Slashdot Mirror
How Australia Bungled Its $36 Billion High-Speed Internet Rollout (nytimes.com)
Not very pleased with your internet speeds? Think about the people Down Under. Australia's "bungled" National Broadband Network (NBN) has been used as a "cautionary tale" for other countries to take note of. Despite the massive amount of money being pumped into the NBN, the New York Times reports, the internet speeds still lagged behind the US, most of western Europe, Japan and South Korea -- even Kenya. The article highlights that Australia was the first country where a national plan to cover every house or business was considered and this ambitious plan was hampered by changes in government and a slow rollout (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source), partly because of negotiations with Telstra about the fibre installation. From the report: Australia, a wealthy nation with a widely envied quality of life, lags in one essential area of modern life: its internet speed. Eight years after the country began an unprecedented broadband modernization effort that will cost at least 49 billion Australian dollars, or $36 billion, its average internet speed lags that of the United States, most of Western Europe, Japan and South Korea. In the most recent ranking of internet speeds by Akamai, a networking company, Australia came in at an embarrassing No. 51, trailing developing economies like Thailand and Kenya. For many here, slow broadband connections are a source of frustration and an inspiration for gallows humor. One parody video ponders what would happen if an American with a passion for Instagram and streaming "Scandal" were to switch places with an Australian resigned to taking bathroom breaks as her shows buffer. The article shares this anecdote: "Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world have downloaded Hand of Fate, an action video game made by a studio in Brisbane, Defiant Development. But when Defiant worked with an audio designer in Melbourne, more than 1,000 miles away, Mr. Jaffit knew it would be quicker to send a hard drive by road than to upload the files, which could take several days."
How dare someone else have a monopoly on internet service!
This ensures companies are always providing reasonable prices and a fast connection, as is evidenced by our high ranking compared to the Australian experiment.
You're trolling, right? We're the nation that invented the internet and yet our ranking is shit, in large part because in most places people don't have a choice of high-speed internet providers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I pay $540 per year for my internet connection. That's pure internet cost. I don't have cable or landline. I've not included my mobile though at least some of that is arguably internet too. They are trying to do it with a one time payment of about $1500 per person? That seems like they've low-balled it, especially when you consider that their landmass is almost equal to the contiguous US. So with less than a tenth of the population density, their costs per connection should be higher than ours.
The private market will always surpass the nationalized or state run model for all services.
Never say "always". Market solutions work well when there is competition and transparency, but when those are lacking, governments can often do better than a private monopoly or duopoly. There are many examples of this: America's privately run healthcare system is worse in both cost and outcome compared to any other developed country. Many cities in America have municipal power, water, and even Internet, and these tend to be at least as good as privately run monopolies in neighboring cities.
Whenever possible, rather than directly providing services, the government should focus on making markets more competitive and transparent. We have government owned roads and ports, but the government doesn't own the cars, trucks, and ships. Likewise for Internet, the government should provide wide conduits so any bonded company can pull fiber. Since trenching is by far the biggest cost, this will allow more companies to enter markets at greatly reduced cost.
Mr. Jaffit knew it would be quicker to send a hard drive by road than to upload the files, which could take several days
Or as Andrew Tanenbaum said back in 1989, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
While it's true that you can lack competition for purely private reasons, the most common reason for lack of competition is government regulations. When a permit is required to connect households to your service, the people who issue the permits are the ones who control whether you have one choice, two choices, or n choices....
Actually, it's more like.... local government gives tax breaks to company A. Company A moves in, and the high cost of entry to the market (infrastructure, bribes, ["election campaign contributions"], etc.) dissuade company B from moving in.
Meanwhile, in the next city over, they want to install municipal broadband, but company B has bribed enough state legislators ["campaign contributions"] to pass a state law banning municipal utilities.
And I keep wondering why USA doesn't score higher on the corruption index.
A couple of points here. I live in Australia and I got to watch this entire fiasco unroll before me. 1. The conservative party got elected before the main rollout of the NBN could get underway. They had one mission: Kill the NBN anyway they could. They did this because they didn't want the Labor party to have a political victory with a major project, and because it aligned with the interests of the largest cable tv network and news corporations in the nation. Cable TV in Australia is a monopoly owned by Fox. They dominate Satellite, and fixed line pay TV. 2. The NBN Fibre rollout was delayed by asbestos inside the pits which had to be cleaned/repaired before they could proceed. This delayed the rollout by probably 6-12 months as the clearance work had to occur. There was also a political deal made where rural/country areas would be rolled out first. This combined with the fact that the backhaul services had to be built first led to an impression that the network was facing major delays and was taking a long time to be built, when it was actually on time and on budget. 3. Where it was actually deployed the Fibre to the Home NBN works perfectly and I've never heard anyone in those areas complain about having a fibre link. The same is not true of the Fibre to the Node and HFC connections. 4. Australia is not as sparsely populated as people would have you believe. 90+% of Australians live in larg coastal cities like most major countries and Australia's major cities have population densities equal to or higher than Auckland in New Zealand which has Fibre to the Home available. Density/population were never an issue with a metropolitan rollout of the NBN. 5, The conservative vision for the NBN was always a complete clusterfuck. Policy made without proper planning or consulting of industry. Done at the urging of people with a vested interest in keeping the internet speeds in Australia as low as the electorate would allow. The largest ISP in Australia has been quite happily milking ADSL 1.5mbit services for the last 20 years and only implemented ADSL2+ because competitor ISPs began taking marketshare. They refused to do any upgrades or builds involving fibre, unless they were guaranteed a monopoly and the ability to charge massive prices for it.
Same exact thing I say when they talk about this with the US:... USA: 35 persons per sqkm; Australia: 3 persons per sqkm. It seems to be hard for tech-enthusiasts to grasp that a widely-distributed population makes providing infrastructure INTRINSICALLY harder.
I don't think it's useful to talk about the AVERAGE population density. In Australia the population is almost entirely concentrated in small dense coastal cities. If you served those dense cities well, you'd hit such a high proportion of the Australian population, that average internet speeds would increase dramatically.
To tell the truth, I prefer copper more than fiber. The phone company can keep service running during a power outage.
They don't care. They don't have to. They're the phone company. We dropped our $50/mo land line when AT&T informed us that a repair would be six weeks out.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Didn't you read the article? The private sector, aka Telstra, reneged on the deal and shifted all of its agreed costs onto the taxpayer, then Australia elected a Libertarian government, who couldn't let a government project succeed, and thus they did everything they could to sabotage it.
If you seriously wonder that, then you should get a passport and go see the world. While there are a a few countries that do better, most are far worse.
Yes but most are poor and developing countries. If you want to compare how you are doing against your peers, compare yourself to the developed wealthy countries Western Europe, North America, and parts of Asia Pac (Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, NZ etc).
I've seen most parts of the world, and one of the great mysteries is how much America squanders its wealth.