Off-Topic
So how do we stop Abbott pulling the pin on the NBN - there was talk today of half the people in Tasmania having the current planned system and the other half having Abbott's plan.
It was due to commence in my area in the second half of this year but it has now been pushed back to June 2014 i.e. after the election :eek
It was due to commence in my area in the second half of this year but it has now been pushed back to June 2014 i.e. after the election :eek
It amazes me that Captain Catholic actually thinks that any remotely intelligent person with a basic understanding of this technology (that doesn't have a vested interest in selling Libs their tech) would actually believe that this is a real solution.
It's incredibly frustrating that we have a decade and a half of stats that even a child can look at and see fairly clear trends regarding usage, technological change, changes in bandwidth requirements and the effect that increased bandwidth has on driving further technological change.
And then, that's before we get to the glaringly obvious issues that his plan has: If you're not living next door to the node, you're going to get a progressively slower connection; even at a short distance from the node, the achievable speeds will be fractions of what a person 100m down the road has.. assuming you even have the copper to survive it. The handful of people in the HFC serviced areas might be OK for a while - they won't be reliant on the deteriorating copper network, and don't have to deal with the woeful speed over distance degradation that VDSL has (not to mention the reliability issues that tech has).
The future of technology in Australia will not be cheap, it won't happen quickly, and it won't reach it's full potential if it's interfered with by two dipshits playing politics who have been bleating this bullshit for so long they actually seem to believe it.
The single biggest issue the Labour backed NBN has had to date is in fact the Liberal opposition; the amount of time, energy and money the opposition has wasted constantly calling NBN Co to task over missed deadlines and not working fast enough could have been far better invested in letting them get on with the job instead of playing politics.
Using the cheaper and "faster" (really? what a fucking poor choice of words) argument for a substandard alternative - they're the carrots you have to use when you don't have any solid reasons for people to support you... just throw them a carrot, and watch all the hungry, greedy little people clammer towards it.
Simon Hackett (former Internode owner, and guy that had a lot to with the early days of the internet appearing in Oz) has it right in a recent presentation - if the opposition gets into government, by 2016, Tony will be doing an arse about face and looking for FTTH anyway. It'd be a miracle if they could renegotiate all of the required contracts within a single term let alone actually get the network build started; and in the mean time, the existing contracts will be costing them money.
Their plan relies entirely on Telstra - who may well decide to put up the price at any time they like given that the Liberal government doesn't have any other alternative with their FTTN plan.
It's incredibly frustrating that we have a decade and a half of stats that even a child can look at and see fairly clear trends regarding usage, technological change, changes in bandwidth requirements and the effect that increased bandwidth has on driving further technological change.
And then, that's before we get to the glaringly obvious issues that his plan has: If you're not living next door to the node, you're going to get a progressively slower connection; even at a short distance from the node, the achievable speeds will be fractions of what a person 100m down the road has.. assuming you even have the copper to survive it. The handful of people in the HFC serviced areas might be OK for a while - they won't be reliant on the deteriorating copper network, and don't have to deal with the woeful speed over distance degradation that VDSL has (not to mention the reliability issues that tech has).
The future of technology in Australia will not be cheap, it won't happen quickly, and it won't reach it's full potential if it's interfered with by two dipshits playing politics who have been bleating this bullshit for so long they actually seem to believe it.
The single biggest issue the Labour backed NBN has had to date is in fact the Liberal opposition; the amount of time, energy and money the opposition has wasted constantly calling NBN Co to task over missed deadlines and not working fast enough could have been far better invested in letting them get on with the job instead of playing politics.
Using the cheaper and "faster" (really? what a fucking poor choice of words) argument for a substandard alternative - they're the carrots you have to use when you don't have any solid reasons for people to support you... just throw them a carrot, and watch all the hungry, greedy little people clammer towards it.
Simon Hackett (former Internode owner, and guy that had a lot to with the early days of the internet appearing in Oz) has it right in a recent presentation - if the opposition gets into government, by 2016, Tony will be doing an arse about face and looking for FTTH anyway. It'd be a miracle if they could renegotiate all of the required contracts within a single term let alone actually get the network build started; and in the mean time, the existing contracts will be costing them money.
Their plan relies entirely on Telstra - who may well decide to put up the price at any time they like given that the Liberal government doesn't have any other alternative with their FTTN plan.
The biggest problem is that I can only get ADSL where I am located, which is a low population density area. It is not profitable for anyone to invest in the hardware at my exchange to provide higher speeds and then we have the backhaul issues.
It needs a public enterprise to invest the funds which is where the NBN was going to be great and now it looks like Abbott is going to ruin it.
I hope the NBN Corporation has lots of nice contracts which can't be broken :rolleyes
It needs a public enterprise to invest the funds which is where the NBN was going to be great and now it looks like Abbott is going to ruin it.
I hope the NBN Corporation has lots of nice contracts which can't be broken :rolleyes
That bit of pipe between tassie and the mainland is your biggest issue - the most expensive transit in the country happens across that pipe. That's really not helping with getting competition.
I think NBN Co's contracts would take long enough to untangle (and cost enough) that it would be stupid to stop - at least that's what I'm hoping.. because that's precisely how I'd cover my own arse ;)
I should mention - exchange backhaul may not necessarily be fixed by someone doing a DSLAM build at the exchange. Unless it's a major exchange, chances are if a new DSLAM went in, it would feed through the same backhaul and then get routed off at the nearest POI - which for you is in Hobart. By that point, you'd be fed into the ISPs own backhaul at that point... so the congestion has already happened before you were offloaded at the POI.
Great post @DavidS.
It just gets so frustrating listening to Abbott's cronies talking about something they have no knowledge of and are going screw it up for everyone.
If only someone with technical knowledge and respect in Oz could speak out on a national level and make the public aware of how stupid Abbott's proposal really is.
There needs to be an Australia wide wake-up call on this!
It just gets so frustrating listening to Abbott's cronies talking about something they have no knowledge of and are going screw it up for everyone.
If only someone with technical knowledge and respect in Oz could speak out on a national level and make the public aware of how stupid Abbott's proposal really is.
There needs to be an Australia wide wake-up call on this!
David mentioned the speed degradation - the following graph is based on using VDSL2 which is the technology proposed in most FTTN systems :
So, if you live more than 1 km from a node don't expect performance much better than ADSL2+.
Even if you don't agree with anything else that Labor has done, this alone should be enough reason to vote for them again.
So, if you live more than 1 km from a node don't expect performance much better than ADSL2+.
Even if you don't agree with anything else that Labor has done, this alone should be enough reason to vote for them again.
Thanks for finding that for me (I was too damn tired at the time).David mentioned the speed degradation - the following graph is based on using VDSL2 which is the technology proposed in most FTTN systems :
So, if you live more than 1 km from a node don't expect performance much better than ADSL2+.
Even if you don't agree with anything else that Labor has done, this alone should be enough reason to vote for them again.
The other issue I have with this is power consumption. Those cabinets - anywhere from 25000 to 50000 apparently - not only do they need to be built, and need to have very expensive and environmentally unfriendly (ok, environmentally disastrous) batteries replaced every couple of years.... these boxes will consume shit loads of power... early estimates are twice as much as what the current NBN plan needs, but I'd suggest it'll turn into more.
The Liberal version of the NBN requires a media conversion process to occur within the cabinets - basically an electronic process to convert light across to an electronic signal, that then needs to be pushed across various lengths of copper then into houses. Fibre itself doesn't need a huge amount of power to push light across it - it's efficient and their Labour NBN doesn't require a "last mile" media conversion.
So.. the conversion process wastes power (bad in a country with filthy power production), requires high volumes of toxic batteries with short shelf lives (and are likely to be stolen quickly), and adds another layer of hardware into the mix littering all of suburbia.... and introduces multiple extra points of failure. And that's just these stupid nodes.
From a competition perspective - what happens next? We already know what happens when ISPs try to use Telstra's copper - they get ripped off, they get woeful service (wait times for ADSL repairs can be over a month for non-Bigpond customers), and those issues pass on to us. Ultimately, the Liberal plan of the NBN helps keep Telstra's monopoly, and will ensure that those pricks get money regardless of who you want as an ISP (kind of like now really).
It's bad enough that the current NBN is both hamstrung and reliant on Telstra for their pits and ducts.
This is the sort information that should be sent continually to the current affair program's to get people aware of the real difference between the two plans. Not just "ours is cheaper and you'll have it sooner" bullshit that they are giving the public!
Let the liberals explain how the people in the bush are going to get the same QOS as the people in the city!
Let the liberals explain how the people in the bush are going to get the same QOS as the people in the city!
The sad thing is that nothing I've said above isn't out in the public domain - it's there, and it's being said by the kind of people with the smarts (ie Simon Hackett is a great example) to build this stuff, who breathe and bleed this technology, who understand to the most finite detail the technical complexities of these technologies, and have been around long enough and have shown the forethought in the past to build for the future rather than build for the now.
The problem is that certain media (read anything News Ltd) has had a very strong anti-Labour bias toward the NBN and have for a long time been saturating the media with crap about how the Liberal version of the NBN is better and for the most part, helped obfuscate the inadequacies of Malcolm Turnbull's tripe.
The technical media, and for a large part it's non-anti-labour biased readership seem to better understand why Labour's NBN is the only investment worth making. Sadly, we're talking about a minority; particularly a media minority whose reasoning for why it's good don't translate so well to the non-tech type of person beyond "it's dearer and it's faster". The non-tech types can easily just see that as too much money and speed that they don't think they need which is an angle the Libs have been taking advantage of. Less money and "Faster" (aka sooner) are fans to the anti Labour rhetoric flames.
Sadly for the non-tech types (and no offense to them), but what the fuck do they know about what they will need in the future for communications? That's for the tech types to work out. The tech types are screaming the answer, but few are listening. It's too complicated for the average person to get their head around, and they're never really going to understand why they need it down to an intrinsic enough level for everyone to vote appropriately.
The anti-Labour bias (and lets face it, the media is loving it) is so loud right now that people are starting to believe too much of what the media says instead of making carefully informed dicisions about what is best for this country. ... and at the end of the day, it's the voters who make the decision. The Juliar crap on Facebook is a great example - I see friends posting that shit every day, and yet none of them can carry on a co-hesive, intelligent discussion about specific issue that they actually have that the Liberals could do in any way better. Drill in to them long enough, and their entire understanding is based on some piece of shit they read in a newspaper or saw on a ACA (or its clone on channel 7) instead of actually looking at an issue, thinking about what the options were, then deciding whether it really is such an issue. We're quick to blame a government for its mistakes, but we forget sometimes that it means that they're trying. We don't belt our childrens arses for trying and failing, yet look at how we treat a government who makes a perceived mistake! When you look at the perceived failure (I'm using that term for a reason), who decides it was a "failure"? The opposition and the media who get on the band wagon! The failure is based on conclusions of advisors and their ministers rather than technical, qualified people in whatever field who are best suited to make those determinations.
Myself - I'd take a government that tries and occasionally fails than a government too scared of its own shadow to do anything significant for the long term benefit of the nation.
Personally, I don't like Labour much either, but having sat here for so long looking at the absolutely short sighted rubbish coming from the LIberals as a "best solution" scares me to death. If they think they can treat the population of Australia as uneducated morons with this kind of shit, what can we expect out of them in power? In more lies, more ignoring the inconvenient parts of their plans?
The media is not your friend here. The modern media will follow whatever gets them the most viewers/readers. The more people hate Julia, the easier it is to cash in on anti Labour rhetoric.
Something for @MagicJ - have a look into the actual funding method being used for the Labour NBN - you might be surprised when you see it's not directly tax payer funded like the Libs would have the country believe, but you might better understand that model than someone who struggles to keep a household budget in line like myself.
Good site about how other countries have gone down the FTTN path and now regret it.
http://nbnmyths.wordpress.com/why-not-fttn/
http://nbnmyths.wordpress.com/why-not-fttn/
Yes, FTTN is well hated. It's not even a smart mid-way point. The very people that the Liberals once quoted about how other countries have done it successfully have been well documented in saying how bad it is and why it shouldn't be done. BT springs to mind (sorry, haven't read your link yet.. that's lunch time reading!).
12Mbps is usually a wireless option for people outside of areas that will be fibre, or are likely to be at the far end of getting fibre. People who can't get ADSL2+ (or more specifically can't get throughput given that it's only a theoretical speed based on distance and line quality) see it as a good option. Kinda slow, but as a wireless option it's not too shabby.
The point of actual fibre though is that it can be scaled, and if it's actually the NBN - you won't be limited to dickheads like Telstra.
First off, Telstra are expensive for NBN connections so you need to do your research :rolleyes
Secondly, why do you think Telstra would tell you the whole truth ?? With ADSL2+ you are using their equipment and paying a nice price for it. With the NBN, Telstra need to pay the wholesale price to access the network (i.e. share the profits), just like all other providers which, stangely enough, provides a level playing field which has not existed for a long time and which Telstra are not used to, and do not like.
They want you to stay on their ADSL2+ plan for as long as they can keep you there because they make more money from you !!.
Did they tell you that for an extra $5/month you can get a speed boost to 25Mbps or for an extra $20/month you can get up to 100Mbps - I doubt it. Why would they want to sell you a product that will actually reduce their profit margin??
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