Australian National Broadband Network Discussion

[PhilPC]

There seems to be a lot of Aussies here, lets discuss what's going on with the two network plans, as it's something we clearly all have an interest in.
For any non-Aussies (or Aussies out of the loop) that would like to be involved, here's what's going on:

The Labor Party, which is currently in government, has started building the National Broadband Network, which is essentially a Fibre to Premise network to 93% of the premises in the nation, and satellite services to the rest. As no company (specifically Telstra, the now-publicly owned corporation responsible for the current copper network and the majority of mobile infrastructure in the nation) would have any part in this, the government created NBN Co (ironically, this was exactly how Telstra was founded). NBN co is a government owned corporation, that has designed, is currently building, and will maintain the network in the future, regardless of which plan goes ahead.

The Coalition, which is likely to be voted into power this year, intends on changing the network plan to be "Fast. Affordable. Sooner," where NBN co will essentially be building half of the original NBN to nodes, then using the current copper network to reach the surrounding premises. This plan has been backed by Telstra, whom would be very happy to see their obsolete copper network still being used for another hundred years.

If I suck at explaining it, here is a 4 minute explanation from a show on the Government station, & you can be sure as hell they don't say it like that on the commercial ones.

And to all you non-Aussies, yes, that is pretty much what all the political commentary is like over here

[Wint3rSh0ck]

Great recap on the situation right now. It's a load of shit to be honest. That copper network, as far as I know, is costing large amounts of money a year to keep crawling along. In the long run the half done solution is going to cost more in upkeep and leave us unprepared for higher bandwidth internet services.

[Mightybaal]

Great topic. Im interested to read peoples comments and thoughts. I try and stay away from the news as its all crap in my opinion.

  Cant wait to see this be a HOT topic unless it becomes very political.

[nishank93]

I don't see the point of the "Faster, Cheaper, More Affordable" (LOL!) proposal. They say 25Mb/s (~3MB/s), which obviously means a user would get some fraction of that speed, which just isn't good enough. And just what is the point of having something as fast as optic fibre, and then using copper to deliver it to the end user? When you're constructing something, make it as modern as possible. The NBN is the way to go.

[Skyfire]

Well, I see they're still sticking with the speed limit. Why have gigabit speeds when you can limit everyone to a maximum of 100MB/s? :D

[Pipinhot]

What sucks and reeks of monopoly is the town i live in.

100% of the town is covered by Telstra, 70% is adsl2 (telstra only). All other telco's reach 35% of the town with adsl2. If you cant get adsl2 with anyone....your stuck like i am on 150kbs

Telstra charge the most, and NBN rollout is apparently 3+ years away for me in my suburb. Neighboring suburb is in progress/Semi completed.

 

300,000 customers, fastest growing town in Queensland and all you can offer me is adsl1 speed......

 

If the coalition can get me my internet faster then labor, the vote is going that way.

I WANT MY INTERNETS.

 

Edit: What also bugs me is i pay $90 a month (bundled) for 200gb, on adsl1, where those who have adsl2 pay 80-90 for a 10X jump in speed. WTF is up with pricing.

Double Edit: But running off of a node sounds like shtako, soooo im torn both ways.....TO THE GREENS!

[PhilPC]

Great topic. Im interested to read peoples comments and thoughts. I try and stay away from the news as its all crap in my opinion.

  Cant wait to see this be a HOT topic unless it becomes very political.

I'm a pretty heavy political guy, so if we start arguing I'm going to get pretty intense.

I think we can all agree that

• Labor has proven over the past year that they're too dysfunctional and divided to properly run the country as a team
• Libs have very short term policies that are essentially just sweeping all the problems under the carpet, but will save us a bit of dosh in the present

I think any further discussion on the election will just result in personal attacks, because we won't know who's being ironically racist, or not; That's just how we discuss politics in 'Straya, c**ts

[Wint3rSh0ck]

Am I the only one not following the politics of it all? I swear I hear cock up upon cock up from either side.

[Delaser]

I'm reserving judgement on the whole thing until I get to try it out myself.

I'm in a mining town of ~5000 people.
They refuse to start installing it here because the mines are having problems.

I'll be moving down to melb within the next year and you can bet that I'll be finding a place with fiber installed either way.

[Delaser]

Am I the only one not following the politics of it all? I swear I hear cock up upon cock up from either side.

Welcome to politics! Where everything's made up and the polls don't matter!

[Slater]

I think the Liberal's plan of using the existing copper network is completely stupid. Its really only a short term solution, they'll soon find themselves back at square one in a few years time where the speeds aren't meeting demand as they should've been if they do mess with the plan. They're just wasting money by not building completely fibre to homes, its like they want us to live in the stone age compared to the rest of the world. All i can see the fibre to the node approach is that its just going to be a giant bottleneck. They're cheaping out on the costs for the NBN now but will ultimately pay for it in the long term, when they find the NBN hasn't helped reduce demand for faster internet.

 

So the solution is simple, don't screw with the current plan.

[PhilPC]

I'm reserving judgement on the whole thing until I get to try it out myself.

I'm in a mining town of ~5000 people.

They refuse to start installing it here because the mines are having problems.

I'll be moving down to melb within the next year and you can bet that I'll be finding a place with fiber installed either way.

The NBN isn't designed to be fully effective at the moment, so it's not really fair to judge it based on that. It's designed to last for decades, if not, centuries, but be quite useless in the present (the pipe connecting us with the rest of the world will remain slow as ever).

It's hard to explain it without sounding condescending, so sorry if this feels rude, I'm also explaining this for people who don't understand how long-term this network actually is.

• We currently run all our communication though a copper network (though not all technically copper, it was designed for phones, so let's just keep calling it that because it's simple)
• You may remember the changes between Dial-up, ADSL1, & ADSL 2, ect. The only things that changed during those network changes, were upgrades with the nodes on the ISP end, and the Modems on the premise end, the network itself never really changed.
• The NBN plan is to change all the copper, where practical, to fibre optics. So instead of bits travelling through electric signals on wire, they're traveling through light on glass pipes. There is a substantial speed difference between the two.
• From that point on, the cables are no-longer the bottleneck; The network it will only be limited by the nodes on each end of the pipe, which will be upgraded as processing technology and software get better.
• This kind of upgrading will happen exactly like the difference between ADSL 1 and 2, where you will just buy a faster router and your ISP will just upgrade their server rack
• this will probably continue going until we use something incredibly sci-fi, like bosons as a medium for binary communication. As exciting as that sounds, we shouldn't be holding our breath for it, especially when we have the technology to harness the speed of light for communication.

Now I actually have no qualifications to claim this is 100% correct, if I'm wrong, please correct me

[Josh]

I don't particularly like the "faster, cheaper, sooner" option, the current network is seriously out of date and the half assed solution the Liberal's are proposing is going to need be updated sooner anyway. That said things look pretty bad for Labor at the moment, I can't really see them winning the next ellection especially with the seemingly unstable leadership in the Labor party. Going to have to vote for the first time and honestly both choices seem to suck.

[TheMightyNoob01]

I have ADSL2 where I live and am happy with it. I wouldn't upgrade unless it was 1gb/s or cheaper than current plan. Doesn't matter though cause NBN is not coming to where I live. I refuse to use wireless or satelite!!!

[TheMightyNoob01]

I really hope the liberals don't cock up and change the nbn to the half ass version when they get in to power. Personally they should just use the current plan but, over a longer period of time IMO.

[Binga]

Yep, the half-arsed version the liberals have planned stupid, and will not benefit 'Straya in the long term While the World is talking in Gigabits Australia is still talking in <100mb

[Delaser]

The NBN isn't designed to be fully effective at the moment, so it's not really fair to judge it based on that. It's designed to last for decades, if not, centuries, but be quite useless in the present (the pipe connecting us with the rest of the world will remain slow as ever).

It's hard to explain it without sounding condescending, so sorry if this feels rude, I'm also explaining this for people who don't understand how long-term this network actually is.

• We currently run all our communication though a copper network (though not all technically copper, it was designed for phones, so let's just keep calling it that because it's simple)
• You may remember the changes between Dial-up, ADSL1, & ADSL 2, ect. The only things that changed during those network changes, were upgrades with the nodes on the ISP end, and the Modems on the premise end, the network itself never really changed.
• The NBN plan is to change all the copper, where practical, to fibre optics. So instead of bits travelling through electric signals on wire, they're traveling through light on glass pipes. There is a substantial speed difference between the two.
• From that point on, the cables are no-longer the bottleneck; The network it will only be limited by the nodes on each end of the pipe, which will be upgraded as processing technology and software get better.
• This kind of upgrading will happen exactly like the difference between ADSL 1 and 2, where you will just buy a faster router and your ISP will just upgrade their server rack
• this will probably continue going until we use something incredibly sci-fi, like bosons as a medium for binary communication. As exciting as that sounds, we shouldn't be holding our breath for it, especially when we have the technology to harness the speed of light for communication.

Now I actually have no qualifications to claim this is 100% correct, if I'm wrong, please correct me

I'm not sure if you meant to quote me there... I didn't say anything about the quality of the network, actually said I was going to reserve judgement on it until I tried it. :\

BTW, Trained network admin here. I know how these things work. :P

And to back up my point about them refusing to upgrade: For the last 12 months, the local exchange has been overloaded to the point where new connections can't be made at all.

I've spoken to the local telstra technician about this.

The town 1 hour up the road from us already has NBN access. 30Mbit connections is the standard.

 

They just won't touch this town. It's said "Construction Commenced" on the nbn website for the last 12 months.

 

[Wint3rSh0ck]

Just found an interesting article which I thought related to this. Looks like the same fibre vs. copper shit fight we're having now happened last century, regarding iron wire or copper wire. History repeats itself, hey?

[d33g33]

The thing I really don't understand about NBN, Fibre to the Node or even existing is how they expect to bring us into "the digital media hwy" when we are all data capped. Our electronic distribution laws need a good going over because IF something like Netflix came. That is, a streaming service that isn't offered on a free traffic from the ISP (and you will pay through the nose, again for it) high speed Internet is useless, well not useless but you get what I'm saying. Will it be they out it in, streaming services get introduced and then we have to push back on the ISPs and say this cap thing you've got going on... Yes it's no good.

Also they are marketing the NBN will be good for 40years. 40years! 40years we'll be in the exact same situation again. It's easy to yell about it but I'm sure there is no easy solution, we are such a vastly spread nation. I would have thought that power line technology would have been better but I don't know much about it to comment any further.

Also the fact that the average NBNCo salary is $120k is bs...

/nuff :)

[bradscoolio]

Within a year for me... still shit plans at high cost :/

[Dim]

FTTH is something the Australian government should have addressed long ago. They never truly began to understand the impact of the internet and were far too short-sighted per term.

 

FTTN is good, but we really need fibre to the home in order to see any colossal change.

I spell it 'fibre', but the spelling depends on where you're from - the US would spell it 'fiber'. There is no correct way on this website :P

[Cruiseshipfan]

Also they are marketing the NBN will be good for 40years. 40years! 40years we'll be in the exact same situation again. It's easy to yell about it but I'm sure there is no easy solution, we are such a vastly spread nation. I would have thought that power line technology would have been better but I don't know much about it to comment any further.

The fibre network will last for a lot longer then 40 years. The signal travels at the speed of light. To increase speed all they need to do it upgrade the equipment used, as the cables will not be what is bottlenecking the network. 

[Hoppa]

My suburb isn't even planned for the next 3 or more years for them to start working on it in my area. They seem so give the crapper suburbs fibre such as the logan area of brisbane (not even apart of brisbane) way before anywhere else.

 

It's all because of the stupid red-head in charge of this country where she feels that everyone has to be financially equal.

[matto97]

moved to USA from Brisbane 3 months ago and i can say theres a HUGE dif in the download speeds. in AUS if i played on a USA BF3 server my ping would be like 700. but in USA i can play on a AUS server at around 50-100 ping

[ofr057]

I currently get 32mb and i dont see how spending tax money is valid unless its improves upon this