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

[Mark Newton]

On 11/08/2010, at 3:58 PM, Matthew Zobel wrote:

No-one here has given even one compelling reason for FTTH.

IPTV
Smart Metering
coverged phone line and data (VoIP)
Teleconferrencing
etc

none of these offer any real value to the average tax payer.

None of those examples actually need an NBN either :-)

Smart metering is my favourite.  The power utilities clearly don't give a rats
about the NBN because they've been deploying smart meters for years
without it.  They use something very much like WiMAX for the tiny quantity
of data that each meter requires.

The first smart meter I saw had a socket in it for a GSM SIM.  It communicated
with base by using SMS messages.

There seems to be a special kind of reality detachment going on here.

The very same people who say, "We need to catch up with South Korea!"
should be able to provide examples of what the South Koreans do that's
different to what we do, so they can show us what we're missing out on.

What do the South Koreans do online that's different to us?  Basically
nothing.  They use web, they use peer-to-peer apps, they transact
commerce;  All at 100 Mbps.

(One thing they do differently is use outsourced storage across the
network - your files follow you around 'cos they're in a datacentre
somewhere, and people don't care so much about big hard drives
anymore.  Anyone who tried to offer a service like that in Australia
would end up at the bottom of a smoking crater with their torso turned
inside out and their carcasses being picked apart by AFACT's copyright
lawyers, so lets not kid ourselves into believing that our NBN will enable
anything like that here)

So where are their emerging apps?  Where are the revolutionary uses
for this wondrous bandwidth that the Koreans are charging ahead with,
which is supposed to make us green with envy until we stump up $43b
on an NBN to keep up?

They're a first-world industrialized economy with lots of creative, inventive
people; and they don't have a government that's purpose-designed to
retard innovation like ours is either, so you'd think it'd be easier to
come up with new consumer broadband apps over there than it is here.
And they've had a huge head-start on us, because they already have it
and we have a Government that managed to get through an entire term
without passing any of the enabling legislation that'd let us even make a
start.

So where are their apps?

I reckon when you give a population of people near-ubiquitous availability
of quotaless high-speed network connectivity, they behave in pretty
much the same way that we behave now.  Going from no internet access
to ubiquitous internet access is a transformative step;  Going from
dialup to broadband is also transformative, but perhaps less so.
But going from broadband to faster broadband?  Not so much.  As a
species we seem to value the connections we can make with each other
a lot more than the volume of communication we can send over them.

I want to be convinced.  I want people like Michael Biber to tell me
all about the (legal) things that people are doing with nosebleed-inducing
broadband speed in all these other countries that are supposedly better
than ours.  I want them to tell me what non-imaginary things are we
missing out on.

And I want them to do it before I need to pay for it.

kthxbai,

  - mark


--
Mark Newton                               Email:  newton at internode.com.au<mailto:newton at internode.com.au> (W)
Network Engineer                          Email:  newton at atdot.dotat.org<mailto:newton at atdot.dotat.org>  (H)
Internode Pty Ltd                         Desk:   +61-8-82282999
"Network Man" - Anagram of "Mark Newton"  Mobile: +61-416-202-223





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