Comment by another-one-off | Hacker News Reader

Comment by another-one-off | Hacker News Reader

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another-one-off

Hurrah, someone who cares about the actual policies. Nikcub has provided an excellent summary of the technical detail of the situation (which I will be relaying to many of my friends).

There is a huge amount of ignorance in Australia regarding broadband policy. I enjoy talking to people about the NBN, and I came to suspect that no-one in my sample payed any tax. Or they are just really bad at accounting.

Very, very few Australians would/should actually trade the cost of connecting their premise for the speed upgrade from ADSL2+ to fiber (edit: which is in the range of about $2k/person or $8k for a 4 person family unit according to the back of my nearest envelope). There aren't enough uses for speeds >=1MBps. A typical household is YouTube, Skype, gaming (and I don't think a fibre has any special implications on gaming that ADSL2+ doesn't have) and downloading stuff illegally.

There are more important research/infrastructure projects than a broadband network. Basically anything transit related for a country like Australia - the money could easily have gone into public transport.

I was stuck in a situation where I could only get dial-up speeds in a rental property. My theory was that Telstra (the local owner of all the network infrastructure) weren't going to invest in any upgrades that would be wiped out by federal spending - but the upgrade wasn't going to be for years. 12 months on mobile broadband is very, very unpleasant if you are a heavy Internet user. Speed of rollout is much more important, and the new policy can be enacted very, very quickly.

I live in a MDU now, as it happens, so the liberal policy is great news for me.

Here's the problem: That $2000 is per house. But its not about the people living in the house, it's about the physical premises being connected to the wider network, just divided up on a "per house" level.

That's a piece of infrastructure which will exist 50 years from now. In fact, if technology is any guide, even with upgrades it'll likely exist 200 years from now even if the light going through it is used for very different purposes.

So take that $2k, divide by, let's say the life of the cable until some idiot hacks it with a backhoe, which is about 20 years: so it's a $100, per house, for 20 years - transferring seamlessly to future occupants from old occupants.

"typical" always fails to describe the point of things like this. Typical is the broadest conceivable average of use cases, and ignores the fact that it's typical because across a country everyone does different specific things in smaller conceivable groups.

And then of course there's the other important issue: if you spend $20-40 billion rather then $60 billion, and at the end wind up with just ADSL2+ but no RIMs or other bollocks, have we really gotten ourselves a good deal?

(edits: clarity) I divided $43 billion [1] by a population of 22 million, although now I see now that $1,500 would have been better (I read the wrong cost :[). Anyway, it was meant to be a per person, not per house, figure.

The NBN would be a good piece of long-term infrastructure, no argument there. It is better than a cash handout.

I don't think it is sensible to divide up-front cost by years of service. $100/year for 20 years is much cheaper than $2k up front (as a Net Present Value).

If we save the taxpayer $20 billion? Yes, that is a much better deal. Everyone gets 25 Mbps ADSL2+, and people who want fibre (happens to include me, but not the rest of my family) can pay for the last bit of cable work themselves if it makes sense.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network#Expe...

Except the project is deployed over a span of 10 years anyway, so the upfront cost is already divided by that. You mention "you want fiber, but not your family" - but again, you're ignoring the fact that you and your family likely won't live in that house, with what opinion, for the next 40 years.

It's saving $20 billion, but still spending $20 billion and possibly more. Spending 2/3rd's the cost, with no upgrade path (FTTN does not upgrade to FTTP easily) is a terrible deal. We're keeping power and maintenance costs of the old copper network, you're splitting the type of plant you need to keep (since you have fiber, copper and coax all over the place), and you still haven't escaped the need to trench cable (since a huge amount of that copper needs to come out of the ducts to ever support 25mbit ADSL2, or needs to be completely rerouted to get the distance to the exchange to under 1.5km).

One huge benefit of fiber is that we don't need to worry about distances from exchange to premise - as long as it's under about 60km it'll work.

Before youtube and skype became mainstrream, your exact same arguments could have been made saying that there weren't enough uses for speeds >= 10k/s.

The internet is an evolving system and the bandwidth required to get the most use out of it will increase into the future. In ways that smarter people than I can't even predict.

Perhaps with >=1MBps connections we wouldn't need so many people transiting to and from offices?

Also, this isn't a "we could spend the money elsewhere" situation. The NBN was a business plan. An investment which would turn a profit down the line.

True enough, but the difference between FTTN and FTTP is currently sitting at numbers like 25mbps vs. 100mbps. That isn't even an order-of-magnitude improvement. It isn't worth the cost. If you want to argue that gigabit connections have a great use case, I'd appreciate examples - there should be some in Korea if they exist. Given that I'm all about taxpayer savings, I'd prefer educational/industrial rather than entertainment ones.

If it comes with a profitable business plan, it is a good time to leave it to private enterprise. I'd happily invest in a fibre-laying company if someone offered me the chance. I don't want the Federal government to choose for me.

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