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

[Mark Delany]

> I do like the idea proposed by Simon that in a lot of the cases the NBN gear
> wouldn't be required and could be replaced by just the RSP router.

I see at least three problems with this idea.

Firstly, it's unclear that RSP routers would be a substantially
cheaper.

Secondly, it's not clear whether these routers would also need custom
s/w or h/w to connect into the NBN network. Thus competitive suppliers
might be in, ahem, short supply.

But most importantly, uniformity of product while rolling out to
millions of naive customers (and technicians), at least for the first
million or two has a lot of value to it. A lot of folk are still
grumbling over various DSL routers and those manufacturers have been
doing it for a decade now.

Surely many remember the early days of DSL and dialup modems?
Everyone had their favorites and each month was different. It wasn't
pretty.

The trade-off you have to make is, is the (IMO) marginal reduction in
end-user equipment costs worth the increased cost of complexity and
frustration and bad press and error rate of first-roll installation
technicians.

We all make these tradeoffs in our respective businesses on a daily
basis. How many try and stick to the same router supplier or
programming language or operating system even if the incremental cost
of choosing an alternative might be cheaper?

As others have observed, NBNCo is starting to relax the requirements
already and it's entirely likely that they will do yet more as the
market matures, but I'd say that cookie-cutter wins the day at this
early stage of the game.

If you accept the cookie-cutter proposition, then the only question is
whether they've picked the right cookie.

On that front, it's hard to argue against the political need for PSTN
emulation and battery backup - especially given the paroxysm some folk
go into about the risks of Aunt Ethel's Life Alert and the backlash
over people having to spend $20 to upgrade their analogue phone.

As technicians we might have special-cased Aunt Ethel and
cookie-cuttered the rest, but as politicians and mass-deployers, a
one-size fits all has a lot of appeal in the early years.

If you've read this far, the final irony is that a lot of RSPs have
cookie-cutter modem offerings too. So they are doing exactly what
NBNCo does, just on a smaller scale.


Mark.