[AusNOG] Simon Hackett's presentation from Comms Day yesterday - NBN fibre on copper prices

[Ben]

On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 12:41:03PM +1000, Jake Anderson wrote:
> I'd really like to see how funding changes if NBNco charge a fixed
> price per port regardless of speed, and ditched the CVC charge.
> CVC is going to be the biggest thing killing off value added
> services for RSP's I think, different flavours of unmetered content
> and the like.
> 
> The issue is probably that the "cheapest" plans would get moderately
> more expensive and everybody would whine.

If you have a difference in pricing going up for cheapest plans that would
be because the basic service cost has gone up, and would only happen if
the more expensive plans are subsidising the cheaper plans.

The biggest reason against I imagine is backhaul bandwidth, but that should
be improving over time, and so a charge for backhaul bandwidth that resembles
local bandwidth congestion makes a lot of sense.

That said, charging $20/megabit for bandwidth is ludicrious.  And generally
speaking the more bandwidth use there is the cheaper it gets.  And so in some
ways even something like charging for bandwidth utilisation in an area makes
sense, as well as for any backhaul to connected PoP.

So then you may have situations like CBD sites paying $0.10/megabit, urban
$0.20/megabit and rural $0.30/megabit.  Then $0.50/megabit for the interconnection
point which may include an element of all 3.

Then rural users can be limited to slower plans, and business users are likely to
use more traffic during the daytime, and urban at night, but will both go to the
same interconnection point.

Then when an upgrade is needed for an urban location because they're congesting their
local segment, then the cost per megabit should come down as the point is upgraded as
obviously they enjoy their bandwidth, and as the investment already needs to be made
in upgrading bandwidth, then there will be lots of slack bandwidth.  Ditto applies to
rural areas, as their usage goes up, and points are upgraded, (it takes a while for
the majority of users to make use of newer more bandwidth heavy applications that
weren't usable prior) the price per megabit drops.  

Ben.