[AusNOG] NBN: "i want a pony! but can I afford it"

Sat Aug 14 18:17:16 EST 2010

It seems that the people who don’t care are already on awesome connections.  20mb down and 2.5 up, yeah i would pay $300 a month for that for my personal use, but i cant buy it because im too far from the exchange.  I get 4mb/0.8mb.  Wireless is not the answer (it also seems no  one is comparing apples with apples either.  12mb wireless would be equivalent to 6mb fibre as the 12mb is shared both ways, where the fibre is sync.  They should be spruiking the fibre connection as 200mb or 2gb connections), as wireless is contended and also prone to interference.  The main problem I see with the NBN is they should be rolling it out regional first, then metro.  Start with the people who have the crappy connections, they are more likely to take the service up.  The people who are in metro areas don’t care because they have fibre or are close to the exchange and get high speed adsl.

My 2c

Regards,

Daniel Mullins

From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of David Connors
Sent: Saturday, 14 August 2010 10:38 AM
To: Matthew Moyle-Croft
Cc: ausnog at ausnog.net
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] NBN: "i want a pony! but can I afford it"

On 13 August 2010 16:23, Matthew Moyle-Croft <mmc at internode.com.au<mailto:mmc at internode.com.au>> wrote:
Come on John, I've been in or around this industry for the best part of two decades.   I spend my time dealing with Telstra and getting DSLAMs installed, so I'm intimately familiar with the industry, regulation, it's successes and failures.

At the moment, I'm so deeply disappointed that, on this list, no one can articulate a way forward other than "NBN is bad for me and so I don't want it", so let's not change the familiar status quo.

Even Mark resorted to "well, let's just wait and see, because we've been waiting and seeing for 2 decades".

Or to accentuate the positive - these dates are off the top of my head but:

 1.  In around 2000 when we moved into our previous offices we paid, IIRC, something like $700 a month for 2 x ISDN b-channels to get 128 kbps symmetrical from TID. Excess data was 19c/meg + GST (yes, $190/GB on a cents-per-meg basis). The other alternatives were multi-link PPP via 56K modems, DDS Fastway for $30K/year (that was just the link with no IP transit) for 2/2 meg serial, or BigPond cable - but Telstra refused to connect that to business premises. I think that was about the time they slapped 3GB flat quotas on cable anyway.
 2.  RequestDSL started offering some of the first DSL services around shortly after that. We switched and paid, about the same $ for the same data but with 2 meg symmetrical. I can't recall the exact time but maybe that was 2001/2002?
 3.  After that, we switched providers a few times and ended up going with iPrimus who were one of the first to allow ADSL1 without the 256/512/1.5 Telstra nonsense, I think getting 6 or 7 meg down and maybe 600-700kbps up (artificial limits still I think - but whatever) That would have been about 2004/2005 - we were paying something like $200 a month IIRC.
 4.  According to my inbox we ordered Business Extreme from Internode at our old office in March 2006, at which point we got pretty close to 24 down in Albert St Brisbane. I can't recall if Annex M was live then but if it wasn't it was shortly after.
 5.  Since 2008 we have all our stuff in a data centre and use a DSL service to access it. 20 meg down and 2.5 up for $69.
So in less than a decade we've gone from:

 1.  128kbps / 128kbps @ $700 per month @ 19c/meg <-- 2000
 2.  22 000 kbps / 2 500 ish kbps @ $69 per month with 60 GB included then shaped down to 128 kbps / 2500kbps ish  <-- 2010
Now there are ISPs like T offering 200GB for similar prices, or TPG offering allegedly unlimited downloads.

So while everyone is quick to say how broken everything is structurally and how evil T is and what not (and I don't dispute any of the gripes posted on ausnog over the years) the fact remains that there have been quite amazing improvements in spite of this.

Some other ways to think about it:

 *   In 2000 I'd pay $700 for a link slower than most people's shaping. Now I p1ss more than that up against the wall on Internet radio - so much so I don't care if I go out and leave a 256kbps stream playing all day while I'm not at my PC.
 *   In 2000 you did not watch video. MAYBE someone e-mailed you a 10 second MPEG and clogged your link for 5 minutes in the process, now you don't even notice 480p videos and the biggest problem with 1080p is that Flash can't render it properly unless you have a super computer.
 *   And at the risk of having all of the NBN folk currently having a nerdgasm throw daggers at me, there was no wireless broadband in 2000. We did some GPRS projects when T first made it reasonably available and I think the cost of data at the time was 2.2c/kilobyte (I recall arguing with my T rep at the time that it cost something like $20 to download the telstra.com<http://telstra.com> home page and associated images). Looking back over my mailbox, I worked out that syncing my mail in 2004 cost $1.50 each time I pressed Send/Receive on my iPaq PDA using IRDA to my phone over GPRS. Now you get 3GB on no contract from Telstra for $29 a month for HSUPA speeds.
I know that not everyone enjoys the benefits of having access to an Agile DSLAM (and being close) and as I have said elsewhere, something definitely needs to be done about RIM/pair gain/regional scenarios. Putting that to one side, for a lot of the population, things have improved substantially even though the regulatory environment is stuffed and T is screwing the little man etc.

If _we_ the industry can't articulate what the future looks like,

If I had gone back to you in 2000 and said "I can buy unlimited downloads for 70 bucks in <10 years over an existing single copper pair at speeds approaching 20 meg down and 1 meg up" you would have told me I have rocks in my head.

then we'll end up with it being decided for us or having nothing change (because we can't explain why or what) and so we end up grumbling for another few decades and be no better off.

That depends on whether you're a fundamentally glass-half-full or glass-half-empty kind of person. I think on the whole, the improvements in Internet access over the last 8-10 years or so have been quite remarkable. Sure, things could be faster if someone else paid for the implementation of fibre across the country - and I'd probably agree for the need to spend $43bln if I looked back 8-10 years and saw that Internet access in Australia had been stagnant or stuffed. It hasn't. In my view it has been quite dynamic and improved quite markedly. For some people it has not and that is a cause for concern and I'm not sure anyone on this thread would dispute the need for a fix for those guys.

Come on.   What does the future look like?

Who the hell knows? No one would have predicted what Internode were capable of delivering in 2006/2007 back in 2000.

The future is extremely difficult to anticipate. It is a LOT of coin IF it happens on time and budget; and based on past experience with the current government, I think either being the case is highly unlikely.

[ ... ]

--
David Connors | david at codify.com<mailto:david at codify.com> | www.codify.com<http://www.codify.com>
Software Engineer
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