[AusNOG] Gosford City Council and NBN RSP.

[Mark Newton]

> On 30 May 2014, at 1:05, Paul Brooks <pbrooks-ausnog at layer10.com.au> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

No: you've been around for long enough to have seen lots of people make precisely that argument, particularly in relation to non-internet type services (eg the power utilities' smart metering silliness several years ago)

> The argument for multiple ports is to prevent the end-users house being captured by a single ISP.

Why do you need multiple ports for that, rather than (say) regulating the behavior of the ISPs to prevent capture?

The reason changing ISPs today can be so painful is because there's no SLA on churning. So... Make one.

(It's a problem that'll need to be solved anyway, given the lack of multiport NTUs in the MTM)

> 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.

It totally does imply that:  the backend services the application requires may only be visible through the appljcation's port!

> 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.

At $20 per megabit, the application owner will be imposing their own separate pitiful data quota :)

> 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.

Seems like using a cannon to crack a nut.  Legislate an SLA, impose targets. That's a sensible reaction to a track record of failure from market participants to deliver required outcomes, isn't it ?

>> 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.

That has _always_ been what has been proposed: that the NBN would spur the development of new services that would be impossible without it.  As if going from 24 Mbps maximum on ADSL to 25 Mbps on sat/WiMAX was going to revolutionize the country.

The rhetoric was always divorced from reality (we spoke about this in the bar during AusCERT in 2011). It's even more divorced from reality now that the ALP's project is dead but a lot of the rhetoric hasn't changed.

It's as if there's a segment of people out there with no plan B, so they're sticking to plan A.

   - mark