Burbage

It's 99% about digging holes and laying cables. IT savvy people know nothing about these tasks.

That's if it ever gets off the ground. You have to remember that they're spending the budget of the next three governments as well. It'll be canned as soon as it covers Sydney and Melbourne, if it even gets that far. This isn't about technology, it's about politics.

It's also pointless. Unless you're downloading porn or illegal movies, why do you need higher speeds than you get already? Some businesses will need it, but it's far cheaper to move the businesses to the nodes than it is to have a line running to every corner of the country. People don't need more garbage piped into their homes. They need less, then they might get off their fat arses and stop being a burden on the health system.

Vash the Stampede

They're asking for 49% private investment. Now's the time for any interested corporations to speak up and stake a claim.

And with private money involved, I suspect it will move faster than a regular government plan.

Hutch

So the Internet is the reason that pill-popping fat people are ill or dying of fat-related illnesses in hospitals? Just so we're clear on that point.

And the only use you personally can envision for higher bandwidth connections - to communities who've lacked one thus far - is porn?

Burbage

To your first question: No. It is a contribution that gets bigger every day.

To your second question: I have no idea. What else do you need higher speeds for? More TV channels? Suggestions, please.

The question is who needs higher speeds? Who will pay for it? Advertising? There goes your bandwidth. The government will have to monopolise the thing in order to force people to take it up. If they don't no private investor will touch it.

And remember that Rudd is Mr Internet Censorship. A government controlled network is exactly what he wants.

Wol

It's not easy to make up my mind on this one. If billions are going to be spent - mostly by the taxpayer by all accounts - on broadband/communications infrastructure, it makes sense to put in a system with the highest bandwidth money can buy.

But this begs the question of (a) whether this speed and bandwidth are for the forseable future required for much more than trivial reasons - downloading video for example, and (b) whether new technology - nationwide satellite/wireless for example - might not make it obselete before it gets going.

I certainly won't be paying for huge speeds and download limits, and I suspect I won't be alone by any stretch of the imagination.

Petals

The government had to do this as if they gave to private companies there would be no guarantee they would look after the bush and only the gov will give the people who live in the bush a good deal. We tend to focus on those of us who live in the cities but our rural dwellers are very very important to this country and have to be looked after.

I also believe it will provide a lot of jobs and add ons and I am very very pleased with the initiative and could not care a hoot that I will pay for this its for the good of all of us. Most disappointing if they start messing around with it in the senate.

hoofie2002

Read my post again Vash please - I didn't question the use of fibre specifically. I am talking about all the other interconnection hardware.

What is your opinion of my suggestion of the Conroy's "family friendly" internet coming true ? Do you agree or not ?

Hutch

Medical care to the home for the elderly or ill. The transmission of entire high density medical histories to wherever they're required, instantly. Distributed education and video training. Instant delivery of entertainment (movies, music etc). The mass-enablement of teleworking, particularly for people in less built up areas. Huge benefits to the police, fire brigade, SES and armed forces in terms of the transmission of unprecedented volumes of data or video/voice traffic. The transformation of e-commerce. Etc etc.

The network in this country - and indeed many others - is just about at capacity. And yet bandwidth requirements double every year. From here on in, your access to the Internet, whether that's the World-Wide Web, VoiP or email will only get slower. And this is not a problem that's unique to Australia - every country with Internet access is facing the same issues.

The network that is being built is an open network meaning that anyone can have access to it - rather than the old gatekeeper - Telstra - who got a cut at every stage from the exchange to the home. That's right - open. At the moment there is very little real competition amongst ISPs because of Telstra's strangehold. All ISPs and telcos will have the same access to this network and so they will be forced to compete on features and on price. It's no different to the government building a road network and allowing haulage companies to use it to sell goods and services.

The government will not 'control' the network any more than they 'control' movement on the road system. Sure - they could legislate to tell ISPs to track what we're downloading and viewing - but that's a totally different thing and something that may or may not happen in the future whether this fibre network happens or not. You think this is just some faster broadband network, but it's not - broadband is just one of many services that will eventually be delivered over the fibre.

If you can envisage a means of data transfer that works faster than the speed of light (fibre is the transmission of data by light) then I'd love to hear it. At the moment, the capacity of a fibre network is limited only by the boxes at either end. Current cost-effective speeds over fibre are in the 100Mbit range, which would enable a movie company (for instance) to deliver a DVD grade film to your set-top box/computer in about 10 seconds. Gigabit will then take over (you can already buy gigabit switches and routers in OfficeWorks) and then transmission will be near-instant.

This network will place Australia at the forefront of the world. No other country will have anything nearly as sophisticated as it. Everywhere else there is the piecemeal upgrade of networks to fibre - always in cities - and always under the control of private companies. What is being put in place is a long term investment in this country's infrastructure, just like the Snowy River project, the national road network or indeed the recent changes to control of water in the Murray/Darling river system. Sometimes government has to step in for the betterment of society as a whole and in such instances it cannot be just about the economics benefits - one way or another - that it brings.

I don't know. I find the objections hilarious. I imagine people were saying similar things when electricity came along. "Electricity? It'll never catch on. What possible use is there for that? My gas lamps work perfectly well thankyou very much!"

Hutch

They can only work with what's economically viable at the moment. Are you seriously suggesting that a 100Mbit node-to-the-door national network will not be good enough?

Thankfully - that ridiculous bill is dead in the water - even the idiot minister that championed it is distancing himself from it.

Swerv-o

The death of that particular bill/idea is certainly no bad thing. I only hope that they are not going to attempt to resurrect it by claiming that with the new, faster network, the filtering process won't have the same negative impact on speeds that it would have done on the current network.

I'm pretty supportive of this new plan, though do have some reservations, such as where the money to pay for it is going to come from. Rightly or wrongly, the government has borrowed heavily to fund the stimulus package payments. This will no doubt end up being paid for by us in the form of higher future taxes. I think I would have preferred to forgo the stimulus payments in favour of a big infrastructure project like this that has real benefit. Instead, it seems as though the government has gone spend crazy, and is just plunging the country further and further into debt...


S

Hutch

I agree with all your points.

Burbage

All those thing can already be done Hutch, it just requires good managers, not a high speed broadband system. Evemn with a high speed boradband system it will still need good managers.

Instant delivery of entertainment is already available via television and radio. And if you are talking abotu TV on demand then most of it will come from abroad where they don't have fibre, so the speed won't increase until they do. As well as that, even in a fibre world the download rate will be limited.

I lived in Singapore where a lot of the condos had pay per view video on demand in the early noughties. No one used it. Too expensive.

A node to node fibre network makes sense. A doorstep to doorstep network is madness. the money would be better spent laying a fibre fat pipe to the USA and one to Eastern Europe. That's where most of the piracy and porn download servers are anyway.

This is not about the difference beteen gas and electricity, it's more analagous to the difference between 240V or 110V.

Hutch

Sorry - don't understand what you mean by managers.

Okay - to avoid splitting hairs - I was not referring to broadcast entertainment. Broadcast television and radio is the current model and it belongs to my parents generation, not mine.

Yes, I'm talking about TV, radio or music on demand - why do you think this will come from abroad? The original TV show or film will almost certainly have been made abroad (apart from the news and Neighbours, natch), but the show or film will be transferred via terabyte pipe from the states, UK or India and peered here at one of the recently upgraded hubs, from where it'll be transmitted at 100Mb/s to yours and mine home. And even if it the file/data in question physically resides on a server on another continent, why would that necessarily be slow? You can't compare the current model with the forthcoming one.

If it's too expensive and nobody uses it - it'll die - that's the nature of commerce. But the fact is that all companies will be able to lease bandwidth on the open fibre network and so the playing field will be level. The doorway to competition is clearly open. I suspect the on-demand you had in your Singapore condo was supplied by the same company that served up your cable TV and it was expensive because they owned the cable and therefore the monopoly.

Why is it madness? Was it madness to string copper wires between houses? Imagine if the early phone companies had said - "No no no - we'll just stick with the old model - telegraphs and messenger boys - why change?"

And again with the porn thing. I was watching a downloaded episode of Q.I. the other night (on the BBC iPlayer - TV on-demand - very foward thinking, the BBC). And Stephen Fry mentioned that it was recently calculated that less than 1% of Internet traffic is attributable to pornography. The vast majority of Internet traffic is swallowed up by spam emails - if the governments of the world wanted to legislate against that, I don't think anyone would complain.

Totally disagree. It's fundamentally different. You keep focusing purely on the broadband side of it, when the reality is that the World-Wide Web etc will be only one small part of the services that can be sent down the wire. All countries will inevitably move to fibre optic - the process is underway - some countries are further ahead than others. Putting Australia at the forefront of this new era will mean that Australian companies can develop the services and software to deploy around the world when *they* get their acts together.

Burbage

Well, we'll see. I can't see it getting off the ground.

Managers who can ensure that all information is where it should be ahead of time. Then there is no need for instant Internet transfer. The only real need for instant tranfer is with live data. The police could roll out their Big Brother plans. But of course, the problem with data is not getting it from one computer to another, it's with getting it from a computer into a person's head so that a decision can be made. Libraries are full of data that no living person has ever read. The bottleneck in the transfer of information is in the porcessing of the information, not the transfer of it. For example, you might be able to download a two hour movie in ten seconds, but it will still take you two hours to watch it. in effect if you are organised it doesn't matter whether it takes ten seconds or two hours to download a movie.

Vash the Stampede

Such as? We've only just reached the stage at which megabit modems & routers are commercially available.

I think it's too early to call. I can't see the private investors being happy about a draconian filter on a national broadband network that's supposed to be making money, so I expect them to resist it vigorously. **Edit** Just seen Hutch's post; apparently the bill is dead in the water? Fantastic news!

The numbers look good, at least. Less than $5 billion from the government, and the rest from the private sector. Not much to worry about for us taxpayers.