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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.
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.
I feel like this post would have worked better if not for the fact that Steve Irwin has been dead since 2006.
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.
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!
Oh, yeah. That'll work ever so well. Everybody will do things in a way that is completely inoperable with every other company and it will be left up to yet another party to integrate it. I mean, it worked great for the American telcos, didn't it?
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?
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?
Oh, yeah. That'll work ever so well. Everybody will do things in a way that is completely inoperable with every other company and it will be left up to yet another party to integrate it. I mean, it worked great for the American telcos, didn't it?
Actually, it wasn't as bad as what Australia is going through now, IIUC. There are issues with rural areas being woefully underserved, and there are many places where the costs are out of line (often because there is only ONE choice of broadband provider in the area), but overall most people have good broadband available.
I think South Korea has done things very well, and that was with heavy government control. But then South Korea's government is much more functional than either Australia's or the US.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
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.
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.
http://delimiter.com.au/2013/12/12/please-accept-apologies-wrong-turnbull/ hints at the politics. :)
Better than the telcos in the US was going to be the optical to almost all homes with wireless towers and sat for some.
Every telco, isp would then be on the same network and have to offer real options to every person wanting telco/net/POTS (plain old telephone service)
National, international best effort vs dedicated, cost, data caps - but it would have cut out several 'Bell' like entities from the copper, HFC revenue streams and allow new media (HDTV, streaming) players into Australia.
The other option was to keep part of the copper and place many new cooled, powered optical nodes in suburbia and let the 'Bell' look after the copper, rent/sell HFC and keep any revenue streams and protect existing HDTV (pay tv).
http://delimiter.com.au/2013/12/12/delimiter-publishes-internal-nbn-co-fttn-analysis/
In the end the costs of all the new cooled, powered optical nodes in suburbia added up in terms of telco/eletrical skill sets needed, speed was low due to low diameter, old, cut, long, shared copper lines.
Faults where fixed to making a voice call standard - can you dial emergency services, make a POTS call? Over time many quick fixes to an old copper network
With the new slow HFC, copper and token optical plan the 'Bell' like entities are now as safe as any in the USA and milking existing revenue streams with no real bandwidth for new HD media.
So HFC will be open to more telcos but at what cost, speed? When you pack in 'all' of the streets with new bandwidth needs on limited HFC - you get very 'old' problems of one shared link back to optical - just one line for many people in many homes with many new download and up load needs.
Australia is now as safe for existing media and telcos as the USA and without any upgrade vision to optical at a huge cost to buy/rent into very old limited networks.
All optical for many in Australia would have been paid back over decades with low repair costs. The upfront cost was not low but now Australia will be paying big for copper and HFC...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Taking Telstra "aside" in this context is like attempting to calculate a helicopter's flight ignoring air-resistance...
Oh, and then one asks, who but the government has created the "local incumbent monopolist" in the first place...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Short version, the previous government, the centre-left Labor Party, was very bad at being a good government. The current government, the right neo-con Liberal Party, is very good at being a bad government. The minor parties are funny/sad.
The former monopoly telecom and current partial monopoly, Telstra, is very good at being a bad phone company.
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."
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
but you can't deny that government infrastructure would have had death panels to decide who was allowed to live and use the internet and who would have to be dragged out into the street and shot for watching porn.
that's what governments are for.
remember tha mantra: gubmint bad, bizness good.