NBN - broadband, the new climate-change?
My take on the NBN? Its become an election carrot, much like the Kevin07 campaign headed up by climate change. I find this to be the sad part of it all. Telecommunications infrastructure, and innovation, development and progress is not a new thing. The focus on our older copper networks being out-of-date and redundant in this day and age has left much of where innovation and invention in relation to telecommunications forgotten and in the shadows.
Its a scare campaign. And I don't like seeing the amazing developments being undertaken already, swept under the proverbial carpet to satisfy a tit-for-tat campaign, blinding the general voter with science and numbers that always sound so appealing.
Its just another climate-change promise.
The current government, albeit a caretaker one, continues with its 2007 election promise (its not new folks!), of spending $42,000,000,000 of taxpayer money on developing another layer of telecommunications infrastructure. Mind you, it was the federal government that effectively sold off the last layer too (and yes, I realise it was a coalition government). And, when you read the fine print, the idea of a fibre-based-infrastructure, is also to be 'sold off' to the private sector after some time. Telstra 4? Its a lot of money.
The coalition, having to throw something in the mix, puts a $6,000,000,000 plan on the table. Really, all they are saying is that they will let existing commercial innovation continue, but unless there are taxpayer dollars at risk, the policy has no credibility - apparently.
Whether $42bn or $6bn, I am sorry, but I truly believe this money could be spent more effectively, to meet our future needs, economically, socially, even (and yes I do admit), environmentally!
Technological innovation in communications is not going to stop. The sudden jump from 100megabits to 1gigabit is a prime example of this. Labor has had two and half years to learn the lingo, develop psuedo-businesses with highly paid executives and consultants, and in reality, they still can't promise me that I will benefit from this election policy. They can't. Neither can the coalition. But I don't want them too.
The billions of dollars being touted here could easily be put into existing areas of need; they say it themselves, health, education, transport, law and order etc. And just a few billion would make a major difference to the research and development being undertaken into newer and more flexible telecommunications infrastructure.
The future is always ahead of us. And to be honest, and this is just my personal opinion, I don't want to be tethered, I don't want to drag a cable behind me...I recall a television commercial with old-style telephones used in place of mobile phones, cords going everywhere. Sorry, but the NBN is not the best solution in my eyes. And the coalitions "broadband policy", well lets face it, it is simply a response to the NBN because thats what people want to hear.
$42,000,000,000 would build a few rather large zero-emissions power stations (solar perhaps). So what is important here? Did you vote for climate change? Will you put a government in on the basis of the NBN carrot?
Sylvestor
ps. already trials are showing coax internet - already in consumer use, measuring speeds of 100megabits. Wireless LTE and 4G lab tests are showing more than this. Lets not argue the tech, lets argue the value!
THERE'S an interesting, instructive and extremely persuasive parallel between the twin frenzies over the NBN and Climate Change.
It starts with the broad demand to spend a lot of money that we would not otherwise choose to spend, and goes on to condemn all those who merely question, far less actually oppose, such spending, as some combination of troglodytes or deniers of absolute truth.
And more often than not, it implies that they are in the pay of some wicked special interest group or groups, which somewhere, somehow can be linked to either or all of Big Oil or Big Tobacco or Big Telstra. All again deserving the capital letters to identify their pure evilness.
Whereas in truth it's the NBN and Climate Change which are like the purest white light we've ever seen to an unprecedented armada of fluttering rent-seekers and main chancers. In both contexts, it's less a case of build it and they will come, and much more one of build it and make them all rich.
The other core element the two share is blinkered, unquestioning faith. By a wave of a political wand, not so much that the waters will part but that the wind will blow and the sun will shine.
We can replace the carbon-based energy that has been the foundation of life since man discovered fire simply because, like a petulant child, "we want to". But don't dare mention not so much the war but the splitting of the atom. I'd call it pure moonshine, except of course that wouldn't work.
It's the same if slightly different with the NBN. Lay the fibre and clamp the connection point to every building in the land; and a thousand, nay, a thousand million wired warp-speed flowers will bloom.
The reality might be a little more pedestrian if the statement from the NBN announcing that "Australia's first NBN opens in Tasmania -- offers blistering speeds" is to be taken as instructive.
The statement contained such gems as: "In the pre-launch activity we connected more than 70 customers . . . as we tested the network." Well, as they could have said, even a journey to connect 10 million premises starts with the first six dozen or so.
And: "Half of the home owners/occupiers in the three towns consented to a fibre connection during the rollout to make them 'NBN-ready'."
Hmm. Tasmanians have been starved of even walking pace broadband. They are offered a completely obligation free connection to the "blistering speed" future. Yet only half of them choose to contemplate it in their personal futures, far less actually move to sign up.
What percentage of the other half choose to sign up to the NBN; how many of them will be prepared to pay extra for the 100Mbps or are quite happy with the slower speed? Might it turn out to be one in 10? Or even one in five? Or one in 20?
As if on cue and very conveniently, NBN chief Mike Quigley announced that 100Mbps would quickly become passe; it was on to 1Gbps. Forget about cutting the time taken to download a film from Tony Abbott's promised 10 minutes to one minute; Mike will get it down to less than 10 seconds. At an undisclosed price.
Of course this had nothing to do with the looming election. Even though the "wrong result" would consign both the fabled 1Gb and Quigley to the same dustbin of history.
When a religious fervor, even of the secular variety, takes over, rationality goes out the window. When you add $43 billion of proferred taxpayer money, and billions more in subsidised broadband access, the main-chancing moths pour in.
There were some voices of sanity. Some, from insiders, so to speak, are worth noting.
Telecoms analyst and writer Grahame Lynch points out that $43bn, at $2000 per person, would be the most expensive government intervention of its kind in the world, and that most of the benefits of high-speed fibre are as achievable with the Coalition's proposed cocktail of platforms.
In practice, at least for the first decade or so, most of the NBN consumer offerings for most customers would more closely resemble existing ADSL2+ and HFC (Telstra cable). That's to say, fast download and slower upload mixes.
So it really is all about download speeds. And that comes back to to two simple linked questions. How fast is fast enough? And how fast is fast enough at what cost?
If we can get 100 Mbps for most of the population most of the time for $6bn, is it really worth spending $43bn to get 1Gb? Especially when you can incorporate in the more modest spend the 1Gb for those focused users like education and health and CBD businesses.
IT executive Sean Kaye points out that it's all very well getting this big pipe locally, but the NBN does nothing to increase the capacity between Australia and the US. That lack of capacity would in practice end up throttling speeds every bit as successfully as your friendly broadband supplier when you'd reached your limit.
Further, says Kaye, the whole concept of digging trenches and running fibre smacks of a 20th century answer to a 21st century question. The same "technologists" who say we need the fibre to fireproof our future claim that wireless and copper won't -- can't -- evolve.
Perhaps the most persuasive "comment" comes from Telstra and Optus. Optus had a great year because of the explosion of its mobile customer base, while Telstra got hit by the continuing exodus of its fixed-line customers.
That's telling us something, which I just can't put my finger on -- oh yes, maybe it's that the future is, well, mobile. So the answer is to spend $43bn on fixed lines. It's obvious!
The Coalition patchwork appeals precisely because it is a patchwork. The future will clearly be a mix of a fibre core and wireless. Not (only) competing wireless but wireless that works off the fibre. Akin to home networks.
It is both fiscal and technological insanity to dump the Telstra and Optus cables that can provide 100Mbps broadband virtually right now to perhaps one-third of Australian premises. While we discover what the future will deliver and how fast we really, sincerely have to download our films.
