The Government has announced it will establish a new company that will invest up to $43 billion over eight years to build and operate a National Broadband Network, delivering ‘superfast’ broadband to Australian homes and workplaces.
This Fibre-To-The-Premises (FTTP) plan (at least insofar as infrastructure technology is concerned), mirrors closely the plan and rollout done by Telstra almost exactly 20 years ago (they were still Telecom Australia back then). While Telecom Australia rolled out and installed a reported 70% of the fibre that was required, the plan to actually use that fibre was axed, and the fibre left largely fallow throughout Australian cities, except for some that was ultimately converted to interexchange use.
The Governments FTTP plan will deliver 100MBps services to the majority of Australian homes, workplaces and schools, and high-speed (though higher-latency) connections to remote and small rural communities.
“the majority of broadband capacity already available in Australian homes is going to waste” |
Unfortunately, as it presently stands, the majority of broadband capacity already available in Australian homes is going to waste. I like the government’s plan. I really do. But unless they can deliver extraordinary cost savings to go with the new capacity, all they will end up doing is vastly increasing the amount of infrastructure that is being wasted.
The issues are a combination of cost, plans, and contention. As an example, I have a fairly substantive broadband connection – I wouldn’t be able to do my job without it. It’s a 10Mbps connection, less than would be available even on the slowest of the planned NBN services.
On the highest capacity and most expensive data-plan available to me, I could run that connection at capacity for three hours before I’ve used up the entirety of my plan for a month.
Three hours. You wouldn’t want to get distracted by telemarketers or the kids playing in the yard, or something compelling on the television if there was a chance that a piece of software might get away from you and pull as much data as your connection could deliver. And that’s happened. A software updater gets confused, and you can kiss your data-plan goodbye for the month.
It makes you think twice about downloading updates for World of Warcraft or other MMOGs, I can tell you. Software that’s digitally delivered or prone to large content updates is something you have to plan for. My own household data-budget allows for six hours of time online in Second Life per day, that time having to be divided up between three adult users for classes, meetings, business and whatever’s left for socialising.
Plans that provide, say, 20GB of data for a month don’t begin to get close to the notion of “the connected home”. Lord of the Rings Online, if bought online, will set you back an easy 10GB in basic downloads, and maybe another 2GB in content patches — before you’ve even started to play.
NBN’s FTTP certainly has a lot to offer. The usage of virtual environments for education, training, business and leisure has been held back significantly by the inability of existing infrastructure to deliver. Research and development of richer and more effective virtual environments by some very skilled Australian businesses and researchers is ultimately plodding along because those advances come at the cost of large quantities of data that must be moved with speed and aplomb.
Unless the government’s NBN is going to deliver capacity at a fraction of the current cost of data, though, Australian NBN broadband consumers are just going to go broke very quickly at worst, or leave Gigabits of capacity unused and wasted.
I'm on an Internode plan, it's slow compared to yours 512k/128, but I also get 25G downloads per month. With all the Secondlife I do, and you know I'm on a lot… the occasional large download, a fair bit of e-mail which often has attachments. I usually end the month with up to 10megs still unusued.
The downside is the lag, which I'm sure wouldn't be as bad with a faster connection.
Some friends who are just thinking about getting online but wouldn't know what a Gigabyte was if they fell over it, see commercials on TV where a *whopping 4gb per month* is offered. are told to think of a naked man, and convert Gigs to Inches… If you're not impressed, don't go for it.
Komuso told me what He gets in Japan, and it's quite amazing. but as for me, what I get, however slow it may be and how expensive it is for what's offered, is all I can afford.
Wolfie!
Any idea of the cause of low data use limits?
Is a matter of physics, economics, or regulation, legal blocks to competion, or what?
I am lucky that I live relatively close to an exchange. When I run a speed test on my ADSL2+ connection, it gets up to around 17,000 kbps. But in normal usage, it is practically impossible to find a server that can send me data at that speed.
Wolfie, when I first got onto SL, I had a 512/128 connection. I noticed a big improvement in SL performance when I upgraded to 1,500kbps. But the difference between 1,500 and 17,000 kbps was negligible.
And fibre won't help with the “classic” definition of lag (latency). It's still going to take so many milliseconds for a photon to travel from Australia to the US and back again.
However, I think FTTH would be a great thing. The actual speeds they are mentioning at the moment are kinda irrelevant. Fibre can theoretically provide unlimited bandwidth – it all depends on the hardware at either end of the fibre. It might sound like a cliche, but I do see it as an “investment in the future”.
For example, where I work, we have fibre between the main sites. If we need more bandwidth, we just buy a couple more Cisco DWDM cards, to put on either end of the fibre, and we get another 12 Gb/sec (up to 1.2 Gigabytes/second real throughput, depending on the protocol). That's a lot of bandwidth. And theoretically we can keep adding more and more.
Admittedly this hardware is in the tens of thousands of dollars at the moment. But it's technology. Soon enough, this kind of technology will probably be available in a $200 Linksys router.
As for the actual ISP plans and their download limits, well, I think that's just the state of the market here. A service is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it. It will get better. My first “broadband” plan had a 1 GB / month quota. The top consumer plans had 10 GB / month, I think. Now, I actually don't know what my quota is, perhaps 40 GB / month. But I am still paying about the same as I did for that 1 GB plan only a few years ago. When there is a need for the “average user” to download 100 GB / month, the ISPs will HAVE to offer this at a reasonable cost, or… they will go out of business.
Suezanne, as I said in my other comment, I think a lot of it is that it just the way the market is here. But another factor is that there are only a couple of links from Australia to the rest of the world, and the ISPs have to buy bandwidth off these companies that provide the links. FTTH is not going to change this.
Profit mostly. Caps provide massive profit opportunities, and the tighter the caps the more profit comes out of the network – even if you lose a lot of customers. Indeed, the first step in implementing a profitable capping plan is to shuck a lot of your customers.
Any idea of the cause of low data use limits?
Is a matter of physics, economics, or regulation, legal blocks to competion, or what?
Any idea of the cause of low data use limits?
Is a matter of physics, economics, or regulation, legal blocks to competion, or what?
I am lucky that I live relatively close to an exchange. When I run a speed test on my ADSL2+ connection, it gets up to around 17,000 kbps. But in normal usage, it is practically impossible to find a server that can send me data at that speed.
Wolfie, when I first got onto SL, I had a 512/128 connection. I noticed a big improvement in SL performance when I upgraded to 1,500kbps. But the difference between 1,500 and 17,000 kbps was negligible.
And fibre won't help with the “classic” definition of lag (latency). It's still going to take so many milliseconds for a photon to travel from Australia to the US and back again.
However, I think FTTH would be a great thing. The actual speeds they are mentioning at the moment are kinda irrelevant. Fibre can theoretically provide unlimited bandwidth – it all depends on the hardware at either end of the fibre. It might sound like a cliche, but I do see it as an “investment in the future”.
For example, where I work, we have fibre between the main sites. If we need more bandwidth, we just buy a couple more Cisco DWDM cards, to put on either end of the fibre, and we get another 12 Gb/sec (up to 1.2 Gigabytes/second real throughput, depending on the protocol). That's a lot of bandwidth. And theoretically we can keep adding more and more.
Admittedly this hardware is in the tens of thousands of dollars at the moment. But it's technology. Soon enough, this kind of technology will probably be available in a $200 Linksys router.
As for the actual ISP plans and their download limits, well, I think that's just the state of the market here. A service is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it. It will get better. My first “broadband” plan had a 1 GB / month quota. The top consumer plans had 10 GB / month, I think. Now, I actually don't know what my quota is, perhaps 40 GB / month. But I am still paying about the same as I did for that 1 GB plan only a few years ago. When there is a need for the “average user” to download 100 GB / month, the ISPs will HAVE to offer this at a reasonable cost, or… they will go out of business.
Suezanne, as I said in my other comment, I think a lot of it is that it just the way the market is here. But another factor is that there are only a couple of links from Australia to the rest of the world, and the ISPs have to buy bandwidth off these companies that provide the links. FTTH is not going to change this.
Profit mostly. Caps provide massive profit opportunities, and the tighter the caps the more profit comes out of the network – even if you lose a lot of customers. Indeed, the first step in implementing a profitable capping plan is to shuck a lot of your customers.