ex_exile

Oh, ok have you seen the bids? If not wind yer neck in.

You have no idea of the design specifications or the equipment that was submitted. I can tell you from preparing bids of this kind that you try to look into the future and give the customer options because you know that if you don't you can be sure that your competitors will.

Infact I could give you a concrete example of where TELSTRA gave a x10 bump in capacity on a network bid for no extra money.

ABCDiamond

100% agree.

I wonder how many people know they would need to upgrade their computers to get 100Mb anyway. The network cards have a limiting factor too, at least mine does

spalen

Yes I do , I sell a good half a billion dollars of this a year. But thanks for the advice.

IvanM

How old is your computer anyway? Gigabit NICs have been standard for years. More important though is that it means multiple devices have access to good bandwidth. This is much more important for business.

IvanM

School going on NBN - http://www.internode.on.net/news/2010/08/192.php
At over 5kms from an exchange you will not get a quality ADSL service and unlikely to get connected. Lots of new housing estate were built without an exchange and instead had a local RIM put in. In Australia this puts households on a RIM at a theoretical max of 8mbs although the practical bandwidth is likely to be much lower.

Basically ADSL is a copper wire technology that gets worse for the user the further they are from the exchange and the worse their copper is. Telstra have been very slow to roll out ADSL and done their best to block acces to their competitors despite being obliged to by law. This beligerance and the combatitive stance taken by the previous CEO meant government could no longer sit back and through Telstra a rocket. Come on board or we will build a network that will make Telstra irrelevant.

The current situation will not serve Australia's future economic needs.

MartinLuther

So all we need is another 85 peeps to do the same and we have an NBN.

Doesn't sound so bad

spalen

I'd love them to do it. Christmas come early for me. But its a horrific waste of taxpayers money (including mine) for something that will be badly managed. Replacing one inept monopoly for another inept monopoly at my expense is not good value. Id prefer they spent hte money on hospitals or schools than in giving people who chose to live in remote areas of australia super fast broadband and people who live in cities super fast broadband that they have absolutely no need to use right now and will be superceded by wireless tech before the applications exist to use the fibre. Its ridiculous abhorrent and makes me cry into my coffee at the wastage of my tax and the future tax burden i'll suffer to pay for the damned thing.

keel

So Spalen
I'm a bit like Abbot on this as I'm not a Tech head but are saying we should hold off and wait for the tech to mature, or spend a bit now to increase what we have or go the full monty that labour are proposing?

Keel

ex_exile

I very much doubt it.
Because you are making up the technology as you go along and posting things that defy the laws of physics.

So you are uninformed but take a position anyway, have you thought about running for Parliament? The technology is mature it just takes a lot of it to rewire a country the size of Australia and this costs money.

But I realise that ignorance will win out on this board (again) so whatever...

MartinLuther

It'll happen one day and you'll pay one way or the other.

spalen

Im not going to debate what I do for a living with you or who I work for but that is firmly in the ballpark of what I did in the last 12mths.

If you run a tender that specifies a component for a price, and you purchase something that is 10x that capability and its the same price, then you *are* carrying downstream cost without a doubt. Whether its maintenance fees, power consumption in the data center, long term capacity constraints (because you could've saved that 1gb and distributed it amongst 10 people instead of giving it all to one you've now cut your capacity long term by 10).

Face it mate - Gillard probably took what was a fly-away comment from Conroy that "ooh this stuff goes up to 1gb" and made it an election comment. They can never have specified '1gb to every home' with all the back end routing capacity to accomodate it. Your comment that 'technology changes' is ridiculous. Yes it changes - which means 100meg gets cheaper - not 1gb gets 'free'. I stand by my point, which is that if its suddenly 1gb and they didnt spec 1gb in the pricing then they are being robbed blind. OR rather, we are because its our tax that pays for this shennanigans.

*nobody* needs 1gb right now there is no application in the country that can drive 1gb , nor is there the investment to build it. Are we going to be shipping peoples live x-ray pictures to their homes? no... Full high-def videoconferencing? (That only requires 24megabits per second) for 60" video at high def, how about iptv that only requires a paltry amount of bandwidth.

There is nothing on earth right now available for a population en-masse that drives these speeds. There *IS* huge huge huge investment in wireless technology that even now delivers 100meg speeds wirelessly without fixing the infrastructure and its upgradable, its mobile, you can take it with you , you can cover vast swathes of population, you dont have to put new trenches, you dont have to build it into new housing estates, you put up a tower and blanket the country.

My point on this whole project is that it is being bandied around as a 'job creation' - in what segment? a few hundred govt funded IT jobs to run it - I'd prefer they were running hospital IT thanks. and 43b isnt good value for a few hundred jobs. It will *not* make a difference to *the vast amount* of industry if they have fibre to the home, and if you are relying on network for your company then you chose somewhere where it has the resources to support you - in a bsiness park that has fibre already, not in a residential street, and if you are too dumb to make that choice - then you are too dumb to be running a company . Building a water mill that is away from a stream is a folly, and so is opening a company that relies on high bandwidth in an area that doesnt have any.

The simple fact that no company, no investment fund, nobody, will take a punt on this demonstrates its a flawed loss leading proposition. Its junk and we're paying for it.

spalen

Additionally, notes Gartner analyst Phil Redman, LTE shouldn't be compared to WiMAX in its current incarnation. In all likelihood, he says, LTE will be deployed at around the time that WiMAX has upgraded to the 802.16m standard, which is expected to deliver download speeds of 100Mbps for mobile applications. From this perspective, LTE and WiMAX stack up very well against one another, since LTE is also expected to deliver peak download speeds of 100Mbps.

Physics seems to be redefined to meet my supposition that 100mbps is available *today* in wireless.

Deancm_MKII

And for 99% of the population this is all the NBN is about. The ability to download faster.

NBN: nice to have. Do we need it? Do we *****!

My sentiments exactly.

IvanM

Thinking the NBN is about downloading at speed is like thinking Motorways are built for Ferraris to go fast. Ferraris can go fast on a motorway but delivers a lot more for the economy.

Deancm_MKII

Great. Video on demand. Just what we all need...