LaQuinn wrote on Nov 25^th, 2013 at 1:50pm:
I'd have been interested to find out whether Turnbull would have been as much of a disappointment had he remained leader. With the turkey that is the Coalition's NBN, Abbott's certainly done a job on him.

longweekend58 wrote on Nov 25^th, 2013 at 3:41pm:
Given that it hasn't happened yet, you're surprised?

Mixed messages complicate Turncoat’s path:
http://www.zdnet.com/mixed-messages-on-telstra-copper-complicate-fttn-nbn-case-7...

You can see now one can know the true state of the full copper network:
Quote:

http://www.zdnet.com/au/telstra-relies-on-public-to-inform-on-asbestos-infested-...

If it doesn’t know about all its pits how the hell can it know about all its lines?

Interesting story for everyone.
Went down to the bank and happened to bump into someone from Telstra. I introduced myself etc etc, I asked him how things were developing since the change from FTTP to FTTN. He replied, whilst shaking his head in disgust
"We have been testing Fibre to the Node at Port Macquire and the results have been 8Mbps instead of the proposed 25Mbps"

Yep things are looking good.....

[... continued]

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.

Australia in the Slow Lane
Global ranking      Average connection speed (Mb/s)
1 South Korea            13.3
2 Japan                  12.0
3 Switzerland            11.0
4 Hong Kong            10.8
5 Latvia                  10.6
6 Netherlands            10.1
7 Czech Republic        9.8
8 United States              8.7
9 Sweden                    8.4
10 United Kingdom        8.4
43 Australia              4.8
Global Average:        3.3 Mb/s


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, http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/ 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.

Source: NBN Co; Illustration: Emily Cooper

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.

[continued ...]

[... continued]

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.

[continued ...]

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/technology/nbn-revenue-to-be-hit-by-triplewhammy/story-e6frgakx-1226770526546

OFFICIALS from the Department of Communications have admitted that the National Broadband Network will take a triple-whammy revenue hit because of changes to the project's technology and rollout plans.

Speaking before the Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network, first assistant secretary Mark Heazlett acknowledged the need for revisions to the NBN Co corporate plan to account for revenue declines brought on by increased competition from other networks and an inability to sell higher-speed broadband plans.

The Coalition is changing the rollout of the NBN from a plan that under Labor promised to connect a fibre optic network to 93 per cent of the nation's homes and businesses.

That plan would deliver download speeds to consumers as fast as 1000 gigabits per second. But sustained construction delays, low take-up rates and the expense of the project have seen the Coalition change the plan to one based on cheaper deployment costs but a technologically inferior fibre-to-the-node network.

Under that new proposal the Coalition will connect nodes on street corners with fibre cabling and use Telstra's existing copper network to connect homes over the last few hundred metres.

Today the Department of Communications conceded that those changes would preclude the Coalition's fibre-to-the-node NBN from offering broadband plans above 40Mbps, which would hit revenue forecasts for both access costs and the increased data consumption which comes with the availability of faster download speeds.

Some 72 per cent of customers on the NBN are currently using plans that deliver download speeds of 25 megabits per second (or less), the same download rates promised by the Coalition's fibre-to-the node plan.

But 5 per cent of NBN users are on plans which offer download speeds of 50Mbps and upload speeds of 20Mbps, while the remaining 23 per cent are on plans with download speeds of 100mbps and upload speeds of 40mbps. Those speeds will only be available for about 20 per cent of homes under the Coalition's plan.

"Some fibre-to-the-premise products won't be available under fibre to the node," said Department of Communications deputy secretary of telecommunications, Ian Robinson.

"There will be a revenue impact and that will have to be assessed."

The department officials said that the possibility to allow Telstra and Optus to retain their cable broadband networks in lucrative metropolitan areas could also open the NBN up to competition that could ultimately eat into its revenues.

Good luck with those promised speeds.

Actually the rollout was ramping up, despite obstacles put in its path by LNP state and local govts. NBN Co should have been much more aggressive in its rollout, turning to running the NBN between power poles whenever Telstra attempted to slow the rollout down for its own interests.

For me the LNP sabotage makes the LNP the Party of Treason.

Someone is whinging mining is hollowing out manufacturing. The NBN would have rectified that in many ways—optimising the potential of 3D printing, boosting education, health etc.