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emmelaich

Good post until the last sentence! NBN history is far more interesting than that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network

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I have to say that it's interesting in the way that watching something be destroyed is interesting.

Being stuck inside it is not interesting, it's horrifying and depressing.

I moved into an apartment that was built with NBN Fibre to every apartment. I moved here and paid a premium for it because I wanted to get a head-start on the FTTH rollout we were promised.

Instead of the promised ability to move just about anywhere and get the same connection quality and bandwidth options, we now have a roulette wheel where most of the options are mediocre at best.

Worse still, we paid even more for this bungled mix of copper based tech than the original FTTH rollout.

Fiber would never be available in every home, it would have always been limited to new estates and inner city areas, which funnily enough is no change over how things were before the nbn. Before the nbn, new estates were supplied with private fiber. Now they get nbn, which will be sold in the future and be private again.... all that changed was billions of dollars were stolen by the political class.

Fibre was going to be rolled out to 93% of the population - so very remote people would have been on satellie but that would have been it.

No, that was their made up promise to fool people who couldn't research the logistics themselves, that is not what was going to happen. Name another country in the entire world where this has happened with similar population density. You can't, because no such country exists. If that actually happened, and it was completed today, Australia would have the world's fastest internet, ahead of all of the countries with extremely dense population such as Taiwan. Such an idea is absurd, but people on the left will never admit it and just claim that is was obviously going to happen.

Arrant nonsense. It was a specific plan, budgeted for, with people in government and industry I knew at the time working on it. Even bloody Malcolm Turnbull was bullish about it (he was on the board of a company I worked for in Brisbane) until he turned. It was going to happen but was scotched for purely political reasons by a party that had always opposed public provision.

Big projects, govenment & commercial alike often fail. The real NBN certainly might have. But to make up out of a complete vacuum that it was some sort of deliberate con is just another barmy conspiracy theory.

>It was a specific plan, budgeted for I like how you call what I said "arrant nonsense". Such a harsh response must have been followed up by some irrefutable facts for justification. Instead, your argument is "it was budgeted for". This level of nativity is complete lack of knowledge of planning and budgeting and forecasting models shouldn't be coupled with your big boy harsh words.

Lets see, Kevin Rudd said it would cost $15 billion. The total cost at the moment seems to be $51 billion. So your conspiracy theory is that the crappier NBN we got which required less work cost $36 billion more than the one you are saying was budgeted for?

First, can I ask why you're creating multiple new accounts to comment? It seems very odd.

> Kevin Rudd said it would cost $15 billion.

The first 90% fibre plan was $43b, later revised down to $37.4b of which it was supposed to be $30b of investment from the Federal government. [0]

About $12b of that was in payments to Telstra ($11b) and Optus ($800m) in return for access to lead-in and last-mile conduits/pits, and decommissioning of HFC networks.

That original business plan was revised later after a KPMG study to recommend ~93% fibre, ~4% fixed wireless (LTE variant), and the remaining ~2-3% on two dedicated satellites (new launches).

(Edited to add: Note that this plan included an eventual ROI, where the government would get it's money back - and hence it be zero/low cost. The current plan has no hope of that happening short of selling the entire thing off to Telstra.)

FTTH installations were budgeted at $1500/residence to install, which by the time the Abbott government was coming into power was actually trending closer to $1200 as the workforce was trained up in deploying the gear and became more experienced in dealing with any odd situations.

There is/was a fantastic video of a talk given by someone from NBNCo (I believe Mike Quigly?) at a University where they go over the architectural design decisions, and how the 93% number was arrived at. The video also went over in detail how the fixed-wireless process was to work.

Arguments that remediating conduit and installing new copper is either cheaper or less work to install aren't backed up by evidence, with NBNCo's current cost for FTTC being somewhere over $3000/residence in 2019[1].

Additionally, because there's now FTTP, FTTN, FTTC, HFC, Fixed-Wireless and Satellite - the whole network is harder to manage and maintain. You need a bigger, more widely trained workforce, you have more equipment to maintain, and more vendors to deal with.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_National_Broadb...

[1] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/nbn-cos-actual-cost-per-premi...

Fiber isn't rolled out in a uniform grid pattern across the country, so population density is irrelevant.

We are one of the most urbanized countries in the world, more so than many who have rolled out fiber.

Agreed. As per the HN guidelines:

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle

HN is a great place for considered discussion. Let's keep it that way.

To be fair, it's a true statement. The NBN is shithouse and compared to what was promised originally, it could be considered fake.

This is the part that is questionable:

> our far-right government, which loathes and fears any technology more recent than coal & witch burning.

Let sleeping dogs lie, is my advice here.

Yes, let's do that please. The tone wasn't right for HN.

If you live in Australia you would probably agree that thats not far from the truth either.

I live in Australia and most people I know would disagree with that statement. Depends on your social circles.

As an outsider I don't have much insight to Australian politics, but all I've read about recently is their stance on fossil fuels and encryption. Based on that, from an outside perspective, I'd be very inclined to agree with that statement. Out of curiosity, in what ways is it untrue?

Fair point.

It was a bit of snark not to be taken too seriously, though with regard to the trogs' fear of technology, it has more than a grain of truth ;)

To the person with the "dead" reply musing about Stephen Conroy being a luddite—I wrote that April fools parody article. Yes, Conroy started off as an embarrassing luddite __BUT__ unlike the luddites that came before him, he improved. He learned. He grew. He surrounded himself with smart, experienced and informed people, and he learned from them. By the time he departed that role he had morphed into perhaps the best communications ministers in recent Australian history.

---------

Whereas you can watch the moment of television where all respect I had for Malcolm Turnbull crashed into the floor (fast forward to the 17 minute mark and watch for about one minute):

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-12/nbn-debate/4882232

"Anthony said that fibre to the premises can deliver one gigabit per second, 1000 megs, and you're quite right, it can. Do you know what it would cost to have a guaranteed one gig' service? At least $20,000 a month."

So basically Turnbull used a deceptive truth (the cost of a high speed service with dedicated guaranteed backhaul) to blatantly and intentionally lie about the cost of gigabit services that would be sold to 99.9% of NBN-connected customers. The fact that he knew enough to concoct this deception made me realise that he wasn't just as bad as the rest of them, he's worse. He used his knowledge and intelligence to cleverly and carefully craft a statement that's blatantly false yet defensible as technically true if he were caught out. Nobody is that clever by accident.

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