Of course, we're having an election sometime this year, and the Liberal's — who are probably going to win — are planning on making the NBN slower and cheaper[1] (100Mbps by utilising the existing copper network, rather than fully replacing it with fiber).
The ABC program "Inside Business" gave a neat summary of the differences between the Labor and Liberal plans: http://imgur.com/OtmOBE7
It's worth noting that the Liberals plan has 'Fibre To The Premises' going to 22% of households, while Labour's plan goes to 93%.
So we're spending an extra $17 billion to give 71% of households a boost from 100Mb to 1Gb per second? That's about $2,500 per household. That doesn't seem like good value to me. Shouldn't we delay the massive cost of installing fibre to existing homes until most households need more than 100Mb per second?
There is a very significant difference between 93% coverage and 22% coverage with this issue. The value goes well beyond the percentage difference because of network effects[1].
Being able to count on near-ubiquitous FTTP and speeds of 100Mb - 1Gb p/s for a whole country completely changes the tech startup landscape.
It's hard to estimate how valuable that is to Australia's social, economic, and technological future.
The Coalition are expected to romp it in, so it's pretty disappointing that Malcolm Turnbull was convinced or corralled into playing politics on this one instead of just neutralising the issue by committing to FTTP. They happily make baseless blowout claims around the current NBN project, so I don't see why they couldn't have instead made baseless "we'll do the same, but cheaper" claims.
Their system design around a broken and aging copper network has few tech industry commentators impressed. I can't see how maintaining the copper network and delaying the inevitable FTTP rollout makes any sense. Being a first-mover in Western society brings a significant number of benefits for Australia's tech environment.
> Being able to count on near-ubiquitous FTTP and speeds of 100Mb - 1Gb p/s for a whole country completely changes the tech startup landscape.
Let's not kid ourselves. The Australian market is tiny.
> so it's pretty disappointing that Malcolm Turnbull was convinced or corralled into playing politics on this one instead of just neutralising the issue by committing to FTTP.
There's also the possibility that Malcolm Turnbull, a former barrister, investment banker and venture investor in and director of Australia's first major ISP (Ozemail) has his own thoughts about balancing costs and benefits.
> They happily make baseless blowout claims around the current NBN project, so I don't see why they couldn't have instead made baseless "we'll do the same, but cheaper" claims.
It's pretty easy to demonstrate that paying someone to dig up every street in the country is more expensive than deciding not to dig up every street in the country.
> Being a first-mover in Western society brings a significant number of benefits for Australia's tech environment.
Japan and South Korea have shown that it's really not that big a deal. Really nice, and enables some new businesses. But you have to trade it off against alternative uses of the funds. The same money could build about 20 new hospitals, a new Sydney airport and a clutch of cross-city tunnels. It's possible these might have been more valuable in the long run.
Or maybe not. We don't know because no cost-benefit analysis was ever done.
> Let's not kid ourselves. The Australian market is tiny.
I don't know if you're being willfully ignorant in your responses, but I can add to my comment: "...for a whole country completely changes the tech startup landscape for that country".
> There's also the possibility that Malcolm Turnbull, a former barrister, investment banker and venture investor
In this context appeal-to-authority isn't particularly interesting. The pundits are all credentialed in this debate, and the tech sector overwhelmingly prefers the current NBN plan to the Coalition's.
> It's pretty easy to demonstrate that paying someone to dig up every street in the country is more expensive than deciding not to dig up every street in the country.
The fact you're quoting a response of mine and responding with a completely different issue is classic trollish behaviour. However as it's an absurd statement that looks superficially like common sense, I'll respond. Would Australia have saved money by not building an electricity and telephone network?
> Japan and South Korea have shown that it's really not that big a deal. Really nice, and enables some new businesses. But you have to trade it off against alternative uses of the funds. The same money could build about 20 new hospitals, a new Sydney airport and a clutch of cross-city tunnels. It's possible these might have been more valuable in the long run.
Reducing a national FTTH network to 'really nice, and enables some new business' and proposing a back-of-the-napkin alternate spend of new hospitals, new airport, new cross-city tunnels (!) which 'possibly' might be more valuable is not an analysis that's worth refuting.
I think you're more interested in pushing a political agenda than having a tech + economics discussion, so best to park this!
I am having a tech & economics discussion. My sarcasm is a learned response from dealing with an unending parade of interlocutors who assume that the NBN is an unalloyed good. The main problem is conflating the technical characteristics of FTTP/FTTN with the total net benefit. They are not the same and should not be treated as the same.
Nothing in life is that simple. Nothing. There are always alternatives and it always pays to do a proper cost-benefit analysis.
Whenever I try to argue this case I am accused of all sorts of things. Trolling, being a stooge, a shill for tin-can-and-string manufacturers.
What I believe is that it's not enough just to want to build the right thing. You have to build it the right way and for the right reasons. 1/3 is not enough in matters of the public treasury and I consider that both major parties suck in this respect.
> But you have to trade it off against alternative uses of the funds.
It is an investment on borrowed money using our AAA rating, we expect to get a return on the invested funds higher than the interest rate paid. The alternative isn't hospitals or schools, it is not doing it.
It's possible to borrow for other purposes. Plus there's the little thing where borrowing by governments is simply deferred taxes or deferred budget cuts.
We don't know what the rate of return is because no proper CBA has been published. We're merely told that there was one and that the companies paid by NBN -- with instructions we haven't seen -- said it was just swell.
My understanding is that copper will be replaced with FTTP when it wears out. That spreads the cost over time while bringing forward the 25Mbps minimum service level forward by a few years.
There's no doubt that FTTP is the ultimate long term solution. But that doesn't mean it has to happen first.
> My understanding is that copper will be replaced with FTTP when it wears out. That spreads the cost over time while bringing forward the 25Mbps minimum service level forward by a few years.
Much of it is wearing out. Users who already have issues with noise, interference and/or slow speeds on ADSL will be similarly disadvantaged by VDSL under the Coalition's FTTN plan. You also still need to worry about flooded pits, leaking conduit and so on. Having worked at a number of ISPs and watched all the faults roll in after even moderate storms, I know that these are real problems.
Further, how does the Government decide when your copper is "worn out", and what incentive do they have to spend more money (over their original plan) to upgrade you? How many people in your area need to suffer the same problem before they need to both a) completely replace your FTTN VDSL equipment with GPON gear, and b) pull fibre, replace conduit and wire small groups of homes on an ad-hoc basis?
I agree, lots of of the existing infrastructure is worn down. My understanding is that Turnbull proposes that some of it will be replaced immediately and the rest would continue to be replaced on a rolling basis.
The main difference between the coalition plan and the business-as-usual plan is that old copper will be replaced with fibre, not with new copper. It's easy to forget that waaaay back when, this is what Telstra and the government were negotiating to do anyhow.
In Turnbull's position I wouldn't have promised anything except to review once in government. For one thing, a lot of work will already be contracted and it's not plausible to renege on the contracts. So there'll be an uneven distribution of fibre/copper which will lead to some distortion in the housing market. Not huge, but it'd be nice if it wasn't there.
> I agree, lots of of the existing infrastructure is worn down. My understanding is that Turnbull proposes that some of it will be replaced immediately and the rest would continue to be replaced on a rolling basis.
The problem is that these costs are most certainly not encapsulated in Turnbull's $20B costing.
The problem is that neither the government nor the opposition have ever produced their original costings nor any audit of those costs. In the government's case we're promised that audits were done. But we can't see what was audited and we can't see what the instructions are.
My understanding is that the major cost is to pay people to do the physical work of drilling holes and digging trenches, so the cost of upgrading to FTTH in future (adjusted for inflation) would be about the same as creating a FTTH network now.
Can the current copper network handle 100Mbps? I think anything broken down into a per household cost is going to be large - health, transport, and Internet infrastructure.
Not to mention latency, which is the most significant factor for me. I'm on semi-NBN and now have a 4ms ping to work. Only have to leave the house once a week (Warning: side-effects may vary).
Nah, it's South Brisbane. They knocked down the old exchange for the hospital extension, Telstra installed fibre, supposedly eventually it will be rolled into the official NBN network, but until then, we get rates way worse than ADSL and I'm forced to pay $30/mth for a "landline" which I never use... still, it's worth it for the latency.
1. http://www.zdnet.com/coalitions-nbn-to-cost-almost-30bn-7000...