[AusNOG] Gosford City Council and NBN RSP.

[Paul Brooks]

Mark - its fine to question rah-rah about the NBN, but theres a bit of
wooly-headedness and over simplification in your thinking as well. Oversimplifying
something that smacks of entrenching a position for ISPs needs to be questioned, even
on a list of ISPs.

On 29/05/2014 6:49 PM, Mark Newton wrote:
>
> Let's say Australia rolled out a network that had multiple VCs delivered on multiple UNI ports on a complicated NTU.  And let's say Australian companies started designing services which depended on that infrastructure (e.g., medical monitoring which connected to a dedicated medical monitoring port)

Nobody said anything about such services _depending_ on that architecture, to the
extent they wouldn't work if the multiple-port architecture wasn't there. You've added
a strawman that just wasn't there, just so you could argue against it.

The argument for multiple ports is to prevent the end-users house being captured by a
single ISP. Each port can be used by a different ISP (or some other non-ISP body -
like, say, a local council) and bypass the first one - but that does not imply that an
application using a different port wouldn't work just as well through the first port
IFF the first ISP was designed or operated right, or had the right commercial model.

The reason for using a different port and bypassing the first ISP might be commercial,
more than technical - perhaps the application owner doesn't want to chew up the
end-users pitiful data quota from their normal ISP. Maybe the application could work
through any ISP - but can't work if the end-user data-caps themselves and gets
themselves throttled. Maybe its technical - perhaps the application owner really needs
QoS support or IPv6 support or something that _is_ available in other markets on
conventional ISPs, but our ISPs in general (with exceptions) are too lazy to provide -
and the application owner doesn't want to go through the hassle of convincing the
homeowner to change ISPs.

At the very least, multiple ports makes it dead simple to switch from one ISP to
another, without incurring any dead-time in the middle, and without being captive to
the losing ISP delaying doing whatever they need to do to free up a single physical
port so the second one can then connect to it. The history of pain and failure in
switching ISPs over a single-provider bottleneck copper line has taught us that
removing the impediments to churn is a good thing - but I can understand why a largish
ISP might not find it so appealing.

> Australia, as the only country going down the road of delivering residential
> services under that model, would be a captive market:

I call Strawman, Mark - great argument, if that was what was proposed - but it wasn't.

Paul.