The petition grossly oversimplifies the difference in approach between the major parties. The NBN will still be built under the new government, NBN Co. will still exist, the debate isn't so much about FTTN vs FTTH (terms that most Australian's aren't familiar with) nor about copper vs fiber.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
Also all those articles about more speed from copper don't go beyond 100m (ethernet distances) or involve pair-bonding copper lines, which means having multiple physical telephone lines to each premises. Which is expensive, inefficient and in many areas not even possible. At which point, the very moment you are sending people out to start trenching cables into the ground, you are wasting money if you are not putting fiber optics in.
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.
Comments
The petition grossly oversimplifies the difference in approach between the major parties. The NBN will still be built under the new government, NBN Co. will still exist, the debate isn't so much about FTTN vs FTTH (terms that most Australian's aren't familiar with) nor about copper vs fiber.
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...
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.
Also all those articles about more speed from copper don't go beyond 100m (ethernet distances) or involve pair-bonding copper lines, which means having multiple physical telephone lines to each premises. Which is expensive, inefficient and in many areas not even possible. At which point, the very moment you are sending people out to start trenching cables into the ground, you are wasting money if you are not putting fiber optics in.
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.
Thanks for a really informative post! You haven't changed my view, exactly, but you've definitely made me more optimistic about the next 3 years.
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?