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

[Greg M]

Colleagues,

 

After reading the Coalition's plan for the NBN, and their own "NBN" type
policy (I don't think it can be fairly called a plan), I sit here in my
chair pondering what will happen if what "The Australian" predicts is a loss
of major Labor seats in NSW & QLD: (And Please, blast me here if the
remainder of this email comes all political)

 

-          NBN is scrapped. Tasmanian network is sold (to who - won't this
be a Monopoly? Who will want to roll out a competitive network to a FTTH???)

-          Coalition spends ~$100M on more blackspot programs (where - where
are their plans, similar to those from NBNco/Labor?!) in 2011/12

-          Coalition spends random amounts of other money to invest in DSL &
Satelite in regional centers, and Fixed Wireless technology (again, where?)

Ok, so being from WA - and travelling to a lot of "regional" locations,
including Margaret River, Dunsborough, and even looking at the Perth metro..
We currently have 4 competitive wireless networks, all of which are decent
in speed and expanding. My workplace has a Vivid Wireless modem at Murdoch
that can easily transfer 10Mbps, 20ish km out of the City. Outside of the
city, when I took my NextG USB stick down to Margaret River I was able to
get 1.4MB/s!! That is 250km from the CBD. These speeds of course vary from
person to person, location to location - but there is no need to duplicate
the networks, and the networks themselves, are NO match for the speed, and
inherent latency of a Fiber to the home service/deployment.

A further example - In January 2008, I drove with my parents down from
Brisbane to Sydney, taking a Laptop with me. I kept a solid VPN connection
for the entire trip on my NextG USB stick. Surely there may not be Optus,
Vivid or N+1 carriers for every single kilometre of the country, but surely
retail competition in Mobile broadband now is at a better point than it ever
has been, and there shouldn't need to be any further duplication? 

 

The only areas that miss out are rural - and in a perfect world they would
get fiber, but unfortunately the cost is too high. 2 way Satellite is
probably the only way this will go.

-          Looking at situations such as RIM's - how does the Coalition's
plan propose to deal with that? They mention Telstra, however it took years
and years and YEARS to get any traction in negotiation anything with
Telstra, so maybe we can put this into some sort of Election basket for
2014?

-          What about competitor ADSL hardware? My home ADSL connection that
is in a rather expensive Perth suburb, is only able to sync at 5Mbps due to
being 3kM from the exchange. How, and where does the Coalition's NBN plan
propose to deal with reducing the length of my copper pair, and or If they
plan to do a FTTN type Opel thing - how are they planning on compensating
infrastructure (DSLAM) owners, and how do they also plan to manage that
aspect of a network? Isnt that just another NBNco wholesale monopoly that
they say they want to avoid?

 

There really are too many unanswered questions - and even though I
shamefully am admitting here that I support Senator Conroy's NBN plans (even
though I am strongly against a filter), I don't think that the magnitude of
this issue is worth lying low and shrugging off. 

 

So, I have decided to put my own neck on the line and email  (separately
from this email) friends and family in what will likely be read as a spam
email by the time they read the subject, but as a "tech" in the industry, I
want to tell people who read all of the politically bias, or Christian
influenced,  articles on in the news papers, in SMH, or other locations that
the simple facts are that if they want to live in a country which will have
communications infrastructure that will be able to support technologies of
now, the emerging, and the future, and enable us to compete with other
digital economies such as South Korea, Japan and others that we have three
choices:

 

1)      You can vote Labor if you have no major objections with your local
candidate and would like to see our digital economy move forwards

2)      You can vote Greens if you don't like your labor candidate, but like
the idea of the NBN, and also don't want the Filter.

3)      Vote Liberal if you like men in red bathing suits, and don't
honestly care about telecommunications.

 

I had to present a paper to the company I work for detailing what the NBN
will mean for the company, and how it will impact the business's costs
(Large Civil/Structural Engineering firm) . I simply stated that the NBN
would enable the company to (in theory, social ramifications aside)
eliminate almost all office locations, significantly saving millions of
dollars each year in rent, electricity and related expenses (workers comp,
the list goes on), and basically provide CAD & Engineering workstations (or
thin clients) to staff to work from home. The staff would then "vpn" in
through the NBN to a central network location where files/emails are stored,
and keep in touch through Skype (video + audio), all in the comfort,
convenience and flexibility of their own homes.

 

The biggest off-shoot of all this is, that the company would have more
money, saved from office expenditure to spend on

-          Employee Salaries

-          Lowering hourly charge out rates to clients, thus gaining more
work, or providing better value to clients through other means (i.e.
additional services @ same cost etc etc)

 

Basket case for the NBN. There are others that are less rosy - but I
personally believe that every business has the opportunity to reap benefits
from an NBN - not just consumers. It will improve the way we work, live and
play.

 

So there is my email. Hastily cobbled together from a scared voter who has
to choose from the lesser of 2 evils in 10 days. Abbot - If only you had
fully supported the ALP NBN Plan/NBNco, then you would have had my full and
undivided vote.

 

So please, if you agree with me, don't just sit on your hands, tell your
friends and family that they should vote for an NBN - Labor or Greens.

 

Thanks for reading this far into the email,

 

Greg

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