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

[Paul Brooks]

On 11/08/2010 3:29 PM, Tim McCullagh wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Brooks" 
> <pbrooks-ausnog at layer10.com.au>
>>
>> Taking an 'I'm allright Jack, bugger you' approach isn't one I'm
>> comfortable with.
>
> So are you saying that everyone should be driving a new shinny roll 
> royce because your 10 year old holden needs to be replaced?  Lets buy 
> everyone a new car now and not just any car but lets all get rolls 
> royces even though we can't afford the payments, that doesn't matter 
> the government will pay. Where does the government get its money ?  
> Thats right from you and I
No, I'm not. I'm saying that the attitude of 'I've got 22 Mbps on my 
DSL, so I don't care that the people outside DSL range have nothing at 
all, and no hope of getting anything" isn't helpful. I think it is far 
more important to get broadband to those that have none at all, than to 
bring faster broadband to those that already have it. I also think that 
broadband is about a whole lot more than simple downstream capacity. 
Upstream capacity  is also important, latency is also important. These 
three together determine the usability of a broadband link, and this 
focus of all of us here, you, and the policy wonks on simplistic 
spleen-venting based on only downstream linkrate is disappointing.

Enough with the emotive car analogies Tim - its not comparable.  A 
better analogy is the width of the road. I'm saying we should look to 
the long term. If you had your way, when they built the harbour bridge 
they would have made it only one lane either way, because thats all we 
needed at the time. By now we'd have had to build 5 harbour bridges 
side-by-side to carry the offered demand traffic, and they would have 
cost in aggregate more than the single bridge big enough to carry it all.

>
> Granted there are parts of australia that have poor or no service then 
> this is where the focus should be.  Not building a forth network over 
> the top of 3 other networks that can supply what is needed for many 
> users today and then scrapping the 3 existing networks so that the 4 
> th network owner can charge whatever they like.
Actually, on this point I think we agree.  The issue of course is how to 
reach those places that have poor or no service, but are inside the 
nominal footprint of those existing networks.


-- 
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