English people. English! I'm not even sure if this is a parody.
The Liberal Party of Australia: Reconsider your plan for a 'FTTN' NBN in favour of a superior 'FTTH' NBN
Australia needs the right NBN.
Vote at change.org if you agree!
In 2009, the Australian Labor Party, in power as the federal government of Australia, initiated construction of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN). The network is replacing copper phone lines across Australia with a new fibre to the home (FTTH), also known as fibre to the premises (FTTP) network, meaning optical fibre will be run around the country, down every street, through every front yard, and into our houses (except some regional areas, where satellite will be used).
Two days ago, a federal election was held. The Australian Labor Party was defeated by the Coalition, an alliance led by the other major political party in Australia - the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party's policy for the NBN is to build fibre to the node (FTTN) instead, meaning optical fibre will be run to cabinets on street corners, which will service small areas, but the existing copper lines will still be used for the "last mile".
The petition is to convince the Liberal Party, now in power, to stick with the original plan of FTTH.
I think they did another one too (Fibre To The Boat) but can't seem to find it.
FTTN - Fibre To The Node
FTTH - Fibre To The Home
NBN - National Broadband Network
National Broadband Network.
Step 2 (later, on an incremental basis): Fibre to the home
Why do we need to do both steps at the same time? The last mile is incredibly expensive and difficult (as the slow rollout of Labour's scheme has demonstrated). Doing fibre to the node now doesn't stop us from having it to the home at a later point in time, as demands increase.
Well, it does work out cheaper in the long run, doing FTTN now involves buying the copper from Telstra, then later on pulling it out and replacing it with fibre. This article does a nice job of going into more details on the costs of it: http://theconversation.com/can-australia-afford-the-coalitio...
> as the slow rollout of Labour's scheme has demonstrated
I can't really comment as I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the rollout progress, but this may be worth a read: http://delimiter.com.au/2013/09/05/factcheck-will-nbn-take-a...
NBN Co allegedly signed a an awful lot of new contracts prior to entering caretaker mode. During the election campaign Turnbull promised that these contracts will be honoured. I'm more concerned that this will result in a two-tier NBN, with over a million homes with FTTH, and the rest left behind on a 2nd tier system.
Perhaps Ziggy will set the Government straight...
One of the benefits of having an NBN Co. is you don't have the retailer/wholesaler conflict of interest as we did with Telstra and as the UK did with BT
The solution in the UK was to mandate open access in regulation with BT OpenReach. The solution in Australia is NBN Co.
It is about the tradeoff between delivering higher speeds and the time taken to implement. The coalition plan is prominently technology agnostic[0]. The reason why Australia ranks 40th[1] globally with an average broadband speed of 4.1Mbit is not because we haven't rolled out fiber to every home, but rather because of mistakes made during deregulation and the delays in implementing a new plan have meant that large sections of the population have fallen behind international standards and are unable to access even a decent ADSL service, let alone a better VDSL or fiber based service.
This has left the country in a situation where because of a lack of basic service, 47% of the country currently access the internet using mobile broadband[2]. This is beyond unacceptable.
The two approaches to solving this problems are 1) build a nation wide network that delivers a satellite and wireless service to 7% of the population and a fiber to the home service to the other 93% of the population. ETA 2021. or 2) set a bandwidth target of delivering at least 25Mbit and up to 100Mbit to all households by 2016 and then upgrade to 100Mbit by 2019 using a mix of technologies
The 25-100Mbit by 2016 plan would bring Australia into the top 3 or 4 nations worldwide for internet access speeds, where we belong (neither plan would solve high bandwidth prices - the NBN only reaches from your home to your nearest point of interconnect, it does nothing to resolve the current poor state of internet bandwidth/backhaul access in Aus which has a lot of existing broadband connections struggling with international speeds).
The new approach is about applying the best technology to fit the situation and to get more bandwidth out sooner. This means that in new housing areas (known as greenfields) where new trenches have to be dug fiber to the home will be deployed (this doesn't change). In remote areas it will be a mix of satellite and wireless service (this doesn't change). In existing suburbs (brownfields) there will be a mix of fiber to the home, fiber to the basement, and fiber to the node with VDSL (and later GFast) delivering the last hundreds of meters.
There is yet another rollout case that is the most complicated and that is multi-dwelling unit's (or MDU's) - apartments, town houses, retirement villages, office buildings etc. The old plan was that in these instances the existing copper within a building would be pulled out and replaced with fiber. The problem is that co-ordinated the millions of residents, strata bodies, building co-ops, owners, etc. is a bureaucratic nightmare. When Optus and Telstra rolled out their HFC networks in the 90s they bypassed many of these residences because of the problems it involves. I think even the most strident Labor NBN supporter would concede that MDU's require a new plan and a different approach (not coincidently a report by NBN Co. on the MDU problem was due out a couple of months ago but its release was delayed until after the election).
This is why technological decisions should not be dictated by online petitions that at best oversimplify the situation and at worse misrepresent it. I was hoping that with the election now behind us that the toxic partizan debate surrounding the NBN would be over and that people that are best suited to finding a solution - engineers, network architects etc. could set about working out how to achieve the aim of delivering 25-100Mbit to Australian by the end of the first term of this new government.
The solution is using a mix of technologies - FTTH in new areas, FTTN in existing areas, an option to upgrade to fiber for businesses, fiber to the basement in MDU's, satellite and wireless in remote areas, etc. Whatever works, just get more bandwidth out there sooner.
As a technologist I can only support using a practical approach to finding the best solutions to hitting targets.
Off course we all want fiber to the home, off course we all want gigabit speeds, but there is a much more immediate problem of solving the blackspots in existing services. It is about taking smaller steps and delivering more bandwidth to more people sooner rather than a clean slate approach of an entirely new network, and all the risks that involves.
I personally know many people who are stuck using 3G modems to access the web and who not only have terrible data speeds but also have usage caps that are a few gigabytes a month. I struggle to explain to them why my area, where I already have an ADSL2+ service at 16Mbit+, is on the roadmap to receive an NBN service this year while their area, closer to the city than I live, is scheduled to start construction of the NBN in 3 years time.
I think it is much more important to get at least 25Mbit to those 47% of households before I get my connection upgraded from 16Mbit to 50 or 100Mbit.
There are no doubt still a lot of problems with the new plan. I wouldn't count myself as an ardent supporter of the coalition plan (I don't think I even like the very idea of there being an NBN and an NBN Co., but I digress), but I do believe that taking immediate small steps to solve the most critical problem is much more important than rolling out fiber to every home. What is certainly the case is that many, many people are overreacting to the change in government and the new broadband plan. The sky definitely isn't falling and we aren't tearing out what was built and dissolving NBN co. I wish more and more Australians would take a more pragmatic and less partizan approach to the problem.
As an aside, the coalition policy document [3], at 37 pages, is definitely worth a read. It goes into all of the background into how they made their decision, their research, etc. It is articulated, thought out, thoroughly referenced and well researched - I recommend everybody with an interest in the NBN read it and contrast to how this petition is presenting the 'problem'.
see also: "Will FTTN advances delay FTTH?": http://www.lightwaveonline.com/articles/print/volume-30/issu...
on how advances in squeezing more bandwidth out of copper (a technology that is far from dead or antiquated) is causing more telco's to forgoe ambitious FTTH plans in favor of FTTN.
[0] http://www.afr.com/p/technology/turnbull_cut_price_broadband...
[1] http://www.news.com.au/technology/state-of-the-internet-aust...
[2] http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/03/aussies-nuts-for-mobile-br...
[3] http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/assets/Coalition_NBN_polic...
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.
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?
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.
You might note that the Australian recently ran an article crowing about how they deployed hybrid solutions to a big apartment block, when in reality it was simply the MDU solution of FTTH - you trunk in fiber lines to the central switchboard, then run ethernet using 4-wires of the existing phone cabling. It delivers 100mbit, but you haven't escaped the problem of needing a fiber network to connect it too.
I guess a lot of this depends on how well NBNCo executes the new vision. Are we steering a speedboat or Clive's Titanic 2?
Arguments should not be as one-sided as either "the Coalition's plan is crap, because it's slower" or "Labor's plan is crap, because it costs more". Instead, the debate needs to be about whether or not the extra speed is worth the cost.
We aren't currently seeing this sort of debate. The Coalition says "give us some benefits to quantify". Labor says "giving all of the benefits would be impossible". I believe Labor should at least try. If they fail, they can fall back to their current position; no ground lost. At this point, Labor need only give benefits from the speed difference to support the cost difference - not the entire project cost.
P.s., the change.org petition is full of flaws. For example: "Broadband internet is an ‘infrastructure’ and should be considered in the same light as highways, water management, electricity and so forth; it should be a ‘right’ available ‘equally’ to all Australians."
But surely, better roads exist where they are needed more- where the cost justifies such? My parent's farm runs off of tank water and a self-sufficient sewerage system, not town water. The cost to provide the same service I receive at my apartment building as to their farm would be ludicrous.
Why are we not seeing a proper debate on this issue?
It requires comprehending civil works project scale, scope, duration and expected lifetimes, the logistics and finances of managing large infrastructure works and a mind open to the idea that the internet isn't "just for games or something".
So, not going to happen ever - but for what it's worth, I fully expect the Coalition to quietly keep going with FTTP since winding back the NBN doesn't save them any money with it spooling up - the money has been borrowed, but not borrowing it doesn't suddenly put the budget in the black. Instead you just don't get a future major asset, and do get to keep the maintenance costs of the old network.
There are two reasons.
First is the coalition, who started on the wrong footing: arguing about technology choice. This made it pretty easy for the ALP to take attention away from the project itself.
Second is a vocal band of people who want super fast internet, dammit. Now that it has been promised, there is a constituency for it. Public debt seems rather abstract and besides, the NBNco promises that it's all going to be profitable somehow (without actually releasing their modelling to the public).
As a properly-run public infrastructure project over a decade or 15 years it could have been the envy of the world. Instead we are going to get something that will be an expensive mess, no matter how you slice it.
How about this: the coalitions plan is crap because it provides less service and less future adaptability at almost three times the unit cost.
$44.1b/100mbps estimated FTTH = $0.441b/mbps $29.5b/25mbps estimated FTTN = $1.18b/mbps
The numbers get even worse for the coalition when you factor in an additional $2B to the NBN plan to move everyone from 100mbps to 1000mbps.
Your analogy of town water vs tank water is not relevant as the plan is not to provide the same service (ie fibre) to all areas. That debate happened 3-4 years ago and has been NBN policy for almost as long. Fibre in dense areas, Wimax in less dense areas and satellite in rural settings. Wider roads exist for more capacity but I guarantee your parents farm has at least one road around it. That is what the change.org petition is talking about.
The problem we're running in to is our physical plant (the copper) is antiquated in standard and age. The coalition has loved talking up how bad the plant is as a negative for the NBN plan (asbestos boxes and viaducts, tree roots, electrical shorts, flooding, etc).
The NBN has planned and has budgeted to replace this plant with newer, modern equipment and techniques.
The coalition plan attempts to bend reality and ignore the dilapidated state of most of the inner city/suburban Telstra equipment. Instead they are going to buy 60,000+ new DSLAMs and just magically integrate them without having to deal with 50 years of bad maintenance.
The Coalition plan likely involves VDSL2+, which is supposed to do 250 Mbps at the node, and 50 Mbps 1 km from the node, so likely 90%+ of the population would get 50-100 Mbps by 2016. 25 Mbps is the minimum, not the average.
And the NBN was supposed to do 1 Gbps within a few years. But the rollout might be slower.
Add to that that once FTTN is rolled out, it could be upgraded to FTTH/FTTP, for a lot less money, these numbers are really not as easy to compare.
Interesting point about the state of the existing exchanges, copper, etc..
The plan did make a brief comparison to other FTTN roll outs worldwide, e.g. AT&T uVerse. Wonder what problems they faced.
I've been running http://www.weneedthenbn.com/ since Saturday night, and it's been getting a bit of traction, too.
My phone call to my local MP wasn't exactly promising - while I couldn't talk directly to the MP (although I didn't expect to), the person who answered seemed generally uninterested in anything that I had to say, and was unaware of the technical differences (other than "the LNP plan is cheaper").
I hope we can make a difference here, and there seems to be a lot of support for it. Even if 1% of the people who signed the petition called/emailed/wrote to their local member, we might have a chance of making a difference.
I've heard that it's cheaper to build, but significantly more complicated and expensive to run because of the maintenance of the copper network and the fact that the nodes require power under the LNP NBN, but not the ALP NBN.
(I'd like confirmation/anti-confirmation of this if anyone happens to know more.)
Here in Belsize Park I have access to Virgin Media, which is fibre to a closeby yet remote center nearby (FTTN).
This is easily good enough for me on the 120Mbit plan. I often get 12 MB/s with suitably fast peers.
So I reckon that FTTN would be just fine.
Because there is no way you are getting 120 mbit's through telephone copper. If it's not fiber then you're on HFC which means shared coax. In which case, well, that's not happening here because you'd still have to run coax to millions of premises. The type of wiring is not the expensive part.
