Labor vs Liberal NBN

[chocco]

It's not surprising to find people charged thousands per MONTH for even piddly 10/10 or 20/20 connections. Seems absurd that many businesses are in that situation and I sit at home with a connection several times faster, massively more reliable (fibre doesn't simply "drop-out" from signal quality) and I pay the same (if not less) in a YEAR that they pay in a MONTH!

Those business's that are paying big dollars for 10/10, 20/20 or even 2/2 up/down are paying for a fibre fed managed service with Service Level Agreements most being service restored same day or possibly even hours and if its not restored within their contract SLA then they get compensated.

Yes there are people/business out there that have bonded SHDSL services in areas that have fibre but choose not to pay for the reliable service, but when there is a noise problem on the copper in the street that takes 5 days to fix, then they wish they had fibre or a fully managed service.

Dont get the wrong idea I agree with the NBN in principle, but its never going to work until they force people onto the NBN fibre by removing the copper in the street which isnt going to happen and the current take up rate is only 10%, I believe alot lower than forecasted. Telco's are still installing DSLAMS and will continue to do so until the copper is pulled, the Greenfield Estates where the NBN is going in I believe there is no copper so there is no choice I may be wrong, just as there should be no choice after the NBN rolls thru a existing suburb.

Either way I will be paying thru higher taxes to cover the cost of the low take up or pull the copper out and give me NBN at a reasonable price.

[duke5700]

Take up levels for NBN is much higher than 10%, I think it was even higher than Labor predicted

Be interested to see the less than 10% and where you read that?

Copper won't be removed until it is worth more in scrap value and it becomes to un reliable, it will eventually go the way of the dodo however. Just a matter of time.

Those business's that are paying big dollars for 10/10, 20/20 or even 2/2 up/down are paying for a fibre fed managed service with Service Level Agreements most being service restored same day or possibly even hours and if its not restored within their contract SLA then they get compensated.

Yes there are people/business out there that have bonded SHDSL services in areas that have fibre but choose not to pay for the reliable service, but when there is a noise problem on the copper in the street that takes 5 days to fix, then they wish they had fibre or a fully managed service.

Dont get the wrong idea I agree with the NBN in principle, but its never going to work until they force people onto the NBN fibre by removing the copper in the street which isnt going to happen and the current take up rate is only 10%, I believe alot lower than forecasted. Telco's are still installing DSLAMS and will continue to do so until the copper is pulled, the Greenfield Estates where the NBN is going in I believe there is no copper so there is no choice I may be wrong, just as there should be no choice after the NBN rolls thru a existing suburb.

Either way I will be paying thru higher taxes to cover the cost of the low take up or pull the copper out and give me NBN at a reasonable price.

[kevin101]

NBN Co has revealed new figures on how many people are actually harnessing its national broadband network.

According to the company, in areas where fibre has passed the premise and the network has been operating for over 12 months, the average take-up rate is around 34.4 per cent.

Meanwhile, in areas where the network has been operating for just six months the take-up sits at around 28 per cent of the premises passed by the fibre.

NBN Co went on to add that households connected to the NBN typically download and upload twice as much data to the internet than their non-connected counterparts.

NBN Co’s head of product and sales, John Simon said the NBN take-up figures are superior when compared to how other internet access products have been adopted by Australians.

Citing figures from various Australian Media and Communication Commission annual reports, NBN Co said it took around four years to achieve a 13 per cent take-up rate of dial-up technology, six years to hit a 28 per cent take-up rate of ADSL and 15 years to attain a 34 per cent take-up rate of HFC technology.

Just a brief article about the takeup rates
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/...e-rate-figures

[macca_779]

Kinda glad MT is a Lib cause he really is a poor alt for a communications minister & appears to be more Abbotised each time he speaks!

I feel a lot of what we see from turnball is dictated by Abbott. Abbott wanted the nbn gone. At least turnball is somewhat saving it. While still a weak policy. It's better than nothing.

Personally if they just left it alone I believe they would have an even stronger pollitical sway.

Plus there is also executing their policy. It relies on telstra handing over the copper network a lot sooner which will give then their $11B sooner it also means they loose their massive cash cow in wholesale rental sooner and any monies made from selling off the raw copper which is a shit tin of cash.

Then there is also getting their policy through the senate with which the minor parties namely the greens are very pro FTTP nbn.

[chocco]

Just a brief article about the takeup rates
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/...e-rate-figures

Or this I bet there are 10 different reports with 10 different figures.

http://www.nbnco.com.au/blog/1-3-mil...timetable.html

At the end of March, the NBN fibre construction footprint covered 935,400 premises in built-up areas, including 68,300 premises where the rollout is complete and householders and business owners can order a service. Also at the end of March a total of 48,600 homes and businesses across all technologies were connected to the NBN.

[jc_sv8]

34% take up, that's better than her approval rating. May be scrap all of the other plans and ride this one all the way to September!

[team illucid]

I think that if they had followed the Finnish proposal and legislated that everyone in the country received a certain level of service for the NBN (because the network was funded via taxpayers) then acceptance would be greater. Then, if people wanted to get better service, they just payed for the next tier up.

[Stewge]

Those business's that are paying big dollars for 10/10, 20/20 or even 2/2 up/down are paying for a fibre fed managed service with Service Level Agreements most being service restored same day or possibly even hours and if its not restored within their contract SLA then they get compensated.

I agree with you there as I work for a company which is in exactly this situation. Charged enormous amounts for a tiny pipe. An SLA is NOT worth $9000 a month on top of the actual bandwidth cost. An SLA will not save businesses from general failure. Routers still fail, people still make configuration mistakes, idiot workers still dig into the dirt and cut fibre cables.
The reason the costs are so high (in regional areas at least) is the cost of back-haul. Taking Ballarat as an example, there are only 3 private providers which run fibre from Melbourne, so they know they can charge whatever the hell they want, regardless of what it actually costs them to do it. On top of that, if you wanted to get a service from a metro provider, but use the private provider to back-haul it out to your city/town, you effectively get charged double.

What the NBN will do, is flatten pricing and remove the "charge whatever we want" attitude from providers as they will simply be beaten by competition. Competition is exactly what is needed in regional areas, as without it, there's simply no options available.

As for Greenfield estates, you're correct. I'm living in one and there's no copper lines, only the NBN fibre. The prices are also not as absurd as people make it out to be. Although, the prices have essentially been "squashed" in that the top consumer plans top out around the $100 (where-as DSL from similar providers tend to be well near $150-200 once you consider line rental etc).

As an example from iinet (the minimum plans for the cheap-arses who seem to be the most vocal about the prices being too high, funny that):
Minimum ADSL2 Off-net (with a median speed of 8-9/0.5mbps with ~70% of people being below 15mbps): $39.95 (10GB+10GB) + $29.95 Phone = $69.90
Minimum NBN Fibre/Wireless (fixed speed of 12/1mbps): $49.95 (20GB+20GB) + $9.95 Optional netPhone (same call costs/terms as regular phone) = $59.90
If you're on fibre, it costs $5 extra to go to 25/5, $15 to go to 50/20 and only $20 to go to 100/40. On top of that you can max out the quota and the whole thing is still only $99.95 + $9.95(Optional phone)
Maxing out an ADSL2 off-net plan comes up at $149.90.
So, it's $10 cheaper on NBN to start at the bottom, and $40 cheaper at the top end. On top of that, most people only have a home phone out of habit, it's not required and I wouldn't be surprised if most people simply don't get one (saving $9.95) as almost everyone has a mobile now.

What people don't take into account is the removal of line rental (although one could argue we effectively pay that in taxes) and you are simply getting more for your money. You get a significantly more reliable service and the speed is fixed, not varying depending on copper line noise or if everyone decides to jump on youtube at 7pm and clog up the back-haul. Since moving in we've only had 1 "outage" which was in fact caused by the provider DHCP server having problems). While there might be 5% of people getting exactly what they pay for from ADSL2 (20+mbps), there's %95 of people getting less than that.

[macca_779]

Back haul, transit, and distribution fibre is still susceptible to congestion be it copper, fibre or wireless. The nbn is not a direct line. The fibre distribution hubs are the main area where this will potentially effect users. Each fdh has 2.4gbps of capacity with the current setup. It then splits to up to 32 homes. So if everyone was on a 100mbit plan and all of them were simultaneously going flat out on it. You won't get 100. The chances of all those things happening though would be extremely rare. Once we get 1gbps plans and if there is no upgrade to the distribution network. Congestion speed drop might occur

[Stewge]

Back haul, transit, and distribution fibre is still susceptible to congestion be it copper, fibre or wireless. The nbn is not a direct line. The fibre distribution hubs are the main area where this will potentially effect users. Each fdh has 2.4gbps of capacity with the current setup. It then splits to up to 32 homes. So if everyone was on a 100mbit plan and all of them were simultaneously going flat out on it. You won't get 100. The chances of all those things happening though would be extremely rare. Once we get 1gbps plans and if there is no upgrade to the distribution network. Congestion speed drop might occur

That's true, however the congestion should be a significantly smaller problem and there is a far better minimum level of bandwidth sharing. 2.4gbps capacity split to 32 homes is not even a 2:1 contention ratio with 100% 100mbps take-up. Coupled with the current statistics on speed sign-ups, it's working out. 1gbps will certainly change things, but I suspect a lot of things will have to change before it has a real-world effect for average-joe users. Although I can certainly see the benefits for point-to-point data transfers (such as transfers of data between hospitals where the data source and destination are within Oz).

The current situation is that you probably couldn't supply general content quick enough to strain the infrastructure as most of it comes from overseas. Although youtube have begun to start allowing 4K uploads which may change things (even though 4K screens haven't really picked up yet). This of course, will hopefully change as more content providers actually host in Oz to take advantage of the network.

[chocco]

I agree with you there as I work for a company which is in exactly this situation. Charged enormous amounts for a tiny pipe. An SLA is NOT worth $9000 a month on top of the actual bandwidth cost. An SLA will not save businesses from general failure. Routers still fail, people still make configuration mistakes, idiot workers still dig into the dirt and cut fibre cables.
The reason the costs are so high (in regional areas at least) is the cost of back-haul. Taking Ballarat as an example, there are only 3 private providers which run fibre from Melbourne, so they know they can charge whatever the hell they want, regardless of what it actually costs them to do it. On top of that, if you wanted to get a service from a metro provider, but use the private provider to back-haul it out to your city/town, you effectively get charged double.

What the NBN will do, is flatten pricing and remove the "charge whatever we want" attitude from providers as they will simply be beaten by competition. Competition is exactly what is needed in regional areas, as without it, there's simply no options available.

As for Greenfield estates, you're correct. I'm living in one and there's no copper lines, only the NBN fibre. The prices are also not as absurd as people make it out to be. Although, the prices have essentially been "squashed" in that the top consumer plans top out around the $100 (where-as DSL from similar providers tend to be well near $150-200 once you consider line rental etc).

As an example from iinet (the minimum plans for the cheap-arses who seem to be the most vocal about the prices being too high, funny that):
Minimum ADSL2 Off-net (with a median speed of 8-9/0.5mbps with ~70% of people being below 15mbps): $39.95 (10GB+10GB) + $29.95 Phone = $69.90
Minimum NBN Fibre/Wireless (fixed speed of 12/1mbps): $49.95 (20GB+20GB) + $9.95 Optional netPhone (same call costs/terms as regular phone) = $59.90
If you're on fibre, it costs $5 extra to go to 25/5, $15 to go to 50/20 and only $20 to go to 100/40. On top of that you can max out the quota and the whole thing is still only $99.95 + $9.95(Optional phone)
Maxing out an ADSL2 off-net plan comes up at $149.90.
So, it's $10 cheaper on NBN to start at the bottom, and $40 cheaper at the top end. On top of that, most people only have a home phone out of habit, it's not required and I wouldn't be surprised if most people simply don't get one (saving $9.95) as almost everyone has a mobile now.

What people don't take into account is the removal of line rental (although one could argue we effectively pay that in taxes) and you are simply getting more for your money. You get a significantly more reliable service and the speed is fixed, not varying depending on copper line noise or if everyone decides to jump on youtube at 7pm and clog up the back-haul. Since moving in we've only had 1 "outage" which was in fact caused by the provider DHCP server having problems). While there might be 5% of people getting exactly what they pay for from ADSL2 (20+mbps), there's %95 of people getting less than that.

$9000 a month, no wonder you want to swap, dont know where you are in ballarat I thought there would have been more choice provider wise.

Anyway I will be on mobile dongle long before I get NBN, you are right by the time you take line rental, etc into the equasion its cheaper.

The new spectrum that was just sold off means fast internet is coming for home, you cannot use 2.5 for mobile you have to be static. Fingers crossed.

[lukemcg]

FTTN - More ongoing maintenance. Powered Node sheds, similar to Mobile base station tower huts, with the need for 3 phase power, air conditioning, full scale battery backup (which need checking/replacing every 2 years), and also the constant repairs to the last mile of corroded and rotten copper. Also cant be upgraded as easily as FTTP due to a bottle neck at the end of each line. Limited to 25mbps, which is pretty close to my 18mbps ADSL2+ connection. Alot of work for not much gain.


FTTP - Superior technology, no corrosion, no EMF interference, as a matter of fact the only thing that inteferes with pure fibre is an excavator bucket.
Much smaller FDH in the street, with no need for battery racks, air con, switchboards etc. Unlimited bandwidth potential due to wave division multiplexing technology. Need more speed? Add another wavelength, and bang, another 40gbps on 1 strand. Will go as fast as the equipment on each end can handle.

I know what my choice would be. Do it properly, do it once.

[HSVREDSLED]

About 8/9 years ago, we built our house. I plan to die in this house so I thought, do it right do it once as many have stated here. So to 'future proof' we were offered a home 'hub' deal. We were told than in ten years time you would need a computer in every room, the kitchen, home theatre...everywhere. At the time we had one computer, and a decent laptop was $2500 plus. So we put in this u beaut hub system. 100's and 100's of metres of blue cable everywhere through the house. Outlets in nearly every room. Fast forward a few years and the kids get older, and we look at getting more computers and then we are introduced to WI FI. Forward to current day and we have 4 computers, four smartphones, WI FI printer, 2 Ipads, 2 Ipad minis and guess what? The 'future proof' home hub system has NEVER been used. So what the point of this rant? I'm sure there are techno gurus on here who say the NBN is the best thing and future proof etc. Well a mere 9 years ago, I invested in considerable infrastructure in my house and now it is obsolete and never used. (Sounds like a desal plant) Who is to say that when the NBN is rolled out, we wont have a have plasma optic plutonium cable developed that is 1000X faster than fibre optic? Now this whole issue is compounded by massive blowouts in the estimated cost of the NBN. I am all for forward thinking and development, but sometimes, you gotta throttle back for common sense sake and not just continually blow billions and billions of dollars day by day and be brainwashed into thinking this waste is acceptable because it is not and the more that is wasted now, the harder it will be for future governments to claw back.

[lukemcg]

About 8/9 years ago, we built our house. I plan to die in this house so I thought, do it right do it once as many have stated here. So to 'future proof' we were offered a home 'hub' deal. We were told than in ten years time you would need a computer in every room, the kitchen, home theatre...everywhere. At the time we had one computer, and a decent laptop was $2500 plus. So we put in this u beaut hub system. 100's and 100's of metres of blue cable everywhere through the house. Outlets in nearly every room. Fast forward a few years and the kids get older, and we look at getting more computers and then we are introduced to WI FI. Forward to current day and we have 4 computers, four smartphones, WI FI printer, 2 Ipads, 2 Ipad minis and guess what? The 'future proof' home hub system has NEVER been used. So what the point of this rant? I'm sure there are techno gurus on here who say the NBN is the best thing and future proof etc. Well a mere 9 years ago, I invested in considerable infrastructure in my house and now it is obsolete and never used. (Sounds like a desal plant) Who is to say that when the NBN is rolled out, we wont have a have plasma optic plutonium cable developed that is 1000X faster than fibre optic? Now this whole issue is compounded by massive blowouts in the estimated cost of the NBN. I am all for forward thinking and development, but sometimes, you gotta throttle back for common sense sake and not just continually blow billions and billions of dollars day by day and be brainwashed into thinking this waste is acceptable because it is not and the more that is wasted now, the harder it will be for future governments to claw back.

Thats a very good point you make, but the kicker here is this, the cabling system in your house is made of copper. Copper is susceptible to the basics like electromagnetic interference, resistance, heat, cold etc etc, then theres the technical problems with twisted pair cabling, near/far end crosstalk, return loss, attenuation, alien crosstalk etc.

The blue cable you speak of would most likely be Category 5 UTP (unshielded, twisted pair), now at time Cat5 was the thing like you say, then it was replaced by Cat5-E, then Cat6, Cat6-A and eventually Cat7. So like you said you invested in a cabling system that is now inferior, to upgrade you'd have to replace all that cable with something better, which would eventually get replaced. Realistically copper cabling networks will never run faster than 10Gigabits per second, we have pretty much hit the limit, and even at 10gbps, its out of reach for most networks due to the enormous cost of equipment to run at that speed.

Fibre is much different, its moving in leaps and bounds. Fibre is glass, and uses laser light. Nothing can hold it back apart from a labourers shovel. If you install a single mode fibre optic link between 2 buildings, as technology develops, there is no need to replace the cable, just replace the switch on each end. The fibre itself is just a really small glass tube for a light to bounce through. Now copper can have 1 voltage on it, and 1 voltage only, you cant put 240V and 100V on the same cable, it will explode in your face. Fibre on the other hand, you can bounce different wavelengths of light through the 1 core, 300+ times, each time making the system faster, and faster.

To put into perspective, the fastest network cabling (cat7) you can buy runs at about 40,000 bits per second (40 gigabits per second) and only for about 50 meters.

The current speed record for fibre was achieved by NEC/Corning, on a 12 core fibre., 10,000,000,000,000,000 bits per second (1 Petabit per second).

Dont get me wrong HSVREDSLED, I agree to an extent with what your saying, but from a technical point of view (i work with fibre optics every day) I can assure you it wont be outdated for a long long time.

[Plenty]

About 8/9 years ago, we built our house. I plan to die in this house so I thought, do it right do it once as many have stated here. So to 'future proof' we were offered a home 'hub' deal. We were told than in ten years time you would need a computer in every room, the kitchen, home theatre...everywhere. At the time we had one computer, and a decent laptop was $2500 plus. So we put in this u beaut hub system. 100's and 100's of metres of blue cable everywhere through the house. Outlets in nearly every room. Fast forward a few years and the kids get older, and we look at getting more computers and then we are introduced to WI FI. Forward to current day and we have 4 computers, four smartphones, WI FI printer, 2 Ipads, 2 Ipad minis and guess what? The 'future proof' home hub system has NEVER been used. So what the point of this rant? I'm sure there are techno gurus on here who say the NBN is the best thing and future proof etc. Well a mere 9 years ago, I invested in considerable infrastructure in my house and now it is obsolete and never used. (Sounds like a desal plant) Who is to say that when the NBN is rolled out, we wont have a have plasma optic plutonium cable developed that is 1000X faster than fibre optic? Now this whole issue is compounded by massive blowouts in the estimated cost of the NBN. I am all for forward thinking and development, but sometimes, you gotta throttle back for common sense sake and not just continually blow billions and billions of dollars day by day and be brainwashed into thinking this waste is acceptable because it is not and the more that is wasted now, the harder it will be for future governments to claw back.

This same old Liberal argument is pathetic, if it was a Liberal policy/roll out you would be all for it but as it's not and your stupid leaders have no better alternative plan you find any reason to knock it. The absolute joke of a proposal for FTTN by the Liberal government is just absurd, wow it "saves" us $15b now, yet in 10 years time when the copper is rooted and and the FTTN network is no longer capable of supporting our exponentially growing thirst for bandwidth we'll have to shell out $60b to install what is already planned and in construction now.

The hub you had installed being future proof, well that's a great example.... Look at how fast you as a family have progressed with unforeseen technology, right now 25-Mbps might suffice but in another 10-15 years we're without doubt going to need Gbps.

It's a great plan for us as people and our ability as a country to move with the rest of the world, get over the politics and get on board the more that do the less of a "waste" it is!