I genuinely believe that Tony Abbott really didn't even understand what purpose the Internet serves, apart from email and playing games - he saw it as some sort of frivolous discretionary spend - definitely not anywhere near as important as roads and mines and coal.
It's an absolute tragedy for the nation that the original plan was changed by such ignorant luddites as Tony Abbott.
They made such an incredibly huge fuss about the cost, but only a month or two back they handed a $23 billion corporate tax cut over to companies and it barely made the newspaper.
I can tell you in no uncertain terms that I have not an atom of respect for any of our politicians.
Off topic, to me all part of the same story is my absolute quivering rage that we are literally giving away our natural resources for nothing or close to nothing whilst every litre of natural gas that can be sucked out of the ground is shipped to other countries.
Meanwhile the politicians ride around in helicopters, leech the taxpayer blind with their kingly entitlements and are genuinely surprised when there is outrage about it.
Seriously it is time for a citizens revolution. We need to take the country back from these idiots.
Couldn't agree more. I've yet to meet a single fellow Aussie that has anything but disdain for politicians from any party. Labor, Liberal, Greens, One Nation doesn't seem to matter, they're all a pack of self serving con artists, and unless the major political parties take a serious look at themselves over the next few years, this is exactly what they're going to be dealing with. Especially as Millennials take their first steps into adulthood in a country that does nothing but tread on them and dismiss them as nothing but avocado loving morons that don't know how to make it in "the real world".
He's been bad enough in the UK, but it seems like he has even more control in Australia.
(I am not saying "oh it's not the fault of the politicians, it's the fault of the populace" -- see my opening sentence that I think there's a lot of contributing factors. And each of these can go several layers deep).
* A robust FTTP that would be paid back nicely, and
* A carbon tax that would now be an "emissions trading scheme" doing it's part to reduce carbon emissions.
Truly Kevin Rudd can be credited with remarkable vision for proposing the NBN in the form that he did and it is a great pity it did not come to conclusion.
Labor/Rudd/Gillard/all the shadowy Labor background figures gets the blame for the "true" NBN not happening because they just could help themselves fighting and grasping at the crown.
The default method of measuring consumer surplus is measuring (using econometric black magic) the difference between how much people would be willing to pay for something and how much they actually paid. IE, if you would have paid $17 (but not $18) for a burger but it only cost $12, you accumulated $5 of surplus. By this measure, the internet (home usage) is not very valuable. If prices of (eg your mobile data plan) go up by $15, many people would pass. That implies the user surplus (for those people) is less than $15. Overall, the traditional economics analysis of personal internet access looks similar to cable TV or other "frivolous discretionary spend."
I don't really think you can sum up the internet in this way. The broader cultural impacts of internet access seem far more interesting than cable TV, to me.
Nothing can be done until Australians demand Constitution reform. This is the crux of the problems with Australian politics - its Constitution is absolutely atrocious.
One of the more worrying issues is that the Governor-General (and thus by proxy the Queen of fucking England) has vito power over our laws.
I hate Abbott as much as anyone but Turnbull seems like the real problem.
However they didn't argue this.
They stuck with the concept of a nationally funded broadband network, but one which was sub-par on almost every metric except cost. This just doesn't make any sense to me, especially because they tried to sell it to the public by suggesting that things like "Why invest so much in fibre when it may be surpassed by another technology in the near future". There was also a lot of clever wording around how their version would be "delivered cheaper, faster, etc than the alternative" - I have no doubt these words were chosen because it sounds like the data rates themselves would be faster, whereas they actually meant it the build could be completed faster.
There is no Australian political party with any momentum that is pro-small government. The Liberals just like making themselves and their friends rich, but they don't have any strong ideological backing. Especially considering 90% of Aussies are pretty content with the level of government involvement in stuff that would send shivers down the spines of most yanks.
I understand the need to support rural areas but the the majority of the initial budget was to cover non-metropolitan areas and while the govt has been messing this up, private industry (TPG, First Path etc) managed to cover huge swaths of the population with little-to-no government assistance.
About 60% of the population is clustered in 4 cities [0] and we're one of the most urbanised countries in the world [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_Australia#Cities
[1] https://infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure/pab/soac/ & http://theconversation.com/density-sprawl-growth-how-austral...
The low population density of Australia makes backhaul and overseas transfer of data more expensive, and the last 2-5% of people might be very expensive to get. But the original goals of the NBN were well thought out and modeled properly.
Hu? You mean how they used copper put in place by telco incumbent Telstra, most of which were built when it was government owned? And how they relied on government mandated access to the copper lines to enable that?
Or are you talking about the small private fibre rollouts? Because they don't cover "huge swaths of the population".
The founder of one of Australia's largest independent ISP's Internode (and later NBNco board member) Simon Hackett put it very well in 2011 where he showed locking in a arbitrary $20 charge per megabit hobbled the network.The whole profitability revolved around charging more for faster speeds/more data in the future.
Every other technological advance gave users faster for cheaper whereas this network would only work if people paid more. Cut to the future and now you've got competition from 4G cellular data at the low end and private companies providing private fibre/wireless networks at the top end. The whole pyramid is coming crashing down so much that the government has had to introduce a new broadband tax ($7.10 per month) to subsidize it.
And even the tax won't solve the problems because the CVC usage charge still exists and the business case still resolves around charging more in the future. In about 5 years when they realize what a stuff up it's been we can only help they write it all off and we can go back having affordable fast internet like the rest of the world.
https://simonhackett.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/commsday-w-...
https://blog.internode.on.net/2011/07/21/nbn-retail-pricing-...
I contacted 15+ people in senior leadership at NBNco, all of whom are still on my LinkedIn. No matter how hard I tried, we couldn't get a meeting with NBNco execs to demo our tech.
I took it to the local tech press here to get some positive coverage and they told us repeatedly how "stupid" we were. We wrote comments on the now PM (then Communications Minister)'s blog and chatted to his people. Zero interest. At that point they'd been at it for ~7 years, spent billions and had pretty much nothing to show for it. Nada.
Last year, an academic completely unaffiliated with us testified at a parliamentary committee into why the existing approach has been such a boondoggle. As a remedy, he suggested our exact approach. He also copped it from the tech press.
Here are a couple tweets from that period between me and an online tech pundit. This Renai LeMay fellow runs Australia's most influential tech site, it's very very popular with Australia's politicians:
https://twitter.com/renailemay/status/705523306699423744 https://twitter.com/renailemay/status/705528311330385920
Such is the life of the serial entrepreneur. This is the typical bs that we have to put up with. I folded that company up pretty fast. Idea tested. NEXT.
If you seriously don't understand why that solution could never have been politically feasible then to be honest it isn't surprising you were ignored.
Additionally, did you really suggest that people should be able to dig their own trenches and plug fibre in themselves? You do realize that does nothing to make you seem credible, right?
As I said in the linked tweet, you could hire the handyman down the street to do it, or you could pay the major contractor Ericsson 100X as much per property to do it. If they somehow screw up plugging something into something else, it just doesn't work - it doesn't affect the integrity of the network at all.
In my opinion, it's the existing approach that lacks credibility. It's corporate welfare. That's why Australia's broadband lags behind Turkey, Poland, Mexico, and many others even though it's a much richer country per capita than all of those.
The funny thing was when we came onto the scene the most interest we got was from Ericsson, with some email discussions and heaps of their people showing up on my profiles, etc. That was flattering but apparently they needn't have worried about us spoiling their cash cow. I can understand their paranoia. Life must be sweet when you own 100% of the purported supply.
Australia is not a place to live unless you work in health or in a trade. Scientists and engineers (engineering is not even understood in Australia, usually being associated to things like infrastructure or maintenance) are screwed.
It's an absolute disgrace how much it has been butchered. I have thoughts about returning occasionally, but going from 2 GB/s unlimited for Aus$ 40 ish a month, back to those speeds and prices is a major factor for me staying here.
It is a massive quality of life difference to have amazing internet.
When I journey back home and stay with my parents, it is impossible to get work done. Latency is the first killer - it'll never properly be solved if you're working with remote systems in the US or Europe - but then upload speeds slowly rip at your soul. Download speeds and quotas are no picnic either of course.
That Australia didn't end up with a future proof fibre to the home system given the amount of money spent is an absolute disgrace. I get angry every time I have to discuss it.
I wanted to move back to Australia sooner than later - and the FTTH NBN promised interesting start-up and other opportunities - but given it has been relegated to a copper backwater those plans are on indefinite hold :(
I usually point people to the Australian government debate regarding copper wire over iron wire from 1910 as an anachronistic comparison.
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/06/parliament-arguing-about-...
I know the feeling. I'm relatively lucky in that I live somewhere that has had VDSL for some time and my download speed is adequate, if not ideal. But my upload speed is atrocious, in fact actually slower now than it was in past years (before my ISP got bought out by a bigger ISP) and my ISP will not guarantee any particular upload speed for my connection. I make use of a cloud-based backup service to mitigate the possibility of local disk failure and it's just painful.
You hardly hear anyone talking about upload speeds in Australia. It's as if cloud-based services aren't really a thing and we're back in the early 2000s.
> That Australia didn't end up with a future proof fibre to the home system given the amount of money spent is an absolute disgrace. I get angry every time I have to discuss it.
I know this feeling as well. :) It is a massive lost opportunity that the country will be paying for in more ways than one for decades to come.
The whole NBN project just irritates me at how it has been mis-managed, by both of the political parties.
Yes, Labor included since they could have sped things up by having Fibre to the basement for most apartment buildings in the cities, and then upgraded those lines once the other build out had been completed. Also for having the rollout happen along political lines (as has been alleged).
Still most of the blame I assign to the Liberals, since it seems they want to make a shambles out of this for political reasons, and also so they can sell it to some other company in the near future.
1. All large scale infrastructure rollouts are difficult and subject to problems and blowouts.
2. It was made a political issue. New government decided to make major revamps for no reason other than it was different to the previous government so they could use it as an election issue.
Some of the utter incompetence involved in the actual rollout was astounding.
Telstra's crews had to reinstall the lines under the main road of my town 4 times.
Twice it was installed on the wrong side of the road, and once it was unshielded.
6 months of traffic jams instead of 1 month.
The worst part was the nationals. In 2007 they were bitching that it needed to be fiber, by 2010 they were saying copper is the future.
Even though they'll be career politicians, because nobody will vote anything other than Nationals in those electorates, there's much more money to be made in a life of lobbying afterwards
The only positive thing they could tout at the time was pass by numbers which ignores the hardest part of the roll out, connecting fiber to each and every house.
You can argue that the last mile problem should have been tackled head on in the NBN and it was a mistake for the liberals to not, but to say that they did it for "no reason other than it was different to the previous government" is just simply wrong.
According to partisan figures that were often repeated but never justified. I don't doubt it would have blown out, world class infrastructure would have been worth it at twice the cost. Instead we have the current NBN who's costs have blown out just as much to delivery 20th century infrastructure.
The Liberals messed this one up (note to Americans, in Australia the 'Liberals' are the conservatives).
My suburb, unfortunately, hasn't been NBN-ified - but we still have a VDSL network courtesy of TransACT, the broadband provider that was created when the ACT Government decided to start laying FTTC fibre around Canberra back in the 1990s.
There's a lot of talk of locally-driven "municipal broadband" in the US, but very little in Australia. I expect that's mostly because local governments in Australia are far less powerful than in the United States (which, for the most part, I'm actually okay with) and wouldn't be able to raise taxes and spend them on broadband projects. The Australian Capital Territory, of course, is a special case - a local government with state-level powers, who already owned an electricity network when they decided to go into FTTN as well.
If you were lucky enough to a) live close to the city b) have telephone poles c) live near a telephone exchange and were chosen by Telstra to get FTTN before the change of government you can get 100Mb+ access. [0] Otherwise you are out of luck.
This is largely a political issue that could be fixed by leadership. Australia has weak leaders of both sides of the political spectrum.
Market forces are supposed to fix this problem according to our learned leaders, but it won't. Australia is big, really big and we needed a federally funded optic fibre solution to the country even if it cost a lot.
Here's my version of NBN... Exchange->fibre->POTS
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/tags/pots
[0] Relative has NBN fibre to the node.
I live in a new housing development (Zetland - Postcode 2017).
I tried to get NBN installed last week with Internode, one of our ISPs.
They said it was possible, they told me to be at home - I took half the day off WFH - then they ring me halfway saying, whoops, it's not actually connected for your building...err...we'll get back to you about the NBN.
I'm still waiting to hear back.
My parents are told it will be available between April-June 2017 - yet apparently they haven't even started planning it for their area yet. So they somehow hope to design, plan and roll it out in the next 30 days? I call bollocks.
I check all those points but no NBN for me :(
I live in Northern Thailand and have 100/30 uncapped fibre for about $70 a month. I've got a friend who has gigabit and he lives out in some rice fields and its all dirt roads.
Actually just had a look at NBNco's rollout map; both Melbourne and Sydney's CBD are blank.
[1] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/nbn-co-prepares-2015-finish-d...
[2] http://www.smh.com.au/national/devil-in-the-detail-20100201-...
[2]
Glad someone gets access. Start a software company in the bush.
I was recently forced from my ADSL2+ service over to the shiny new HFC system. My quality actually degraded - although my bandwidth increased, my latency is off the charts, especially in peak time. I contacted my ISP to see if I could go back to my ADSL2+ service and they flat out said no.
The future is bleak.
Check out the section 'Shared Bandwidth' on wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_Internet_access
Check out this comparison: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/tech-tips/compare-cable-dsl/pcmc...
And check out the post by Net_Sharing in this forum: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28980221-Speed-Does-cable-b...
Honestly the whole thing smells very strongly of a money-making racket on the part of Telstra (how much money did the CEOs profit from the privatisation only to sell their 100-year-old waterlogged copper back to the government?).
The article is very light on numbers. It would be nice to actually see solid metrics around speeds and costs across the whole of Australia.
Basically, Tony Abbott got in in 2013 and the shitty version of the scheme was put into place.
It's an honest question, because I'm not familiar with any.
I once tried to follow the Udacity course on Tensorflow, but could not download a 10GB that was needed for one of the exercises. Download kept failing and restarting and eventually I killed it after 8 days. Utterly shameful.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/downloadthissho...
Wow :(
This is insane. We're getting laser beams, and they're literally going to be worse than cable!
I wonder if NBN Co would agree to do a FTTH setup if I covered the fiber and installation.
Hmm. They might, but then I could be stuck with a $200+/mo Internet bill...
Shakes head ...this is just infuriating, how completely this has been mis-sold and bungled.
If you have such requirements, I'm genuinely curious what they'd come back with (solution/$-wise) if you told them what you needed.
(My current awareness of commercial internet is that you can currently get 500Mbps SLA'd fiber for $499 in urban Sydney. Yay? Not so much.)
- Every household and business to have access to broadband with a download data rate of between 25 and 100 megabits per second by late 2016. [We're currently trailing Kenya]
- Key prices for a Coalition NBN will be capped nationally, ensuring Australians in metropolitan and regional areas alike can obtain services at fair prices. [For the low low price of $80 a month, on a 24 month contract, you can get 25Mbps/5Mbps from our two largest telcos: Telstra & Optus] [2] [3]
- "...unshackle the competitive telecom market that Labor tried to stamp out, and reduce the cost of the NBN to prudent levels." [Because of the NBN wholesale cost structure and network inter-connect structure, our retail ISPs are rapidly consolidating. We're likely to have three left standing by the end. To be fair, the latter wasn't the current government's fault.]
- They would complete the network roll-out at 2/3 the cost of the previous plan. [The Parliamentary Budget Office estimated in December 2016 that the total network cost will be $49 billion. However, the current government did make the entirely unsubstantiated and unquestioned claim that the $44B plan for FTTP was actually going to cost $90B.] [4]
So, things seem to be going to plan so far. The worst part about all this is that everyone seemed to eat this shit right up at the time. Even Australia's tech so-called 'journalists' were all going on about how the Coalition had presented a 'credible alternative'.
We deserve this, because we're stupid.
[0] PDF of election document: https://www.communications.gov.au/file/315/download?token=8O...
[1] HTML cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ih8ycW...
[2] https://www.telstra.com.au/broadband/nbn/nbn-plans
[3] http://www.optus.com.au/shop/broadband/home-broadband/plans?...
[4] http://www.news.com.au/national/nbn-cost-blowout-to-impact-b...
You basically have to have a humorectomy to be able to follow Australian politics. Otherwise you go crazy from too much cracking up.
--
Some qualifying info to add some substance so this isn't just hyperbole and commentary:
- IIRC, what was happening is that the installers weren't being paid enough, and they were nailing the insulation haphazardly without identifying where the 240V lines ran underneath the batts so they could dodge those areas with their staple guns. Said insulation batts had foil on them. So sparks flew where wood met aluminium and exposed/partially-shorted wiring. Even more tragically, four installers were also electrocuted (AFAIK/IIUC) by live foil on the batts during installation.
- Mr Garret was actually really mature about the situation and took full responsibility, stated that he wasn't fully informed about various risks, and did raise issues about safety multiple times that were not listened to. So there's that.
Some random sources/articles I found:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/peter-garre...
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/peter-...
House fires went down statistically. The absolute number of fires was higher because more homes were getting insulation, but fires per insulated home went down.
The real cause is business efficiency, hiring cheaper workers and not training them properly. You can't hold the government responsible for every grunt a private business hires. You don't hear the current lot taking direct responsibility for the recent shooting in our offshore detention facilities.
Edit - in hindsight it's a perfect example of how "fake news" isn't a recent problem.
Peter Garret basically covered for Rudd
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2017/04/nothing-malcolm-but...
You can think of the shit infrastructure, crap attitude in general, and intellectually bankrupt waste that make up the political class as the many layers of tax on any high cognitive business in Australia.
Coal is the future apparently. Don't even get me started on the racists.
I understand if you are Australian and find the criticism uncomfortable, but it's a fair reflection of my experience.
My intent wasn't to suggest X is better than Australia, rather to inform the readership of HN that the political paralysis and ineptitude in this country is in no way limited to a single broadband project.
The "cartoon that united Australians" - Malcolm Turnbull, PM, 2017 (his comment, he's not the cartoonist)
http://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/53a5099c7991c37bb152ddf53...
Funny one, isn't it.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/mar/17/turnbull-lauds...
Skipping the Scandinavian-ish countries name a place less racist?
France? Asia? US? Africa? UK? India?
This discussion is about broadband not sure why you felt the need to Segway to this pointless point.
My comment added some context about one of the main protagonists of the story, I'm comfortable it's cromulent. If not, please, take my internet points.
The majority of connections opt for 12 or 25mbit anyway, sorry couldn't find url for nbnco statistic.
Technically, dropping billions on fibre in this day and age is stupid given that so much (vast majority) of the population is already in areas that can get faster IP (over 100mbit) from LTE, wireless technology is the future, imagine if it was spent on LTE sites.
Many people use the argument only fibre can do it, when that's just intellectual dishonesty about different types of layer 1.
4 million of Australia's households (roughly half) already have HFC that when upgraded will do gigabit.
It is illegal to compete with NBN.
The NBN was unfunded in its commitment. The same party implemented a $20b/year national disability insurance scheme which was also not funded. All these arguments saying it was bungled, but only the hollow commitments of the unionist/socialist party that implemented this were bungled. A lot of the angry people also don't pay a lot of net tax either which is the usual narrative of the ALP.
So it wasn't properly costed or funded, all these great things that party promised in power, but they still lost the next election anyway, so the people spoke.
Also NYT is fake news. :)