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NBN National Broadband Network: Turnbull reckons we can get by with 25mbps
Topic Started: 3 Apr 2013, 07:32 PM (8,909 Views)
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Australia's thirst for data reaches new heights: ABS

Harrison Polites
9 Oct, 9:10 AM

Australia’s thirst for data is on the rise, with total amount of downloaded data in the country up by over a third compared to figures from the previous year, according to new results from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The amount of data downloaded over mobile devices also more than doubled compared to results from the same period last year.

Australia downloaded around 657,252 terabytes (TB) of data in the three months leading up to June 2013, up from a download total 414,537TB in the same period last year. On average, a terabyte holds just over 400 standard DVD movies. The majority of this data was downloaded over a fixed-line broadband network.

With mobile devices, Australians downloaded a record 19,363TB of data on in the past three month, up from a recorded 9943TB last year. The ABS did not record whether this data was downloaded over wireless Wi-Fi service or through 3G or 4G networks.

The study also found that the majority of Australians are opting for fixed internet services with advertised download speeds between 8mbps and 24mbps.

It also revealed that the number of ISPs on the market is slowly starting to decline, with four providers - out of a 2012 total of 81 - either closing up shop, or losing subscribers to the point where they have less than 1000 customers, and are therefore not included in the study.

Read more: http://www.businessspectator.com.au/news/2013/10/9/technology/australias-thirst-data-reaches-new-heights-abs
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The article from the ABC below is interesting. I had not been aware that in the planning phase the NBN folks had also fucked up the whole apartment complex thing so badly. Pretty obvious that either the legislation had to mandate that bodys corporate allow access or install fibre internally or come up with some other method.

For my money, the sensible approach would be for the fibre to be pulled to the building MDF and for bodys corporate to be responsible for reticulation. They could choose either to run VDSL2 (100Mbps at this short distance) with potential upgrade to G.Fast (1 Gbps over ordinary phone wires up to 250M) on the existing in-building wiring, or pay to have the fibre extended into each unit. In some cases upgrading the internal wiring would be very expensive and in some cases it would be quite cheap. It all depends on the standard of ducting, etc etc. The general case would be quite expensive because even where ducts do exist they will be firestopped and no longer useable, so mostly there will need to be core drilling or wall penetrations done.

Given that internal existing wiring will support 1Gbps by the end of the decade, there seems little need to upgrade that part of it, as long as fibre comes into the basement.

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Print Email Facebook Twitter More NBN Co representatives seek answers on fast Internet at Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam

By environment and science reporter Jake Sturmer in Amsterdam

At the Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam, many of the attendees and exhibitors already speak Dutch.

But this is an event where the language centres around terms like G.Fast, FttP, FttN, FttC, FttX, OTT and NTD - a kind of double Dutch.

In English, the event is just about making the internet faster.

Representatives from the National Broadband Network are here looking for ways to satisfy the new Coalition government's direction to build a cheaper network that will be completed sooner.

Completed sooner because it relies on a slower technology, fibre to the node (FttN). Optical fibre cables go to a street cabinet and then connect to your premises using the copper network.

In contrast, Labor was building a faster network that sent optical fibre right to your front door.

But it hit some trouble, particularly in apartments. The construction and administrative difficulties caused by having to pull optical fibre cables to every flat became a hurdle for NBN Co.

More than 70,000 premises cannot connect to the NBN, but they are counted in the rollout figures because technically the network passes their premises.

NBN Co's chief technology officer Gary McLaren is looking closely at solutions while in Amsterdam.

"With the new incoming government we have a little bit more flexibility in terms of what we can do for rolling out the NBN," Mr McLaren said.

"As we go through the strategic review we're going to be looking at a number of different technologies."

One of the solutions is to build fibre to the basement of the apartments and then use the existing copper in the complex to connect.

It is already being trialled in NBN Co's labs and is now ready to be tested in the real world.

Trials in apartment complexes could begin as soon as the start of next year.

The Coalition's FttN alternative has the support of the man who helped pioneer broadband over copper networks.

Electrical engineer John Cioffi, also known as the father of DSL, believes the numbers for fibre to the home do not stack up.

"It's going to be very difficult to justify that few thousand dollars per customer at any time in the foreseeable future," Dr Cioffi said.

"If the consumer is willing to pay $300-$400 a month for that service, it may be justifiable at that level.

"But if they're paying $30-$40 a month, fibre to the customer premises in anything other than [a brand new development] is going to be a very difficult economic argument."

Dr Cioffi, a prolific inventor who has won numerous awards, has previously provided advice to Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

He is due to visit Australia in a few weeks and will be meeting with several telecommunications companies.
Google backs fibre to the home

Google has been testing a fibre to the home network in three cities in the United States and the man in charge of the rollout believes there is a genuine need for speed.

The network provides speeds of one gigabit per second in Kansas City, Austin and Provo.

"We believe that faster internet speeds will lead to what we believe is the next chapter of the internet," Google's Kevin Lo said.

"Studies show that 80 per cent of people do walk away when they see loading bars and similarly 11 per cent of potential customers will walk away from a website if it loads just one second too slow.

"We see this at Google as well - we once ran an experiment where we slowed down the search results by just a blink of the eye and it resulted in a significant reduction in the number of search results."

Mr Lo said having a fibre to the home network installed had helped to upgrade Kansas City's debt rating.

"We've really been surprised and impressed [what effect] fibre connectivity and faster internet can really have in a community," he said.

"We can't wait to see how fibre to the home is implemented in other cities in the US and hopefully in other cities around the world."

However, you might need to get used to waiting if you are expecting Google to build a fibre to the home network in Australia.

"The only thing I'm going to comment on is what we would normally say - which is we're really focused on delivering a great service to our users in Kansas City, Austin and Provo," Mr Lo said.
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The NBN copper whispering campaign

Mark Gregory
23 Oct

The state of the copper network is now the top discussion being held around the water cooler. Joe heard that Fred heard that Misty’s father was a Telstra linesman who swears….

The situation is far from clear and Telstra is not helping matters by making a series of conflicting statements regarding the state of the copper network.

Recently Telstra CEO David Thodey told The Australian that the copper network was in good working order and "will be going for another 100 (years)”. Thodey went on to say "there is always opportunity so you have to keep things maintained. But it's perfectly OK, there is some copper a lot older than others but copper does not decompose."

Thodey’s remarks appear to be quite different to views put to Telstra shareholders in 2010 before a vote on the $11 billion NBN Co deal when the copper network was described as uneconomic due to its deteriorating state and high cost to maintain.

The true state of Telstra’s copper network must be investigated and publicly disclosed so that an open and transparent assessment can be made about the viability of using the copper for FTTN.

In August 2012 business analyst firm BIS Shrapnel produced a report titled "Maintenance in Australia 2012 to 2017" which stated that telecommunications infrastructure maintenance would decline from $2 billion in 2015 to $1.3 billion in 2021 due to the move to a fibre network.

In the report, BIS Shrapnel senior manager of infrastructure and mining Adrian Hart said:

"While it will allow for much higher levels of voice and data traffic, the technological superiority of optic fibre over Australia's ageing fixed-line copper network is estimated to reduce industry maintenance costs by between AU$600 million to AU$700 million per annum once fully deployed.”

Yet the whispering campaign to soften our minds to the possible use of the copper network for Fibre to the Node (FTTN) is in full swing.

The Australian Financial Review (AFR) recently published a story about a preliminary study using a well-known inaccurate database that found “up to 82 per cent of homes in cities are situated within 500 metres of a copper node” and the study went on to say “they are close enough to receive theoretical speeds of up to 100 megabits per second under fibre-to-the-node technology.”

To add yet another layer of hype the story went on to say that “up to 90 per cent of homes were within a kilometre of a Telstra copper node, meaning they would receive roughly at least a quarter of the maximum speed based on the technology.”

Does it matter that the study only considered cities and not regional and remote areas? Of course there is no real need to worry about anyone living beyond North Sydney or Toorak.

What about the use of theoretical speeds achievable only in a laboratory using pristine equipment to implant the idea that FTTN will be the National Broadband Network’s (NBN) technology saviour?

Is there any point advertising that customers will get “up to 100 Mbps”? The debate about this very questionable use of misleading advertising continues and it is high time that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission steps up and stops the practice.

In the UK BT has only guaranteed a minimum of 8 Mbps on their FTTN. Properties that are less than 300 metres from the cabinet can achieve 60-80 Mbps downstream but only 30 per cent of premises fall into this category. If your home is more than 300 metres from the cabinet the projected speeds drop off quickly.

If only someone would post a copy of Dodo’s ADSL2+ speed disclaimer near the water cooler we might be able to see the recent spate of media promoting the qualities of the copper network for what it is – hype and nothing more. Just in case you need reminding here is the speed disclaimer:

The actual speed you experience depends on a number of factors, including, your equipment, the quality and location of your line, including how far your connection is from the local telephone exchange, the applications you are using, the capacity and speed of our systems, the systems of our suppliers, and the Internet generally. For these reasons, you should not expect your actual speed to be at or near the theoretical maximum.

The EU recently published a report containing a snapshot of Internet connections in March 2012 which was collected from about 9000 homes server by 250 ISPs across the 30 EU countries. The research states that “on average, EU consumers receive 74 per cent of the advertised headline speed they have paid for. xDSL based services achieved only 63.3 per cent of the advertised headline download speed, compared to 91.4 per cent for cable and 84.4 per cent for FTTx.”

If it wasn’t for cable and FTTx the EU figures would be around the xDSL figure of 63.3 per cent which is not something to be extolled. Would you be concerned if you purchased a car that you were told achieves 600km per tank and you found you could only do 400km, about 60 per cent?

As the NBN reviews commence, Telstra should be called upon by the communications minister Malcolm Turnbull to provide full and frank disclosure of the state of the copper network. There can be no reasonable decision to move to include FTTN in the Australian NBN without an open and transparent analysis of the copper network.

Read more: http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2013/10/23/technology/nbn-copper-whispering-campaign
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It's time to go back to plan A with a more sensible schedule. There is obviously no economic benefit to FTTN given that the technology will be obsolete long before the rollout is complete.

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Job losses 'likely' after review finds Coalition's NBN plan to cost billions more

Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull says job losses are "likely" at the NBN Co after a review of the Government's broadband plan found it will be billions of dollars more expensive than the Coalition had promised.

The strategic review revelations come as it is confirmed that current Vodafone Australia boss Bill Morrow will start as the new chief executive of the NBN Co next year.

The review, conducted by the NBN Co, states the Government's proposed fibre-to-the-node-based network would require around $12 billion more than estimated in the Coalition's April 2013 policy.

Speaking after the analysis was unveiled, Mr Turnbull said jobs would have to be cut following downgrades to the company’s profit forecasts.

"I think the report makes it very clear that the size of the organisation was established to cater for a business that had much higher revenues and a much higher rate of deployment," he said.

"I think it is reasonable to assume from that, given that this document is one that has been approved by the board, that some right sizing is likely to occur. These are all matters for the management."

Mr Turnbull said his policy assumed NBN Co was doing better than it actually was.

"We assumed they would be able to meet their forecasts a year earlier than has been assumed in the study," Mr Turnbull said.

The minister added the Government would not pay any extra to the NBN Co.

The original figures were announced under Labor and the NBN Co chairman Ziggy Switkowski has criticised the way they were calculated.

"The original corporate plan underestimated the costs, overestimated what are the real world experiences revenues and what households are prepared to pay," he said.

Policy promises 'very unlikely to be achieved'

The Coalition's policy promised to give most Australians the option to connect to a 25 megabit per second network by 2016, but the review found that was extremely unrealistic.

It found less than half of the country would have access to those speeds by 2016.

The Coalition's policy also promised to have 50mbps available by 2019 and the review supports this, with 91 per cent of premises expected to have access to those speeds.

The report also found Labor's fibre-to-the-home approach would cost an extra $29 billion in capital expenditure and take an extra three years to rollout.

The review found the current corporate plan had "blind faith" in the achievability of the targets.

"The independent assessment concluded that ... it is extremely optimistic and very unlikely to be achieved," the report said.

It also canvassed a scenario looking at the cheapest possible fibre to the home option, which was still assumed to be $20 billion more expensive.

New NBN Co chief Bill Morrow says role will be challenging

Speaking to the ABC, incoming NBN Co chief Mr Morrow said it was too early for him to say if the current NBN targets could be met.
Video: Bill Morrow says he's ready for NBN Co challenges (ABC News)

"I've not had a chance to meet with the employees, to look at the detailed plans, to interface with all of the third party suppliers and partners," he said.

"I have no idea at this point. I've not seen any of the details."

Mr Morrow says he is confident that politics will not get in the way of the rollout.

"It's so important to the country that naturally there's going to be a lot of strong opinions on this," he said.

"I trust that Malcolm Turnbull, along with Ziggy as the chairman of the board, are looking to bring together all of the thoughts, all of the perspectives to be sure that we set out on a trajectory that's the right one."

He says he took on the job because of its financial and political challenges.

"I look at any assignment, any endeavour - it's not what it is today it's what you can do with it," he said.

"So all of those challenges are real and they're very serious."


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The Rise and Fall of Australia’s $44 Billion Broadband Project
Why Australia decided to abort an ambitious fiber-to-the-home plan
By Rodney S. Tucker
Posted 26 Nov 2013 | 15:00 GMT

Posted Image
Photo: Adam Voorhes

In April 2009, Australia’s then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, dropped a bombshell on the press and the global technology community: His social democrat Labor administration was going to deliver broadband Internet to every single resident of Australia. It was an audacious goal, not least of all because Australia is one of the most sparsely populated countries on Earth.

The National Broadband Network (NBN), as the project is known, would extend high-speed optical fiber directly into the homes, schools, and workplaces of 93 percent of Australians. The remaining 7 percent, living out of fiber’s reach in rural areas and remote pockets of the vast outback in the middle of the continent, would be linked to the Internet via state-of-the-art wireless and satellite technology.

Governments and telecom carriers in other countries, such as Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea, have similarly embarked on endeavors to deploy widespread fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) networks. But those countries are much smaller and more densely populated than Australia. The country has roughly the landmass of the contiguous United States but only 7 percent as many people—fewer, in fact, than the state of Texas. To lay a nationwide fiber footprint, the government would need armies of workers and unprecedented access to rights-of-way, utility poles, and underground ducts.

And indeed, the NBN’s estimated cost was high: The latest figure was AU $45.6 billion (US $44.1 billion). It would be one of the largest, most pervasive FTTP rollouts any government has ever attempted. But although the price would be great, so would the impact: The network would bring broadband access to underserved areas, but it would also raise standards of living everywhere by driving innovations in telemedicine, remote education, e-commerce, and e-governance. A government-funded report released this year by Deloitte Access Economics concluded that the NBN would provide job opportunities, time savings, and other benefits worth, on average, AU $3800 (US $3600) per household per year by 2020, when construction would be nearly complete. In addition, fiber’s enormous bandwidth capacity means that transmitting and receiving equipment could be upgraded indefinitely at low cost, allowing the NBN to keep pace for decades with the incessant demand for higher data rates.

Yet despite these benefits, some conservative politicians and media outlets vehemently opposed the plan. In the campaign leading up to a national election this September, the fate of the NBN was vigorously debated. Although polls showed that the majority of voters supported the project, they nevertheless rejected the Labor Party and ushered into power an alliance of moderate conservative parties known as the Coalition, whose leader and now prime minister, Tony Abbott, promised to drastically scale back the national network.

So now, after three years of planning and construction, during which workers connected some 210 000 premises (out of an anticipated 13.2 million), Australia’s visionary and trailblazing initiative is at a crossroads. The new government plans to deploy fiber only to the premises of new housing developments. For the remaining homes and businesses—about 71 percent—it will bring fiber only as far as curbside cabinets, called nodes. Existing copper-wire pairs will cover the so-called last mile to individual buildings.

Such issues are not unique to Australia. Enthusiasm for near-universal broadband was once widespread, and it is still being pursued in the countries mentioned above, among others. But the ardor has cooled in recent years as legislators in many parts of the world move to cut government spending. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with technology, the public debate is beset by misunderstanding, misinformation, and a general lack of technical knowledge. A rare opportunity for growth and development is about to be lost, and disappointingly few people fully grasp the implications of that loss.

For example, in Australia, the Coalition is pursuing a fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) strategy because it would be much cheaper in the short term—about two-thirds the price of the original NBN. But that calculus overlooks the longer-term realities. Copper links simply lack the capacity to support the massive growth in data consumption that analysts predict. Eventually, Australians will have no choice but to replace those links with fiber, probably before the end of this decade. At that point, upgrading to an FTTP network will add to the cost of the FTTN rollout, increasing the total investment beyond the price of installing that fiber today.

And in delaying the deployment, Australians will have passed up a unique chance to become leaders in the global digital economy—an opportunity they may not get again.
Posted Image
Today in Australia, as in much of Asia, Europe, and North America, commercial carriers own and operate competing landline networks. Such an arrangement normally encourages carriers to stay at the forefront of technology. However, it can have disadvantages as well: In a thinly populated country such as Australia, carriers may cherry-pick customers in the few dense urban centers where they know they can make the most profit. Consequently, progress is slow to reach the vast majority of people living in rural and suburban areas.

It’s not surprising, then, that among developed countries, Australia is notable for its paucity of fiber-optic links. The highest rates are in Japan and South Korea, densely populated countries with small landmasses, where fiber accounts for more than 60 percent of broadband lines. In larger, more sparsely populated countries, such as the United States and Canada, rates are much more modest. In Australia, the rate is less than 2 percent.

Today, more than two in three Australian households have fixed broadband subscriptions. Most of those connections still use digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, which transmits data packets at higher frequencies than do analog voice signals, enabling Internet traffic to travel over telephone lines at relatively high bit rates. In a DSL system, twisted copper pairs, also known as loops, connect each customer to a central switching office. There, a rack of modems known as DSL access multiplexers, or DSLAMs, link the local loop to the backbone networks of various Internet service providers.

The problem with relying on DSL for broadband service is that many modern applications, including ultrahigh-definition videoconferencing and 3-D television, already require faster transmission speeds than these lines can provide. The biggest bottleneck is the copper itself. Due to the electrical properties of the metal, signals distort and weaken considerably with distance and can interfere with signals traveling through neighboring wires. This severely limits the bit rate of connections, particularly long ones. While customers close to a central office can receive rates as high as 24 megabits per second (using a common standard known as ADSL 2+), more distant customers experience much slower speeds. In Australia, where loops can be quite long and where some users opt for low-speed plans, the average Internet connection is just 4.8 Mb/s. And because the upload rate for DSL rarely exceeds more than one-fourth the download rate, the service doesn’t work well for high-bandwidth two-way applications such as videoconferencing.

Posted Image

Source: NBN Co; Illustration: Emily Cooper
Broadband Far and Wide: The original conception for Australia’s National Broadband Network would have given all citizens high-speed data connections—93 percent of them fiber. The country’s large landmass and sparse population made this controversial plan unprecedented and hugely ambitious.

The leaders of the Labor Party weren’t the first Australians to recognize the need for a faster, more inclusive network. Telecom carriers and federal advisory groups have been kicking around proposals for a national broadband network since about 2003. But it wasn’t until December 2007, after the Labor Party won majority power, that the government committed to the venture.

At first, Labor representatives thought the new network should use an FTTN architecture, which would require removing DSLAMs from central offices, located kilometers from customers, and installing new ones in nodes as close as a couple of hundred meters. The nodes would connect to the central offices via fiber and relay data to and from each customer’s premises using very-high-bit-rate DSL, or VDSL, the highest-speed DSL standard available at the time. These shorter copper loops would boost average speeds considerably—to as high as 50 Mb/s, depending on the distance between the node and the premises. The resulting FTTN network wouldn’t be nearly as fast as a full-blown FTTP grid, but the anticipated cost seemed more reasonable.

The government also assumed that the best way to build the network was to award the job to a commercial carrier through a bidding process. It would grant the winner a monopoly license and pitch in AU $4.7 billion to subsidize the cost of construction. Six carriers, including the market leader Telstra, submitted proposals by November 2008. To evaluate them, the government appointed an expert panel; I was among its seven members.

After studying the proposals, we agreed on two key points. First, we found that the global economic recession, sparked by the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble in 2006, was preventing Australia’s carriers from raising enough capital to fully fund the construction of a national network. In fact, none of the bidders came up with a viable business model. It was clear that unless the government bankrolled the majority of the cost, a commercial network would not likely succeed.

Our second observation was that an FTTN layout would be a bad idea. Using VDSL, a home connection could theoretically deliver 50 Mb/s, but only if the node sat very close to the house—a mere 100 meters or so away. Since the panel disbanded, a newer standard, VDSL2, has emerged. When combined with a novel interference-reduction technique called vectoring, it can provide download speeds up to about 100 Mb/s over short distances. And now an even faster standard known as G.fast is in the works, which promises download rates up to 1 Gb/s, but again, only for very short connections. For customers on longer loops, telecoms would be able to guarantee only about 50 Mb/s.

Market analysts project that data usage from a single family or small business could easily surpass that rate by 2020, and to meet this demand, Australia would need an FTTP network. Laying a cheaper FTTN footprint first would make little sense because it’s not a necessary step toward realizing an all-fiber system. In fact, an FTTN network requires special equipment and infrastructure, including nodes, that would have to be removed and discarded during an FTTP upgrade. An interim FTTN rollout would consequently end up costing Australians more in the long term than simply investing in FTTP technology today.

For these and other reasons, we recommended that the government itself create a national FTTP network. Incredibly, it accepted our advice.

Two Faces of the NBN
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Sources: NBN Co; Coalition’s NBN policy statements; “Energy Consumption in Access Networks,” J. Baliga, R.S. Tucker, et al., Optical Fiber Communication/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference, 2008

In April 2009, following Prime Minister Rudd’s landmark announcement, the Australian government established NBN Co to build and operate the future National Broadband Network. The governmentowned company would be responsible for connecting every home and business to more than 100 hubs, called points of interconnect, around the nation. These are places where commercial Internet providers and other content-delivery companies, called retail service providers, would hook into the network. To reduce some of the cost of laying fiber lines, NBN Co would pay commercial carriers to access existing underground ducts and pits and decommission copper telephone lines and DSLAM equipment. Telstra currently owns the vast majority of this infrastructure, and the government had agreed to pay AU $11 billion to access it.

As the sole owner of the new national network, NBN Co would run what’s known as a Layer 2 network. It would offer commercial providers a choice of speeds at set prices (from AU $24 per month for 12 Mb/s downloads and 1 Mb/s uploads to AU $150 per month for 1 Gb/s downloads and 400 Mb/s uploads). It would route the data to and from the providers’ customers using Ethernet protocol. The providers would add on the remaining layers, including data packaging, encryption, and error correction, and bill customers directly. Although NBN Co alone would manage the physical infrastructure, including the modems in people’s homes, providers could still compete, based on the type of content they offered and the quality of their service.

To construct the network’s fiber web, engineers opted to use passive optical network (PON) technology, a standard approach for FTTP networks. In NBN Co’s PON system, a single fiber would ferry data from a central office to a small curbside cabinet, where a beam splitter would divide the signal, guiding the light through up to 32 branching fibers, each leading to a separate premises. Unlike active optical networks, which electronically switch data at the cabinet in order to route it to its final destination, PON systems broadcast to all premises on a splitter. They rely on electronic switches at each customer’s terminal to weed out the neighbors’ traffic and encrypt the data to prevent eavesdropping. PON systems also tend to be cheaper, use less power, and are easier to maintain than active ones because they don’t require engineers to install and tend to switching equipment in outdoor cabinets.

When construction began on the NBN in 2010, the fastest equipment available for transmitting data on a PON network relied on an industry standard known as gigabit PON, or GPON, which can send 2.4 gigabits per second to each splitter. This overall capacity would be divided among all of the premises on a splitter. However, if several customers in a neighborhood opted for fast services, NBN Co would simply install more splitters at the cabinet—a quick, 20-minute job. This way, NBN Co could guarantee that every fiber-connected Australian who wanted the maximum 1 Gb/s rate could get it.

Inevitably, though, some people would fall outside this fiber footprint. About 7 percent of Australians live in rural communities or remote outposts where wired broadband access is technically or economically unviable. NBN Co would connect about half this population via fixed wireless towers equipped with standard 4G LTE technologies capable of delivering download speeds up to 25 Mb/s and upload speeds up to 5 Mb/s to each customer. The other half would be served by two new high-bandwidth geostationary satellites due to launch in 2015, which would provide similar data rates.

But no matter the type of access technology—fiber, wireless, or satellite—NBN Co would still charge commercial providers the same wholesale rates to use its pipes, ensuring equal and fair prices to all consumers regardless of location.

Many politicians and industry executives praised the NBN plan. Alan Noble, Google Australia’s head of engineering, called it “the greatest enabler of innovation.” Others said it was “a critical part in the evolution of the Internet” and “too good an opportunity to miss.” Nevertheless, the plan was controversial from the outset. Members of the conservative Coalition, concerned about rising costs and construction delays, have described the NBN as a “dangerous delusion,” a “white elephant on a massive scale,” and a “shockingly misconceived, wasteful exercise in public policy.”

Some of the early criticisms, particularly from media commentators, stemmed from technical misunderstandings. Opponents of the FTTP approach, for instance, often reasoned that the popularity of mobile gadgets is causing wireless technologies to advance so rapidly that they will eventually offer greater speeds than fiber, making the NBN obsolete.

The fallacy of this assumption is immediately apparent to anybody with a basic knowledge of wireless networks. Such connections will always be limited by the bandwidth capacity of a cellular base station, which must be shared among all its users. Even if one station could use all available radio spectrum to serve one customer, the bandwidth of frequencies that can be passed through an optical fiber would still be some 20 000 times as great.

What’s more, mobile systems may not be able to sustain their awesome growth without an extensive fiber network. Already, operators are deploying miniature base stations known as small cells in homes, businesses, and busy urban centers, to help expand capacity and bring services to places where traditional towers may not reach, such as indoors. The glut of data flowing through these cells will need to be hauled to and from an operator’s core network—a job that suits fiber very well.

Other critics of the Labor Party’s plan worried that giving NBN Co sole ownership of Australia’s physical network would stifle infrastructure competition, keeping prices high for consumers and slowing the adoption of new network technologies. This argument might be persuasive in more densely populated countries such as the United States, where high consumer demand usually ensures vigorous competition based largely on technology. Indeed, in the United States, Verizon began offering its FiOS FTTP service in 2005, and plans are now available to more than 18 million homes, 5 million of which have subscriptions, the company says.

But in Australia, providers have already demonstrated that a free market hasn’t produced good access options for most consumers. In the 1990s, for instance, Telstra and its competitor Optus strung separate hybrid fiber-coaxial lines, a faster service than DSL, to the same 2 million premises in some populous suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. Meanwhile, millions more premises missed out on the upgrade.

By far the biggest concern about the FTTP model was, and still is, that the benefits won’t justify its high cost. The Coalition argues that an FTTN network, though less than ideal, would provide more value per dollar. But the numbers just don’t add up.

An FTTP network offering peak speeds of up to 1 Gb/s would have cost Australians about AU $3450 per premises, according to NBN Co’s cost analysis. By contrast, the new Coalition government estimates that each FTTN connection, capable of guaranteeing up to 50 Mb/s, will cost on average around AU $2320—a whopping two-thirds the cost of a vastly superior FTTP link. And if consumer data rates continue to climb as fast as analysts predict, many FTTN customers will probably want to upgrade to FTTP technology before 2020. To accommodate them, the Coalition government plans to offer “fiber-on-demand” service, in which a customer could choose to pay out of pocket for installing fiber from a curbside node to a home or business. These upgrades would likely add another AU $1000 to $5000 to the price of each connection, depending on the length of the fiber and the amount of labor required.

In the meantime, an FTTP network using GPON infrastructure could last well into the future. Upgrading it to the next-generation standard, called XGPON, which will support up to 10 Gb/s, would simply require replacing some of the equipment in central offices and the terminal modem at each customer’s premises—for a likely total bill of no more than AU $300 per connection. In the future, newer standards could provide even faster bit rates for a comparable cost.

It has been painful watching the formation of this “futureproof” network come to an end. I can’t help but think of the United States’ Interstate Highway System, championed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s, which paved the way, literally, for a booming transportation-based economy. In Australia, a fiber-based broadband highway could transform the country’s digital economy in much the same way.

Sadly, the new Coalition government seems impervious to these arguments and is determined to downscale the NBN. I am left clinging to the hope that Australians will realize the foolishness of abandoning the FTTP network and insist that their leaders reconsider or devise a new plan that’s not too far removed from the Labor Party’s revolutionary vision.

This article originally appeared in print as “Australia’s (Less Super) Super-highway.”
About the Author

Rodney S. Tucker is a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Melbourne and an IEEE Fellow. In 2008, the Australian government appointed him to an expert panel that recommended building a nationwide all-fiber access network, now known as the National Broadband Network. Although this ambitious project is now in danger of being downscaled, Tucker considers his work on the panel “one of the most significant contributions of my engineering career.”
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