Australian opposition announces National Broadband Network plan
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
The current government has founded a company called NBNco (National Broadband Network Company) to connect 93% of Australian homes via fibre. The remaining will be covered with a fixed-wireless and Satellite.
This comes at a cost of $44b and completion date of 2021.
The opposition party has just announced their plan, which is to connect 22% of households directly to fibre, 71% via fibre to the node, utilising the existing copper network for the last few hundred metres, 4% via fixed wireless, and ~3% via satellite.
This comes at a cost of $30b and completion by the end of 2016.
What it comes down to is, should the Australian people be spending an extra $14b and five years to connect 71% more of the population directly to fibre?
A lot of the discussion revolves around whether people really need > 100mb/sec (FttH), or whether >25mb/sec (FttN) is suitable for the next "x" years of technology.
For what its worth, I think that the 50% extra price to connect an extra 71% of homes directly to fibre is worth it. I like to use the analogy of the rail networks being built in the USA, or the interstate highways, or even the light rail in Calgary. Each is a massive project, which costs quite a bit of money, but in the long term, repays the investments many times over in the things they enable.
The opposition is guaranteeing that nobody will have less than 25mb/sec, and the government is touting a maximum speed of 100mb. But they seem to shy away from the fact that 100mb is just the speeds you will get with todays technology in the exchanges. I'm not too familiar with networking hardware, but it seems that increasing the speed of a FttH network is much easier than the FttN network, because it involves replacing hardware in the exchange. Whereas with FttN, you are fundamentally limited by the copper connections to the houses.
I heard the opposition communications spokesman yesterday on the radio, talking about "What will the average person possibly need with 100mb/sec?", but then you could ask the same thing for their 25mb/sec connection: "What will the average person possibly need with 25mb/sec?". I know right now, that my mum, sisters, brother, etc would not be able to utilise that bandwidth. I think that by conceding that 25mb is the minimum suitable bandwidth for the future, they are conceding that faster networks will be required in the future. So why limit it at the arbitrary value of 25mb and say "This is all we will need".