Labor vs Liberal NBN

[kevin101]

Found this demonstration this morning, as much as I don't like the Gillard Government I would rather see this country move forward with technology then backwards. As we all know we are in the age of technology now and we can't afford to be left behind the rest of the world it will do more damage than good. Realistically speaking the NBN will do this country a massive favor.

http://howfastisthenbn.com.au/?fb_ac...ref_map=%5B%5D

[macca_779]

I wish the coalition would just leave the nbn alone. Normally I vote liberal. But their policy on this combined with their moron of a leader will push me labor this year. Lesser of two evils if you will

[feistl]

The argument is a lot more simple than that... The current copper is costing telstra BILLIONS per year to maintain (As copper rusts as it gets old), and this i only getting more expensive. Fibre is effectively glass, so wont rust/break down.

Plus fibre will support virtually unlimited speed increases, whereas its getting harder and harder to boost the speed of copper (Especially as copper loses signal strength of distance).

I really wish Gillard would realise she is going to lose badly, but as one final gift to the public (to redeem herself slightly) would be to call a plebiscite for the NBN. Give Australians a chance to make their decision...

[duke5700]

Anyone with half a technical brain will understand.. the blind faith will soak up the dribble because they know no better and still rubbish it.

The sad thing is my house is still 3 - 4 years from having it completed, looks like I'll get whatever hamfisted cost cutting expensive for what you get approach the next government puts in place to ease the minds of the public.

[jc_sv8]

I've never got an answer on if it's fibre to the kerb, or the premises.
To the kerb means it runs past your place and from what I hear is about $1K to get terminated inside the house like a phone line.
Happy to be corrected...

[duke5700]

It is one connection point inside the house.

Just had the bloke who sits next to me at work get his done.

[Micks]

As I mentioned in the other thread the Coalition's ideas are as antiquated as our existing fifty + year copper network!
Labor on this one.

[feistl]

I've never got an answer on if it's fibre to the kerb, or the premises.
To the kerb means it runs past your place and from what I hear is about $1K to get terminated inside the house like a phone line.
Happy to be corrected...

From what i understand (not sure if its changed), during the initial roll-out all houses can be connected (Fibre physically run to your house) for free (if you sign up/give permission). However if you explicitly forbid fibre being run on your property you may be charged if you want it connected at a later date.

You can have the fibre physically installed (no cost) and you DONT have to sign up to a service. So essentially if you dont want fibre, it wont cost you a single cent. However it would be pretty foolish not to have it at least physically installed.

Also from what ive heard (My dad is the lead project manager at telstra preparing all the Victorian exchanges for NBN equipment) the coalition plan would end up much more expensive due to the correct copper sub exchanges (Lack of documentation, critically low number of spare pairs etc). It honestly its a case of it being easier (and cheaper in the long run) to physically put in fibre rather than trying to sort out the mess of current copper).

Anyone who has done any project management will know that it takes a lot of effort/planning before any "real" work takes place. EG, you spend millions of dollars designing and planning a new building long before the first shovel breaks earth. The NBN has spent a lot of time/effort designing the NBN, and yes progress seems to be slow but thats how projects run. Once the process is sorted then progress should appear rapid.

My biggest concern with coalition NBN is it might be ok now, but it will be a problem in 5-10 years... At least the labor NBN will be "future proof".

Also, have a read about the overland cable. In 1871 a single cable was run from Adelaide to Darwin costing ₤128,000 (Thats over $20bn in todays money). Now when you consider for just double that amount, we are getting fibre run to 93% of households accross the entire country it seems like comparatively good value....

[CLUBRED]

My question, will you vote for Gillard based purely on she has a better internet system?

[Stewge]

Quite simply, FTTH is superior. Doesn't matter which party has it, it's the superior solution. Unfortunately, as a technical innovation, it gets dragged down by the BS that is politics. Unfortunately, as the whole thing would never happen on a private level, we're stuck in the predicament that it currently is in. Until it's considered a true "utility" (ie. a requirement like water or electricity) then there will always be debates on price vs performance. The other problem is, Labour shot themselves in the foot with poorly managing the FTTN deployment (contractors over-charging etc).

For anyone interested in the technicalities of FTTN vs FTTH i'd suggest having a listen to Simon Hackett's (Internode Founder/CEO) presentation from CommsDay Sydney. A very interesting point made is that of powering the nodes and having battery backups on every street (imagine the landfill from that).
http://simonhackett.com/2013/04/09/c...lem-with-fttn/

On the FTTN full fibre termination costs, it's slated to be more in the 5K range (ouch!). Other countries (S. Korea, most Scandinavian nations) did a FTTN deployment with great success (with usually a 1K cost for full fibre). However, these were done over 10 years ago where FTTN in itself was already superior to dialup and ADSL2 hadn't even hit mainstream so there was growing room. Our problem is it's simply too late to bother with FTTN. It is literally an end-of-life technology before it's even installed. There are exactly ZERO developments in copper tech which applies to general households. Recently there have been developments which push over 100mbps over copper, but only at ranges of < 200m with NEW cable, nevermind our rotting network.

All that said, I already have 100mbps NBN fibre installed in my house (via iinet 500GB/500GB plan for $99 :P). Discrete box in the garage, CAT5/6 everywhere, DHCP on the WAN (no more PPPoE/A username/pw dial crap), no house phone (all got mobiles). Coupled with things like iinet freezone/mirrors downloads are epic fast. Did have to build a new PC router (Mini-ITX pc with dual-nics, i3/4gb, no problems now ) as the old ASUS Rt-N16 was a great unit with DD-WRT but got a bit unreliable with 100mbps LAN->WAN translations killing the CPU.

To give you an idea of the "real-world" benefit of even 100mbps (I use the term loosely..):
It was quite literally faster for me to install Steam and download Skyrim (pulling full 10MB/s from iinet/internode steam mirrors and no quota cost) on my new media PC via cable, than to LAN transfer it from my laptop over WiFi (wifi only has a real speed of about 40-60mbps due to signal, location of wifi AP etc; can't be helped). Whole thing done in less than 15 minutes.

[duke5700]

Yes, it is enough of a reason. It isn't just the internet.. People need to get that idea out of their heads.

In the coming years 99% of commerce will be completed over a data network. All of the countries infrastructure will require it and require it to be reliable. It will be a massive contributor to the countries piggy bank.

The very poor opposition plan is any indication of what we have coming, if they get into power then we will be left with will be our dicks in our hands whilst we struggle to catch up and spend trillions trying to get into line with the rest of the world. The cost over time for the libs plan will be well in excess of what the labor government is spending now.

My question, will you vote for Gillard based purely on she has a better internet system?

[kevin101]

My question, will you vote for Gillard based purely on she has a better internet system?

This day an age of politics you may as well vote for a party that has one thing you like and for the most part stay that way, because we all know promises are made and broken everything changes there's no real point discussing the politics here there's another thread dedicated to that.

It is however good to here other people thoughts and opinions on the NBN seeing yes it is a major upgrade to our country, simply put it is just Internet speed, BUT it goes way beyond that. The Internet is used in just about everyone's daily lives it won't just benefit the tech savvy people, it will benefit the entire country in more ways then you could imagine, the amount of people that don't understand this is astounding.

[RB30E]

The objective of Turnbull's plan was to come up with a cheaper alternative, but the ongoing cost of maintaining the copper network - currently about $1 billion per annum- is a serious issue. No company other than Telstra is currently in a position to maintain the network and they will charge accordingly. Turnbull's NBN also requires the "negotiation" of new agreements with Telstra - good luck with that. As for claimed performance, there's a reason why Turnbull's NBN is being called "copper magic".

[Evman]

The number of people I come across that still say we don't need fibre because "what we have is fast enough for me already". Such a crock, if (recent) history is anything to go by, in 10 years time the internet will be regularly used in ways we haven't even conceived yet. For once I'd love to have my tax dollars go towards something that is long-term rather than a short-term band-aid solution

[macca_779]

To give you an idea of the "real-world" benefit of even 100mbps (I use the term loosely..):
It was quite literally faster for me to install Steam and download Skyrim (pulling full 10MB/s from iinet/internode steam mirrors and no quota cost) on my new media PC via cable, than to LAN transfer it from my laptop over WiFi (wifi only has a real speed of about 40-60mbps due to signal, location of wifi AP etc; can't be helped). Whole thing done in less than 15 minutes.

Update your Wi-Fi mate. I run gigabit ethernet throughout my home but use an Apple Airport Express as the Wi-Fi hotspot ( disabled the old G junk on my Billion router). I get 11MB/s max transfer rate over Wi-Fi to my NAS and ~45MB/s reads from the NAS over ethernet (limited by the HDD in the NAS.