Comment by grizzles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grizzles | Hacker News Reader

I have a personal perspective on this. Around 2014 or so, I + some of Australia's top physicists designed and quickly prototyped some tech to lower the cost of the NBN rollout bigtime. Our approach revolved around self install fibre + a far greater use of wireless.

I contacted 15+ people in senior leadership at NBNco, all of whom are still on my LinkedIn. No matter how hard I tried, we couldn't get a meeting with NBNco execs to demo our tech.

I took it to the local tech press here to get some positive coverage and they told us repeatedly how "stupid" we were. We wrote comments on the now PM (then Communications Minister)'s blog and chatted to his people. Zero interest. At that point they'd been at it for ~7 years, spent billions and had pretty much nothing to show for it. Nada.

Last year, an academic completely unaffiliated with us testified at a parliamentary committee into why the existing approach has been such a boondoggle. As a remedy, he suggested our exact approach. He also copped it from the tech press.

Here are a couple tweets from that period between me and an online tech pundit. This Renai LeMay fellow runs Australia's most influential tech site, it's very very popular with Australia's politicians:

https://twitter.com/renailemay/status/705523306699423744 https://twitter.com/renailemay/status/705528311330385920

Such is the life of the serial entrepreneur. This is the typical bs that we have to put up with. I folded that company up pretty fast. Idea tested. NEXT.

I'm sure your technology is great, but I suspect you aren't seeing it through your (potential) customer's eyes.

If you seriously don't understand why that solution could never have been politically feasible then to be honest it isn't surprising you were ignored.

Additionally, did you really suggest that people should be able to dig their own trenches and plug fibre in themselves? You do realize that does nothing to make you seem credible, right?

We suggested and could show that the tech can be completely plug and play, and support any logical network topology. There is no installer risk because power doesn't run over optical fiber. It's a big misconception that you need specialized installers. You don't. And it's the labor cost that is responsible for biggest chunk of the expense in building a country wide broadband network.

As I said in the linked tweet, you could hire the handyman down the street to do it, or you could pay the major contractor Ericsson 100X as much per property to do it. If they somehow screw up plugging something into something else, it just doesn't work - it doesn't affect the integrity of the network at all.

In my opinion, it's the existing approach that lacks credibility. It's corporate welfare. That's why Australia's broadband lags behind Turkey, Poland, Mexico, and many others even though it's a much richer country per capita than all of those.

The funny thing was when we came onto the scene the most interest we got was from Ericsson, with some email discussions and heaps of their people showing up on my profiles, etc. That was flattering but apparently they needn't have worried about us spoiling their cash cow. I can understand their paranoia. Life must be sweet when you own 100% of the purported supply.

I feel your pain. It is extremely difficult in Australia to get interest in anything related to innovation. I have had surreal experiences when dealing with companies and particularly Government. They will do anything to boycott something that resembles change, particularly if it affects the the way they work, or of course that might expose their incompetency.

Australia is not a place to live unless you work in health or in a trade. Scientists and engineers (engineering is not even understood in Australia, usually being associated to things like infrastructure or maintenance) are screwed.

I'm immune to it now. My motivation in writing about this is because from a public policy perspective I'm convinced that our approach was the correct one. I like to keep the idea alive for those who come after us. I just hope they have more luck with it than we did.

Do you have any promo/marketing material you can share? I find the concept of self-install fibre (trench and all!) pretty wild and to be honest, practically ridiculous. I'd love to know more about what you had in mind.

Sorry, the company doesn't exist anymore. Our marketing didn't focus on the self install angle for residences, but it did for business. In either case, it's logically no different from hiring any worker to do it. Basically our pitch was, you can reduce the install cost to whatever the minimum wage is. Deploying the physical topology of an NBN can be designed to require 100% unskilled labor. Maybe the problem was that it would create too many jobs. *joke

Ahh, that's fairly different to regular punters doing it themselves. If you pitched it as a self install method vs a cheaper way for contractors to do fibre installs (the #1 reason the Libs gave for the MtM), I can see why people were confused.

Yeah well :) Billion dollar projects like the NBN are like these huge huge conquests for the big corporates involved. It's hard for startups to compete with all the resources, salesmanship, box seats at the footy and other wining and dining that goes on behind the scenes to win the bid. All up, I'm relatively happy with the experience, we built and pitched a high quality product, built it very fast, and got out fast. As fails go, I'm very happy overall with how it was executed. The bet had a very nice risk / reward ratio had we been successful.

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