[AusNOG] Long live the NBN. The NBN is dead?! [personal]

[Paul Brooks]

On 11/08/2010 5:20 PM, Mark Newton wrote:
>
> On 11/08/2010, at 3:08 PM, Paul Brooks wrote:
>>
>> I don't accept that a household connection *cost* needs to be $3000 - 
>> $5000, especially if - like the current network - the common costs 
>> are amortised over a period of many decades, which is something that 
>> a government entity can do, but a purely commercial organisation 
>> perhaps cannot.
>
> That kinda ignores the way new copper connections take place now.
>
> The expensive bits (pit and pipe, cable back to an pillar for aggregation)
> is supplied by the housing estate developer.  Its price is built into 
> the cost
> of each house (so it might contribute a couple of grand to the asking 
> price
> of the block of land).  When it's built it's gifted to Telstra, and 
> they plonk a
> RIM next to the pillar and install fibre back to the nearest exchange.
>
> It's dead wrong to say that the cost of a house's copper connection is
> "amortised over a period of many decades."  That might have been the
>  case 80 years ago, but those days are long gone.
>
> New bits of the CAN are now built by private entities, paid for with short
> short term debt that's recovered as blocks of land are sold.  And Telstra
> pays for barely any of it.

Actually, I was taking a larger view. The common costs - the central 
exchange, the land, the multistorey building (in a normal suburb), the 
generators, the battery banks, the switching equipment, the access 
network head-end equipment, the DWDM gear to drive the backhaul, the 
main trunking cable - or in the FTTH case, the main fibre from the ONT 
to the splitter, and perhaps further - all that is amortised over a long 
period, and also amortised over the number of end-points served in the 
area.

An overhead drop-cable from the eaves to the pole in the street isn't 
$2k, and neither is a lead-in trench dug by the building owner (or their 
builder) to underground it.

I understand you're talking greenfields estate construction - I had 
brownfields (i.e my house) in mind.


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