has reneged, announcing instead the NBN will cost $12bn more and take four years longer. The critical change is that the new network is based on Telstra's aging and unreliable copper network rather than fiber to the home, as has already been delivered during the NBN roll out to date."
... that politicians lied or that government can't handle tech.
The solution obviously is to let the free market sort it out. Obviously the free market wants there to be high speed internet all through Australia, including in the outback. So, government, butt out!
Perhaps they can get Steve Erwin to catch some kangaroos or something to drag the fiber out?
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
So the underlined text is completely the opposite. it will take less time and cost 20 billion less.
However id prefer it took longer, cost more but was FIBER TO THE HOME and not copper dsl
SLAHSHDOT YOU ARE HURTING US NERDS IN AUS COME ON PLEASE COMPLAIN PROPERLY
After abusing his control of Australian media Murdoch got what he wanted - no NBN to challenge his cable interests.
The answer lies in between. Politicians promise large projects and underestimate their cost. They hire the lowest bidder, and the talent running the project is not cream of the crop because that would cost more. The government also has very little competition for large scale projects, so if the project isn't going well, we can't exactly bring in someone else to take it over, like an individual would if a plumber they hired was incompetent.
Public-Private Partnerships seem to work address a lot of these issues. Expect to see more of them in the future.
One step forward and three steps back.
Continued investment in poor and aging infrastructure is not smart. Doing it at a greater expense is criminal. This should come at the expense of the jobs of the hacks who made these decisions.
The solution obviously is to let the free market sort it out. Obviously the free market wants there to be high speed internet all through Australia, including in the outback. So, government, butt out!
Perhaps they can get Steve Erwin to catch some kangaroos or something to drag the fiber out?
Steve Irwin died, you insensitive clod!
12 billion more into a monopoly for the same useless copper? When full fiber to the home could mean divesting the service side of the network and the infrastructure? Sounds like a boondoggle to me.
No sir I dont like it.
... that politicians lied or that government can't handle tech.
Is the AU government's handling this better or worse than (say) the telcos in the US?
Time to chuck another shrimp on the barbee mate. GDAY!!!!!
The plutocrats prevailed.
Telstra snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, and have not only managed to force everyone to pay (again) for their decaying copper network that they themselves ran into the ground, they've now weedled their white-shoe conservative mates in Canberra into letting them set up a tollroad for all Australians far into the future.
And Murdoch and his evil empire gets to maintain his complete and utter dominance of Australian TV, newspapers and cable.
Win-win-win all round for all the white shoe tory criminals.
I don't understand how people like Simon Hackett can't get their ideas heard by their government (the same thing happens in the US government, unfortunately). I watched his video a while back and it highlighted how much waste / over engineering was going into their NBN, and his ideas to simplify the service would considerably reduce the cost...
bork bork bork!
it seems like it was just days ago when they said they couldn't run fiber to the home and were going to use copper to the home:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/05/2025245/australias-44b-broadband-network-may-settle-for-fiber-near-the-home
What are they downgrading to now? A piece of string to the house?
Say, a government project delayed, over budget, and under-delivering... But it would bring health-insu..., errr, never mind, broadband to millions of the poor! Only a racist can object...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
1). Attach string to 2 empty beer cans
2). Hold onto 1 can - attach other can to dingo
3). ??
4). Sit back, drink a VB and tell the bludgers on slashdot to rack off!
TFA fails to give proper credence to the fact that the previous government did not disclose the poor state of their plan and implementation. There is a one liner about it in TFA but no more.
The real story here is the previous plan would not be rolled out on the timelines and budget given by the previous government. If they were reelected the story would now be that the NBN is in an even worse state than the 14B AUD the coalition were out by given the information they had. The Labor party were withholding the real state of their rollout from the electorate - THIS is what should be the news.
ATT did a similar thing in the US. They started out promising FTTP, and I believe, received govt. $$$ (from the Uniform Subscriber Fee). Over the years, they down-graded it to FTTN, and now are merely converting their copper lines to IP-based (still called U-Verse). The bad news is that their FTTN (and of course all-copper) has much less bandwidth than the cable company's coax networks. Don't you guys have coax cable over there?
The only real news is that a politician kept their pre-election promise.
During the campaign Rupert Murdoch ^w^w Typhoon Tony PROMISED fibre (probably) to the street (or near the street (or somewhere, anyway)) and whatever Telstra had left after a lot of neglect to the home. Not this [sarcasm] unnecessary luxury [/sarcasm] of fibre to the home.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
The previous iteration of the NBN was already over budget and behind schedule. The new "NBN" is delivering less to less people, how can it cost more and take longer? NBN Co. has shown itself to be full of incompetent yes men just telling whoever is in power what they want to hear (see: way off cost/time projections).
Pro-tip: It's going to be expensive and take a long time, but you don't want to cheap out on this...
It can cost more because the real numbers are starting to surface. The pre-election numbers were based on published data which was wrong. Right now the predictable capital expenses of this project are growing at rate that is out of control. There are also some major labour shortages as there are only so many people who can put the fibre in the ground -- mostly due to very old rules about certifications needed to work on anything involving electricity or working in a telco pit.
The first step of the new fibre network is to make sure that each exchange has a reasonable amount of fiber connecting it to the core. This hasn't been done yet and it will take years to do just that at the current rate. Once all the exchanges are hooked up, that breaks the ADSL monopoly and allows existing ISPs to install their own equipment in exchanges and drop their prices while offering naked DSL or port binding or even last mile 10 gigabit ethernet.
The second step is to roll out to the existing RIMs. These are remote extensions of the phone exchange switch and sometimes have ADSL at slow speeds. These tend to have fiber connections to them already but that fibre can't be upgraded to higher speeds since not all fiber is equal and the new stuff is more equal than others. The RIMs are part of the Node infrastructure and many already have ADSL2+ DSALMs but not enough back haul capability.
The third step is to upgrade DSLAMs combined with a rollout of replacement fiber where the existing copper is failing. The current list of areas at high priority for replacement will require every crew that is currently doing the core fibre install several years.
There are some areas that have two HFC networks, ADSL2+, 4G and are passed by competing fibre networks as well. Those areas are now last on the priority list.
Another issue that has annoyed many people is that the old maps of "when do I get fibre" would mark huge areas in "build out within two years" when the only parts that were planned was often connecting a new building or subdivision to the NBN. Those areas have all been removed from the map now.
When talking about the last mile CAPEX, the previous plan assumed nearly every house would be connected and factored in price increases that were above the current rate of inflation. Existing line cost about $36 per month which covers its written down CAPEX, the dial tone and minimal maintenance. Replacing that was expected to cost about $5,000 or now $7,000 per house at today's costs. While that can be factored over whatever term the government is willing to provide the loans, at the current rate it adds $35 per month to everyone's phone lines for 30 years which doubles the costs of the non-data user's phone. If there is any decrease in take-up, those costs start to raise rapidly. When the costs of 4G is less than the cost of a wired connection, what will the take up rate be in 5 years? If it isn't close to 90%, the finance plan breaks. With the demise of the wired phone and desktop computer combined with decreasing costs of wireless service that works anywhere, I can't see how the number of fixed wired services will not decrease.
The NBN is a Labor initiative - work on it started in Tasmania in 2009, two years into Kevin Rudd's Prime Ministership. The conservative coalition (running on more toned down ideals of free-marketry than US Republicans, but certainly less interested in regulation than the Labor party/Greens) only took power in September of this year.
Whether or not I agree with the poster's contention that we're screwed re over-regulation, (s)he did refer correctly to the party (s)he sees as being responsible.
We're the biggest pirates, we just overturned gay marriage law and we detain refugees indefinitely, honestly the world does not need us on the internet
The current national Liberal Party policy seems to be limited to 1) balance the budget without added revenue, and 2) cut revenues they don't feel they should collect. The result is that the mining tax will go away, and due to very low tariffs and deletion of subsidies that ameliorate the effects of the strong AU$ that Aussie ores create, most manufacturing will go away. Ford and Holden closing up shop is just part of the trend.
So, yah want an information economy to go with those fries? Sorry mate, costs more than we want to spend, and what would you do with all that bandwidth, anyway? You don't know, you say? Back in my day, dialup was good enough. What does YouTube have to do with it?
Luke, help me take this mask off
Want to know why the NBN is hyping up 50-100mbs as slow and turning the public against it?
They want a fucking monopoly. End of story.
"NBN Co advised that the Coalition's NBN had to be built as a monopoly or risk losing so many customers that it would be financially unviable; and that it should prioritise signing up large numbers of customers quickly rather than racing to cover the entire country."
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