Australian Government will offer 1Gbps this year to all NBN-connected homes

http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/nbn-customers-set-for-worldleading-download-speeds-to-happen-by-end-of-the-year-20130418-2i32b.html

by treelovinhippie • 13 years ago

34 51 13 years ago

smh.com.au

anigbrowl3• 13 years ago

I wish the US government would get its act together on this. The Constitution includes a grant of power to Congress to create a national system of post roads (Article 1, Section 8.7) and my understanding is that the founders included this because they recognized the importance of a public communications infrastructure rather than a privately held one [1]. Considering the criticality of our communications infrastructure in an era of cyber-attacks, I find it disappointing that Congress seems to have abandoned this important role to the private sector.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurn_und_Taxis

wyager2• 13 years ago

Do you really want the government to be in charge of data transport with its track record of blatantly ignoring the right to privacy? Aren't you the least bit concerned that we'll end up with something like in the UK or China, where government control over internet infrastructure has lead to extensive monitoring and censorship?

I'd rather take (possibly) slower and/or more expensive internet that the government has to put a lot of elbow grease in to censor or monitor than a (possibly!) cheaper and/or faster internet that the government has extensive control over.

If you've worked in telecom, you might know how extensive the government's data monitoring infrastructure already is. I sure as hell don't want to make it any bigger.

anigbrowl3• 13 years ago

I'm concerned about the creation of the infrastructure, rather than the operation of it. And no, I don't lose a lot of sleep over this, any more than I lose sleep over having my mail opened.

jeza• 13 years ago

With the NBN, the government is just a wholesaler. They just provide a physical medium and end users will still get a retail service from a private company. Besides the government has the same responsibility to adhere to privacy laws as any private company, in fact government have their own privacy requirements with additional channels to resolve complaints. Ethnically I don't see why a government that you vote for would have any less reason to respect privacy than a private company (who you pay money to). Finally, the government could just pass legislation to monitor/censor within a private network, so it doesn't really matter whether it is public or private from this perspective. It's more a matter of voting for the right representatives.

jameswyse• 13 years ago

They'll find some way to cripple it for sure, like sticking a 200GB/month cap on it. Australia can't have nice things :/

elithrar3• 13 years ago

> They'll find some way to cripple it for sure, like sticking a 200GB/month cap on it. Australia can't have nice things :/

If you look at many of the plans already offered by ISP's, you'll find that this isn't the case.[1]

Once more homes are connected, these limits are only likely to increase (as they have each year prior). Perhaps we shouldn't have limits at all, and just pay for a pipe of a certain bandwidth; but from an ISP's perspective they implement these caps to protect themselves from abuse by a small % of users.

Personally I'd rather know my cap is there, as opposed to the odd behavior of many US ISPs in targeting "high usage" users with what seems like little transparency.

[1] http://www.iinet.net.au/nbn/nbn-plan-residential.html

cynix2• 13 years ago

> If you look at many of the plans already offered by ISP's, you'll find that this isn't the case.

The largest plan offered by iiNet has a quota of 1000GB. If you're on the 100Mbps plan, this can be consumed in less than 1 day. How is this not the case?

endgame• 13 years ago

Or Labor will muck up this election and the Libs will muck up the NBN.

dmishe• 13 years ago

You have universal healthcare

rayiner• 13 years ago

How is that crippling it? From the point of view of subsidized public infrastructure, it's much better to keep it fast for everyone than to let it get overloaded with people torrenting movies.

grecy• 13 years ago

As an Aussie who left to live in the USA, let me assure you Australia has many, many nice things.

Healthcare, education, safety are very high on the list of things you should be thankful for, and are high on the list of reasons I'll be coming back (at some point)

zmmmmm• 13 years ago

That's kind of a tautology ... all the homes in the US connected to 1Gbps fibre "this year" will also be connected to 1Gbps fibre "this year". The salient missing fact is that the NBN is going to reach only a tiny tiny miniscule minority of homes "this year" (my house is not even scheduled on the plan that stretches out past 2017).

treelovinhippie• 13 years ago

True, just that "XXX,XXX homes currently connected to the Australian Government's NBN initiative, will have 1Gbps speed enabled by the end of the year" is a bit long for a title. I've made a small title edit :)

Here's the NBNCo targets:

June 2013 - 661,000 "passed or covered" and 92,000 premises with active service

June 2014 - 1,681,000 "passed or covered" and 551,000 premises with active service

http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/nbn-co-corporate-pl...

davidjohnstone• 13 years ago

Of course, we're having an election sometime this year, and the Liberal's — who are probably going to win — are planning on making the NBN slower and cheaper[1] (100Mbps by utilising the existing copper network, rather than fully replacing it with fiber).

1. http://www.zdnet.com/coalitions-nbn-to-cost-almost-30bn-7000...

quink• 13 years ago

Up to 100 Mbps. By they'll try to get at least 25 Mbps. Don't ask about upload speeds, those apparently don't matter.

arbitrarywords2• 13 years ago

Not to mention latency, which is the most significant factor for me. I'm on semi-NBN and now have a 4ms ping to work. Only have to leave the house once a week (Warning: side-effects may vary).

tacticus• 13 years ago

I think Clarke and Dawe did a fairly decent video on the LNP alternative. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TptIs0k-spg

MarkMc2• 13 years ago

The ABC program "Inside Business" gave a neat summary of the differences between the Labor and Liberal plans: http://imgur.com/OtmOBE7

It's worth noting that the Liberals plan has 'Fibre To The Premises' going to 22% of households, while Labour's plan goes to 93%.

So we're spending an extra $17 billion to give 71% of households a boost from 100Mb to 1Gb per second? That's about $2,500 per household. That doesn't seem like good value to me. Shouldn't we delay the massive cost of installing fibre to existing homes until most households need more than 100Mb per second?

mctx• 13 years ago

Can the current copper network handle 100Mbps? I think anything broken down into a per household cost is going to be large - health, transport, and Internet infrastructure.

justsee2• 13 years ago

There is a very significant difference between 93% coverage and 22% coverage with this issue. The value goes well beyond the percentage difference because of network effects[1].

Being able to count on near-ubiquitous FTTP and speeds of 100Mb - 1Gb p/s for a whole country completely changes the tech startup landscape.

It's hard to estimate how valuable that is to Australia's social, economic, and technological future.

The Coalition are expected to romp it in, so it's pretty disappointing that Malcolm Turnbull was convinced or corralled into playing politics on this one instead of just neutralising the issue by committing to FTTP. They happily make baseless blowout claims around the current NBN project, so I don't see why they couldn't have instead made baseless "we'll do the same, but cheaper" claims.

Their system design around a broken and aging copper network has few tech industry commentators impressed. I can't see how maintaining the copper network and delaying the inevitable FTTP rollout makes any sense. Being a first-mover in Western society brings a significant number of benefits for Australia's tech environment.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

oohmeplums4• 13 years ago

How much extra would it cost to upgrade the FTTN to FTTH afterwards? Surely it's more efficient to do it once and do it right with fibre?

And I have my doubts about the copper reaching 100Mbps.

angersock• 13 years ago

Pardon my ignorance, but aren't the pipes that actually go to Australia relatively small? So, wouldn't this just increase burden on those interconnects and maybe not help unless connecting to somebody else in Australia?

nness• 13 years ago

I don't know much about the pipes actually, but I do believe a new one is being constructed. That said, I am curious to know the answer to this question too.

I guess torrenting within the borders will be a speedy affair however.

Schwolop• 13 years ago

Allow me some time to find the statistics again on this, but from what I've gathered following the NBN debate for a few years now: No. The pipes are more than double our current requirements and growing faster than requirements do due to some funny incentive scheme.

Total capacity: ~2TB/s [1], but the PPC-1 line has potential to add another 2.5TB/s. The others are being upgraded too [2]. "Currently, Australia has a theoretical 5637734.4Mbit/s of transpacific bandwidth, however lit capacity is much less."[3]

"The total international capacity in use for the Australian market in 2009 is estimated to be around 300 gigabits per second."[4]

References: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_Australia... [2] http://www.itnews.com.au/News/157753,ppc-1-delivers-more-spe... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia#Internati... [4] http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn#nbn_faq (See section 5.7 - "Does Australia have the international capacity to provide every customer with 100 megabit internet?")

mcbridematt• 13 years ago

The days of this being an issue are long gone, especially since there is now good competition in the submarine cable space. Last mile is starting to be the bottleneck.

jacques_chester11• 13 years ago

Could you elaborate? I don't see prices for bandwidth dropping at Australian hosting facilities.

oohmeplums4• 13 years ago

Quick eyeball of Wikipedia suggests there are five major cables out of Australia: Telstra Endeavour, Southern Cross, AJC and Pipe Pacific.

Telstra Endeavour is currently 80Gbps with capacity to 1.28Tbps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstra_Endeavour)

AJC is currently 240Gbps with capacity to 1000Gbps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93Japan_Cable), and probably tons from Japan to the US.

PPC-1 can deliver up to 3Tbps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_Pacific_Cable)

SXC has 800Gbps * 2 lit, with capacity up to 6Tbps * 2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Cross_Cable)

There's also SEA-ME-WE and probably other smaller ones, but they are the main links out of Australia.

jacques_chester11• 13 years ago

I hate to be the guy who says that this looks like an election-year stunt to try and "save the furniture", but ... well, it does.

Edit 2: A mate of mine pointed out that they made the same announcement before the 2010 election:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/nbn-downloa...

Part of the problem with the NBN is the highly selective veil of secrecy. It's a public project and it's being backed by the Commonwealth. The lenders who are loaning the funds are not doing it because they think NBNCo would be allowed to go broke; everyone knows that these are really Australian Government bonds in a dress.

But the government still uses "Commercial-in-Confidence" to stymie all oversight. This would be more reasonable in dealing with a company at arm's length, but NBNCo is 100% government owned. They would be well within their rights to waive the requirement for confidence.

Consequently, nobody really knows how the rollout is going or what it costs. NBNCo claim they can't give Parliament information about particular streets because they don't track to that level of granularity, yet mysteriously they are able to claim in aggregate to be on track.

Leaving to the side of whether this is the right thing to build, there's still the important question of building it the right way. And IMO that's not been happening, and it really bugs me.

edit: I know people don't like this point of view, but if you disagree, the done thing on HN is to reply, not downvote.

oohmeplums4• 13 years ago

The upgrade to 1Gbps was always in the roadmap: http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/initial-roadmap.pdf

Frankly, I think they should've launched with 1Gbps to begin with -- customers don't have to pay for the higher speed tiers if they don't want to.

jacques_chester11• 13 years ago

Ah, I hadn't realised that. So it's a stock standard re-announcement.

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

The whole NBN has been a joke from the beginning. The roll-out delays for what was originally a 100mbps fibre network that is now supposedly going to offer 1gbps speeds conveniently announced right around the time Quigley is about to be grilled in parliament over the delays and so close to an election it looks like Labor will be losing in a landslide.

While the prospect of 1gbps speeds sounds great as a developer, the very fact those speeds will only be affordable to businesses at a cost of what looks like could be close to the AUD $200 per month mark initially and no doubt rise with minuscule bandwidth provided for the cost. The reason current Internet offerings in Australia are so expensive is because of the small number of cables that connect us to the rest of the world and monopoly of our limited selection of ISP's, are they planning on laying more deep-sea cables to handle the increased load?

Will the high-speeds only apply to Australian content like Optus's fraudulent high-speed 100mbps addon pack promises for cable subscribers which only could promise close to those speeds for Australian content, not content from overseas.

On the outside this looks like a Godsend for Australia and while it undoubtedly is in some aspects as we saw with the rise of ADSL in the early 2000's, the project has been poorly managed from the start and this sounds like a stunt more-so than a reality based on what we've seen so far.

Having said that, I would be more than happy with 100mbps speeds compared to the 20mbps connection I currently have which costs me $75 per month through Optus Cable. And overall the premise and vision for the NBN is still better than the archaic coalition "high-speed" network plans they have of their own.

jacques_chester11• 13 years ago

The odds that a project of this magnitude and complexity would be done on time and budget were basically zero. But it's very hard to tell what could have been better because of the Commercial-in-Confidence veil.

Quigley is not an idiot; he's a smart, well-educated bloke with decades of telco experience. He had no control over the schedule -- Treasury (remember those guys? they're the ones who said that the European carbon price would continue rising to hit $29 by 2015) pretty much drew up an estimate for a press conference and that's what got chucked over the wall.

In Quigley's position I'm pretty sure anyone would have struggled to make it work.

Australian Government will offer 1Gbps this year to all NBN-connected homes

Related Stories