[AusNOG] Very funny NBN skit

[Paul Wallace]

Narelle -

They are ONLY offering to pay cash to what .. TWO Carriers.

There are around 300 registered Carriers according to the ACMA Register today & many of them have spend tens of millions building out their infrastructure.

I'm sure you'd agree it's rather prejudicial to pay just 2 carriers billions & the rest nothing whilst obviously exposing those Carriers to ruin.









-----Original Message-----
From: Narelle [mailto:narellec at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2013 3:33 PM
To: Paul Wallace
Cc: John Edwards; ausnog at ausnog.net
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Very funny NBN skit

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 1:52 PM, Paul Wallace <paul.wallace at mtgi.com.au> wrote:
>
> As a separate note Liberty Group has 25 million subscribers in Europe 
> mostly on HFC & they're continuing to build out HFC as fast as they 
> can! That's HFC not fibre. Here in Australia we're paying billions of tax taxpayers funds to rip the two great HFC networks down.
>
> We actually pay cash here to destroy first class telecoms assets!
>

Alright - I'll bite. :-)

To go from existing DOCSIS platforms to higher capacity ones, ie make the transition from TDM to OFDM, you need to change out the head end electronics and RF plans for the entire networks. The existing CMTS hardware in place may not be capable of supporting it - the line cards certainly aren't - so a substantial upgrade is required to get to DOCSIS 3.1 and above. All household modems need to be replaced also.
Significant tuning and effort is required across the network to condition the plant.
That standard isn't finalised, either.
http://www.lightreading.com/docsis/docsis-31-to-be-revealed-at-cabletec-expo/240135059

To make the transistional move to higher than DOCSIS 1.1 - even before going to DOCSIS 3.1 - you need to replace the customer modems, and rejig your RF plan to ensure you can support the bandwidth customers demand in competition with any TV you are servicing. High definition TV is a bandwidth hog, and there has been little take up of trickle down options and local storage for popular programs and/or P2P servicing from set top boxes. Current service models may not fit.

The service model of the future is also much less download oriented and requires higher upload bandwidths. More challenges for the RF plan.

That means about now is a good time to really assess that investment.
If you own an HFC network and you haven't exactly maintained the outside plant particularly well, then it might be a really good time to stop doing it. If your OSS  and other business systems are magnificently tuned, with a hard to shift model, then that might be a good argument to stay. I suspect the former is quite true, and the latter not so true in Australia's case. Both add up to a timely move away.

HFC has been a largely failed investment in Australia partly because of the competition aspects when it came into being: many people remember the laughable sight of one crew turning up to install, rapidly followed by the other within days, and so no-one got sufficient footprint to really sustain the business well. Then they competed against each other for content and the studios laughed all the way to the bank as they watched the prices rise. A certain non incumbent telco really suffered and wrote down the investment massively. Once that went, profits were possible!

One of the main reasons for going to a federally funded national broadband network is to get to an optimal competitive platform.
Infrastructure competition has not led to good outcomes nationally.
Our HFC experience is a textbook example.

HFC is a fibre to the node technology. That's what the Hybrid, Fibre and Cable all stand for: FTTN. The current networks are not capable of a fully loaded 90%+ penetration rate delivery to all of the approx 3m homes the combined Telstra (2.5m) and Optus (2.2m) homes pass. This is due to the condition of the cable and the RF plans used to apportion available bandwidth. Upgrades to backhaul etc are easy in this context, but reworking your HFC is not.

Much of that cable also is aerial, all the way to the homes, and a very popular source of Cockatoo entertainment. No-one has been able to get a multi-dwelling unit model working properly within that scheme.

That said, I rather enjoy the service my family gets from it, and all the years I was employed by one of them, testing all the newer broadband delivery options, I always happily went back to the HFC service afterwards.

But no-one was offering me a brand new fibre...

GPON is vastly more reconfigurable than HFC at the physical level, and vastly more upgradeable electronics-wise leading to much better long term capacity and serviceability.

What all sides of politics should have done, imho, was to sort out sensible industry competition, say, about 10yrs+ ago and promoted FTTN transition then, when it would have been a sensible transition technology. What did we have? A less than competitive marketplace, and little mechanism to move across then.

>
> We actually pay cash here to destroy first class telecoms assets!
>

Indeed, asset holders should be paid cash to transition off to more longer term, more optimal platforms as part of a sensible government program. Imagine your house being confiscated to build a highway with no recompense?


regards


Narelle