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0 pointsXorNot12y ago0 comments

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?

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another-one-off12y ago· 1 in thread

(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...

XorNotOP12y ago

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.

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