Just did it, I'm still on copper you know !!!!!!!!! You'll get your replies quicker when we all get onto the NBN
You really think people will use it for other things? I have broadband to my house and I work in IT and I still only use the internet to fnck about on, ie. FerrariChat and Alfa sites. My wife does sometimes buy things on it, but that's about all. Is that really worth the billions? Where I work has only a very small internet presence and I work for a very big insurance company, but like most insurance companies IT is considered a fncken expensive overhead that they really don't want. Thus everything we have is ancient, yes most applications are beyond support age, etc. ... faster broadband will not change their attitude. I didn't explain myself well. I'm happy for my taxes to pay for the fibre down the streets, but not to each house. Users can pay for that thanks. I know damn well that where I live all that it will get used for is Facebook or not used at all. And yes I did not know about copper ageing affects on speed, but again I still think it should be done as a user pays process. Pete
yes Does your boss know that ? I use to log into many different systems around the world using dial up and that was ever so painful, then ADSL turned up, and the world was easier to access as I VPN into a lot of sites via this method and you'd be surprised how many councils for one use this method to give access for IT issues they need fixed. ADSL2 was a moderate improvement as once again the copper attenuation was limiting the max speed I could get, with fibre I will have substantially improved speeds available. I do have one huge bugbear with the telecommunications people getting their act together , the SERVER people need to improve the performance of their machines !! Too often you hop onto a site like Ferrari country selector and find it runs like a pig while other less used sites like www.pornisking.russia run like the wind
Absolutely! Do you really think they won't?? The trouble with that is that you still have to maintain the existing copper network (and the cable TV one) for those who don't opt-in. Alternatively, you have to come up with some kind of media converter for every single premises to replace the existing PSTN and coax cable TV network infrastructure but maintain the "last 20 feet" worth of copper. The expensive bit is all the cable-laying in the streets, with associated rules and regs, closing of lanes or footpaths and so on. The curb-to-house bit is easy, send them a letter and say "this is happening. It's better, so shut up and deal with it" OK, think about that though. Facebook as it is wouldn't have been really workable with dialup, there's too much content on a page. So the existing broadband options have made that a viable application - sure, there's a lot of junk, but people value things like keeping in touch with distant friends and relatives, grandparents can see their grandkids growing up even when they're in another country, blah blah blah. So just that single website has provided a reasonable social benefit. Before you had DSL and you (perhaps) just used the internet for email, would you have said "my kids will never get anything out of DSL, I'll use it for email and that's it"? I'm not claiming to have a list of future uses (I wish I did, because the people that work them out are gonna make an awful lot of money, just like their equivalents today have done), but I'm in no doubt that they'll happen. There are a few obvious ones that already exist but aren't super-practical for a lot of people (especially those miles-from-exchange suckers) - video telephony, on-demand instant TV/movie type content, cloud-based backup, and so on. They'll all be a lot more practical, along with other things that don't really exist yet - telehealth is always a favourite NBN-backer one, but I'm not too convinced by that so far.
Like I said I work from home very rarely. Used to more often at previous places but not any more (kids have grown up and now in high school, etc.). And I hate it. I even only use the internet at work to talk to you guys, etc. Like I said I work for an insurance company. IT is not what they are good at. The system that I manage is designed for the web, but we only have like 20 special users that use it like that. The rest are via Citrix terminals. VMax, Pretty much. I get what you are saying about Facebook and internet speeds enabling that to be what it is today BUT and this is the bit that you and John are missing. Facebook and other applications are not developed in slow old Australia, they are developed in places that already have supposedly faster internet access. Do we see those countries using their internet speed for better things? ... NO is the answer. Yes new developments might come, but the funny thing is, as an IT person all this computer stuff is NOT enhancing our lives. It really isn't. I watch my daughter who has just started at highschool and we had to get her an iPad (a toy IMO) and they do stuff on it but the biggest problem the teachers have is stopping the kids playing games on it during class. In my day we just ignored the teacher, but now they have a really good tool to enhance that ignoring function. She also has the whole "how do I print from this toy" issue because of course we have a PC. This morning she had to print a photo and she apparently could not find it after connecting the two together ... I had to leave for work so didn't have a look. And yes with time she will work these issues out but at the moment I can't see a lot of enhanced learning due to technology going on ... and my daughter is a keen student that tries hard. So what do I see from the bankrupting NBN: not much. I do not believe we are going to see a revolution of applications in Australia. Australia is hardly the place you would attempt to build a new silcon valley ... labour is far too expensive (and lazy) for a start. And like I said we are presently using the applications developed in these faster worlds perfectly well ... if you have broadband like I do. Yes I accept the future maintenance costs will reduce, that I concede is a plus, but as the fibre will be installed the cheapest possible way (but charged at the most expensive) we will have to suffer more ugly cables hanging from our already ugly power poles. What society needs to do is get OFF their computers and go and meet real people. We really don't want to encourage them to live their life second hand, if you like, in cyberspace ... for example: meeting a real person and having a chat is just so much better than anything you can do via these horrid computer things. I've already discussed IT careers with my kids ... and turned them off it. Yeah I get paid well but it is about as interesting as picking fluff out of my belly button. When I was coding it had it's moments but I don't have that lift anymore. I honestly believe the best thing that has ever happened on the internet and because of the computer is the AlfaBB.com site as I'm restoring a 1750GTV. I can list so many negative influences on our lives because of in particular the internet: 1. We are all paranoid about world news now because we know too much, that we honestly don't need to know and worry about. 2. Everybody has become a journalist just because we can post stories so easily. The fact that now 95% of them are complete and utter BS doesn't matter. At least before only 70% were BS 3. We have enhanced the ability for sickos to pry on other people. Yes it used to happen all the time, but what a great tool we have developed for them. 4. Nobody talks anymore ... okay that is an exaggeration, but at work everybody emails everybody because they want the record of the "conversation". This means we occassionally get fnck ups due to miss-understandings. Note I'm talking about people emailing others that are just on the other side of the desk. 5. Children are loosing the ability to research and investigate issues because of course Google will have the answer ... the next generation will not be able to think, they will just use Google to "think" for them. 6. We have made ourselves and our industry so dependent on electricity that we are endanger of significant economic crisis if we should loose it for whatever reason; be it a war, infrastructure disaster, or even being taken over by 'aliens'. Both where I work and where my wife works come to a stand still when we loose the power ... there is nothing we can sensibly do. 7. We are a slave to the computer (and this has happened with the car too). Instead of making computers more useful for us, we are fascinated by what we can achieve with this technology. So much so that we have universities all over the world and many thousands if not millions of people working long hours every day to make a better and faster computer. So much for computers working for us ... nope, we work for the computers. ... and we really need to spend billions on making the internet faster, when it could have been spent on hospitals, REAL children education, medical research, REAL driver education, etc. Pete
Absoluely correct. Australia will never be a technology hub because there is no capital here. I spend a lot of time trying to raise funding for a range of new and established tech ideas - there is no appetite here, there never has been, there never will be. We are a real estate and primary industries economy. The NBN boosters are peddling a delusion. 2nd part is that anyone who needs fast fibre can get it today and has been able to for years, we don't need the NBN for "e-medicine" and other such BS as peddled by Labor. Another furphy. Fiber has connection points, where faults begin. Having had fibre connected to many offices over the years I have experienced regular service faults, as I do with my home coax cable internet service today. But there is an update, I attended a very interesting meeting today, the religion is changing fast in Labor/NBN land, fibre to the home is not so vital any more...
On top of all I have said above. Have you seen the Google server site? Most impressive bit of engineering, but we have all that energy to make all those servers, to power and cool them just so people can search for old Ferrari chassis numbers, for example Even where I work we have a long row of air conditioners cooling our server room, pumping hot air into our carpark. These things are running flat out all day everyday ... and we're just an insurance company. All this energy to enable a faster response and supposedly to save paper (that is a myth as I still see people print emails!). And the really funny thing is an insurance company has to send out paper copies of everything due to outdated legistration, thus we have a large(ish) print room printing away all day long. Now if only we could electronically send the documents ... we could then track them and be sure the customer actually received them. Something that is currently impossible. NBN won't solve that unfortunately. Pete
Correct. We funnel thousands of images between our practices via GWIP lines which are not available to the average punter. More than adequate at the moment. "e-medicine" is a con anyway peddled by the left. It has had an extremely low take up in rural areas and I'm sure it has not improved health outcomes. Anyone who has ever treated a patient knows what you can do remotely is extremely limited. A good clinical examination is the basis for good healthcare
Sure we do - Netflix/Hulu, Carbonite/Mozy/etc, Amazon Prime, Skype/Facetime, Office 365, these are all things that work OK here, but better in the US with cable internet (or the same where DSL is used). They'll be better again with fibre. Some kids will ignore teachers, some won't, some will ignore the bad/boring ones and pay attention to the interesting ones - I don't think that's changed much over the years, and I don't think it'll change much with technology. Probably a bit, but then there's also the potential for the same technology to enhance lessons by making them more interesting for kids. I don't really know the answer here as I don't have kids, but I know I ignored the heck out of a lot of teachers when I was a kid, iPad or no I do agree that the iPad is something of a toy too - a proper computer is better for learning but also potentially not as interesting, so it could go either way I guess. Printers exist now that you can print to directly from an iPad via WiFi, and I assume they'll become more common as needed. I think that issue will go away with time. There are people moving to Kansas City(!) and making moves towards a startup-type culture to take advantage of Google Fiber there. In THEORY, it shouldn't cause more ugly cables hanging from power poles - it should cause the same number at worst, with old copper removed and new fibre installed. Potentially the coax for cable TV could also be removed. In practice, maybe that doesn't happen everywhere, and I agree that should be fixed (or built into contracts that new replaces old, rather than old unpowered cabling being left everywhere). I met my wife via the internet. It's very unlikely I would've met her otherwise, and I simply cannot conceive of a person who could be more perfectly matched to me. For that reason alone, my life has been vastly improved by the existence of these technologies. I think most of these disadvantages are only so if you see them that way. I look at the modern world with ubiquitous connectivity as an amazing, wonderful place - I can listen to any music I want any time and any place I want, I can learn about any place, any person, any event. Google gets me there, but it doesn't make learning irrelevant, it makes it easier and quicker, allowing me to learn more in a given time. Medical research is made more efficient with high-speed connectivity allowing collaboration and sharing of very large amounts of data between universities that are geographically far apart. More business can be conducted remotely rather than having to fly somewhere for a week and leave your family behind. I love the modern, connected world, what it does for me, and what it does for society.
You make many valid points but there needs to be people in society that stop us all running of a cliff with new toys (which in many cases is all this new technology is). IMO this connectivity is not worth more than hospitals, etc. It was a vote grab for the young voters so their Facebook would be faster, nothing more, and they and their children will be paying highly for it. Pete
The snowy mountains scheme was commenced after a thorough cost benefit study. Suppliers were selected by open competitive tender. The financial reporting of the project was overseen by the auditor general and fully disclosed throughout. None, repeat none of those things have happened with the NBN. It beggars belief that an expenditure of taxpayer funds of this magnitude is occurring under a cloak of secrecy, without any disclosure or independent oversight. Why? The obvious answer is that the business case doesn't stack up, Labor found itself with an electorally popular program and couldn't believe their luck, so the NBN had to proceed at any cost. To cite but one example, in 2011, NBN was Oracle's largest new customer worldwide, they paid full price for "the complete Oracle stack". In an industry where stupidity is routine, this scaled new heights of foolishness. The CIO who made that decision is no longer with the NBN, but the deployment continues.
Speaking of telecommunications......................anyone interested in a job? Image Unavailable, Please Login
This highlights this current governments ineptitude and everything they touched was done with the same lack of detail. Just amazing! It would be funny if it was somebody else's money they were spending. I believe the best political situation for this country is to have a Liberal federal government to responsibly control OUR money and for the states to be Labor. This means we can have all the hair brain schemes at State level but they do not have what they think is open or blank cheques to pay for it. But of course they will waste what they do have through immature inability to move their heads out of the idealistic clouds and turn that concept into a practical reality. We will be bankrupt if they are not removed AND worse than that they will have beaten the motivation out of all of us, so like England we won't know or want to pull ourselves back up. We need, desperately, those people that wake up every morning unnaturally motivated and loving the taste of capitalism and dreaming of becoming stinking rich. Those people fire up the rest of us AND are the backbone of OUR success. Currently Labor is deflating even these people ... how can they be so blinkered to not see this? Pete
NBN Co head of products and sales John Simon said that while the company had not started considering the implications of a Coalition government, it would work closely with whichever major party won the election. Read more: Coalition pledges cheaper NBN all round I'm here to tell you that that statement is a flat out lie. They are not only actively reworking their plan, they are relieved that they will escape the obligation to deliver a FTTP network that is proving to be beyond them. The NBN is hopelessly politicised, it is an arm of the Labor spin machine, rather than an independent public-paid-for utility. The simple fact is that Labor's NBN cannot be built for anything like the $37b they claim, because the existing infrastructure (pits, conduits, poles, etc) requires re-engineering on a scale that wasn't realised.
Telcos give cautious support to Coalition broadband plan ^^^^ One of our club members thinks the Coalition's proposal is going to cost more And purely from a technical standpoint FTTP is far supperior to having copper for the last mile. One thing that gets me about ALL govts over the last 40 years is the ineptitude in building a second airport for Sydney !! Surely that is a prime concern of this "infrastructure" driven govt :
And then when Telstra get their monopoly back this is their plan : Telstra pushes the case for users paying for premium network quality - kate mckenzie, throttling, Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN), network, Telstra - Computerworld I have no problem with user pays but this will be a return the bad old days of price gouging, and if I have my elitist hat on I'd say "f*** them if they can't afford fast internet "!!!!!
Surely impossible for it to cost more! But in 99% of the cases perfectly adequate. What we all need to remember is we are not talking about handing out ice creams to our children at a cost of 30 cents each and thus wonderful to be fair and even. We are talking about running cables all over the biggest country in the world. To do this as Labor are doing and starting with the customers who don't actually need it, but give good news coverage, is criminal and just plain stupid. This has to logically be done on a priority basis to be more effective sooner. And we have to also remember that this will never pay for itself as we have already discussed. Australia is not suddenly going to invest in software development, this country has for years shown absolutely no interest in investing in technology. Witness how we were leaders in solar panel technology and these innovators have had to move off shore. I work in IT and my team and many others have just been off shored for application support and development to India. It is millions of times cheaper over there AND India has been investing in growing that industry for many, many years with universities, attracting large consulting companies and the like. Our governments are NOT interested and if they really wanted to get IT going in this country they needed to start 25 years ago ... it's all in India or Manilla, etc already and it is not going to come back because of fibre optic cables. Pete
I heard on the radio yesterday experts expect the cost of NBN to blow out to double it's original cost of $40B!!! They mentioned names and other crap of the experts explaining why, but I didn't pay attention to it as I don't have much interest in the NBN. That dollar figure caught my attention, if it's true.
Ok, so Turnbull only wants to spend $20B for FTTN and then leave the last mile for the aging copper network which costs billions to maintain and is currently done so at the rate of $33/month on your phonebill. He states that if you want FTTP then fork out the $3k+ for the privilege (fine by me, that's how it should be) You may find this hard to believe but they have already done the long runs many years ago and a quick check on the NBN site shows that they seem to be targeting the industrial zones after selecting some politically sensitive areas for feedback (typical of any marketing focused party). This makes perfect sense, if I were planning the rollout the first section I would target would be the industrial business sector, they are the ones that need it most and I wouldn't charge them for the privilege, this is an investment in the business sector. IT is all going to the countries that pay their people peanuts, I'm sure if you and your colleagues drop your asking rate to $20k/yr the business will stay in the country , gunna ????? No, didn't think so, so no need to blame ANY govt for that outcome, Labor or Liberal, it's just an issue of too many people and what the govt is willing to do about it. In India's case they put as many through university as possible, heck the cold calls I get from Indian phone bashers probably has more degrees than me !!! With a glut like that they can afford to pay peanuts for well qualified people, here the situation is different and I am glad I am getting out of the IT industry here as there is no future (financially) for geek motivated people when they are competing on a global basis for the jobs they want. No employer is going to give a high pay to an IT person here that he can get for 1/10th the price from India/Philippines and yet you have the other problem of the high cost of living here which demands decent pay for highly qualified people .... not a nice conundrum to be in. There is no point in either brand of lying govt to invest in software development when you will be beaten to death by the India sweatshops (don't worry that you might develop some ingenious developers here ) I oversaw the removal of DEC's R&D software facility here on the Gold Coast many years ago, one of the better internet software developers. The company just shut the facility down and handed all the source code to India, the developers weren't happy but if they wanted their redundancy payment then they had to comply, and that must have galled them to not only hand over the code but also the pathway for the code which any developer would know is half the battle in getting funding for the idea in the first place. The idea of FTTP for EVERYONE IS crazy to a degree, but the idea of FTTP for business should be top priority. FTTN for residential with high-end users paying for the FTTP makes perfect sense and if you look at the NBN map you will see this is mostly what appears to be happening. Leaving residential to last (apart from the politically motivated residential areas for marketing purposes ) also gives the Libs the option to roll back the costs and offer my above proposal .......... hmmm I better call Malcolm again and tell him I've got a new spin for him
Were you listening to Alan Jones by any chance ? He's never let the truth get in the way of any broadcast that wasn't for money
there are a range of people who have realised that the NBN won't be built for the current publicly disclosed figures. The budget uses cost per connection figures that are not achievable in real life. Sub contractors are walking away because they cannot make a profit on the amounts allocated per task. e.g. NBN allocate $400 per pit to replace footpath pits in Canberra, actual cost is often $800, because the plan didn't consider that most pits have outstanding maintenance backlogs already. Based on actual results so far, it is easy to extrapolate the finished network costing double the forecast. People inside NBN Co. know that they have a major problem with their budget. This has happened because NBN management is stacked with ex-vendor people, rather than telco network engineers. Love them or loathe them, the only company in Australia capable of building such a large telco project is Telstra.
