: :Here is an interesting article that has picked up 485 reader responses already: : :Do we even need a fibre National Broadband Network? :=================================================== : :The following post is by Sean Kaye, a senior Australian IT executive. It first appeared on his personal blog, Sean on :IT, and is re-published here with his permission. Kaye also blogs at Startups Down Under. : :opinion As someone who is very pro-technology and likes to be on the cutting edge, I find myself staring at many of my :colleagues and acquaintances in the industry with disbelief when the topic of the National Broadband Network comes up. :People I know (and some who just email or tweet me) ask if I?ve bumped my head and forgotten what I do for a living. It :even has had me re-thinking my views, but ultimately I keep coming to the same place. : :Here?s what I think ? : :First of all, $43 billion is a ridiculous sum of money to spend on anything. It is even crazier when the country finds :itself coming off a $22 billion surplus and staring down the barrel of $100 billion of debt. I don?t think this is at :all right now about need, but is entirely about our ability to cover the cost of such a thing. : :The full story and responses at the following URL: :
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: :Cheers Don...
I haven't bothered to read al lthe various links referred to in this thread. I see it in rather simple terms as follows.
Putting fibre into every home is akin to putting a 6" diameter water main into every home. There is no way in the world a home could use the capacity of either a 6" waer pipe, and similarly so for fibre. "That's ok", you might say, "you don't need to pay for the full bandwidth capability of the fibre, just pay for what you reckon you need." Sure, but that is still like having a 6" water pipe but with a stop c*ck to regulate the amount of water you can pull out at any given rate.
There is simply no way that 99% of households can justify needing 100Mbps let alone 1Gbps. The only places which would justify fibre to the premises (dare I say for the next 10 years or so) are businesses, educational/research and the medical facilities. For the majority of households a guaranteed 20Mbps would be more than adequate and this could easily be provided using a FTTN solution which would cost around half as much as the FTTH. So, to my mind, fibre to the home is largely a waste of money. I think the best solution currently would be fibre to the node with the last 300m in copper. Perhaps later down the track FTTH would be justified and then it would be even cheaper to connect individual homes.
The problem is that both political parties who are capable of forming government have got themselves into a major bind because Telstra owns the existing copper network and neither one wants to allow Telstra to own any part of the infrastructure associated with a terestrial NBN, no matter what solution is used. A FTTN NBN would mean that Telstra's competitors would have to install their own fibre nodes (or pay Telstra to lease spare capacity on theirs), and then also rely upon Telstra copper for the last 300m, and that is a big no-no as far as they, and the libs and labor are concerned. That is the real reason we have this FTTH NBN proposal in the first place - it is pure pig-headedness on the part of the government of the day (whichever) which has put the nation where we are today with regard to a modern NBN.
It is possible that if labor gets in again and pays Telstra $11B for their ducts as they say they will, they could then change their minds and go for a FTTN solution, but somehow I can't see that happening.