5 ms·

National Broadband Network CEO says Australians don't want super-fast broadband

60 points by prawn 10y ago

flukus 10y ago
Context for international readers: The original plan was to roll out fiber to each house to for 90% of the country, despite the large size of the country and low population we are very urban so this was doable. Then the other party had to differentiate themselves and promised brand new copper for a about 2/3rds the price (know looking to cost a lot more). So the debate isn't so much do we need fantastic fiber connections to every house, it's should we spend a bit more to get a more future proof result.
voycey 10y ago
Sure - who doesn't love 1mb/s down and 256kish up? I'm in the process of moving apartment and I am living in the Melbourne CBD and it's fringe and I would say at least 60-70% of the apartments are still ADSL only! I can't do my job on infrastructure like that!
- voycey 10y ago
  Actually maybe that's why I got a permanent visa over here, I'm British and I DO want fast internet, so I can... you know... be efficient!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ClassyJacket 10y ago
This guy was specifically installed to hold back the project as much as possible for the sake of partisan politics and making profit. He's well aware that he's installing a useless network, that's his job. They're actually actively installing slower connections than people had before, and spending around 2300$ per house to do so. And the technology they're using has no capability to be upgraded. At all. Ever. Labor wanted fibre, so the Liberal Party wanted copper. The current plan is to waste the entire NBN budget so that even if the other government gets back in power, they still can't give us good connections. There is no excuse for deploying fibre-to-the-node in 2007, let alone 2017. It's a deliberate, political move. Jobs, education, small businesses, science, research, film, art -- all of these will sadly be held back in Australia for at least a decade while we wait for decent internet. Thanks for destroying our future, Turnbull. But at least a few Telstra shareholders got a bigger mansion.
- Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
  I felt like the up-vote just wasn't enough. Well said!
- helthanatos 10y ago
  Man. Looks a lot like America... Spending money just to waste money AND to hurt your citizens.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    Indeed, I seem to recall a massive subsidy given to American telcos in the 1990s to deliver fiber to the consumer (we all know how that turned out).
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  To be fair VDSL is good enough for a single household to run a 4K stream or two and other activities provided you actually get the whole 55Mb downstream and not the BS "up to" line the telcos like to use for their craptastic DSL offerings. 100Mb+ isn't really a necessity for most people.
  - sumedh 10y ago
    > 100Mb+ isn't really a necessity for most people. Maybe today, what about the future.
  - hiisukun 10y ago
    Could you imagine telling someone that moves a lot of files around their computer, or compiles large projects regularly, that they don't need a faster HDD/SSD? Would you tell someone who renders 3d movies for their job or hobby that they don't need a faster CPU/CPU? Telling people who regularly pull (and upload!) docker containers, software packages, or meaningful work data like pictures, videos or backups that they don't need to have time shaved off their activities is equally strange. A decade ago we had to 'imagine' what quality internet we might need in 2017. But now it is 2017.
  - 10y ago
kirrent 10y ago
As always, get the story through Google to bypass the paywall. https://www.google.com.au/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=Y0adWIbZCI_Y8AfT5LZ4#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.couriermail.com.au%2Ftechnology%2Fnbn-ceo-says-australians-do-not-want-superfast-broadband-speeds%2Fnews-story%2F822bc8b57836bc8dc80cc9bd285d56d5 https://www.google.com.au/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=Y0adWIbZCI_Y8AfT5LZ4...
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Or use archive.is and avoid google tracking: http://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/nbn-ceo-says-australians-do-not-want-superfast-broadband-speeds/news-story/822bc8b57836bc8dc80cc9bd285d56d5 http://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/nbn-ceo-says-austra...
- jlardinois 10y ago
  That's what the "web" link at the top of every thread is for.
  - kirrent 10y ago
    You learn something new every day.
tlow 10y ago
Sure. You can survive without high speed internet. This website is fantastic for me because I do not have a high speed connection. Australia would do itself a disservice to write off the impressive power of connectivity high speed always on connections provide. As a side note, a friend from several years ago attended University of Queensland, and at that time they implemented a program to provide only extremely limited volume of bandwidth to students which made geographically distributed collaboration much more difficlt.
- TRManderson 10y ago
  Current UQ student here. They currently provide 40GB a month. If that's not enough, you're probably torrenting.
  - dpark 10y ago
    You cannot be serious. I use ~120GB a month and I don't consider myself a heavy user. I don't torrent. I do watch Netflix. Edit: 40GB a month works out to one hour a day at 3.2Mbps. I have a 100Mbps connection. If I used half its capacity for only an hour a day, I'd consume about 630GB/month.
  - jordsta 10y ago
    The year after I finished at Griffith, they implemented a 'Unlimited free internet downloads during off-peak hours' policy. Just reading up on it though, it's not as good value as I first thought: the first 5GB are full-speed, then thereafter you're capped to 64kbps off-peak for the rest of the calendar month.
  - tlow 10y ago
    This was UQ Ipswitch (at that time that's where the IxD program was, no?) ? And this was 2009. I think they had a maybe 200 MB/mo. At the same time at Stanford, I was using about 50 TB/mo. Edit: update: I was one of the largest bandwidth users, they sent me a letter every month. No I will not go into detail.
    - 10y ago
qzervaas 10y ago
For those who are unaware, NBN stands for National Broadband Network, the Government-funded project to bring "high speed" Internet to all of Australia, both urban and rural. This article is about comments the CEO of the NBN company made yesterday.
ctphipps 10y ago
Can't agree with this sentiment more. I've been involved directly in two separate decisions over the last 5 years where US companies decided not to invest in product and operations launches Australia specifically because of the cost of bandwidth to residential users. This is not just about home users wanting to streaming movies, Australia is losing jobs because of this short-sighted, political farce over the NBN. The clincher is that my mother, who lives in the nation's capital, has only two options for Internet connectivity at her home, both are ADSL1, neither offers downlink speeds in excess of 8Mbps and uplink is capped at 256kbps, with actual speeds more like 2Mbps down/128kbps up. Why? Because Telstra, the national telco decided to implement micro-exchanges in the form of roadside cabinets (RIMs) in the 1990s, thus locking out all other players from offering ADSL access, and themselves from being upgraded to ASDL2/2+. Almost 30 years later, these RIMs are still a key part of their landline infrastructure and due to lack of competition and the delays in the NBN, they're able to charge the poor customers that are connected to them top dollar (~AUD$70/month) for third world Internet speeds.
- kid0m4n 10y ago
  At my third world home, I get a 125 Mbps fiber to home connection for around USD 74 per month.
- nikcub 10y ago
  > I've been involved directly in two separate decisions over the last 5 years where US companies decided not to invest in product and operations launches Australia specifically because of the cost of bandwidth to residential users Cost of bandwidth and last mile network are completely unrelated. Australian bandwidth is the most expensive in the world because it is poorly peered mostly one-way expensive transit. You could install gigabit to every home tomorrow and you'd still have 100GB download caps because an international link is $25/Mbps+ I find a lot of people confuse these issues, which is unfortunate because all of this NBN energy directed towards the price of Australian bandwidth could actually fix something tangible.
  - ctphipps 10y ago
    I'd take good domestic bandwidth as a good (albeit primitive) first start. Overseas bandwidth/peering can be a commercial next step - if the last mile and domestic bandwidth is the bottleneck then there's no catalyst to kick-start international connectivity negotiations. Let me run a stable FaceTime chat from Canberra to Sydney. Then let's worry about Canberra to Los Angeles...
mrmondo 10y ago
I remember moving from New Zealand where I'd had 100-200Mbit/s fibre for several years to Australia in 2012, when I arrived I moved into a brand new apartment in the first suburb to get fibre to the home, turns out it wasn't to all homes... and I was stuck with 2Mbit/s, which is what i had when I started high school in NZ many many years ago. 2017 is here now and I literally spent over an hour today trying to help someone figure out how to get better than her 2.5Mbit/s ADSL to her house which is not at all far from the CBD, turns out there's nothing she can do. Up until recently I was paying for 3x ADSL lines all set to annex-M and peered together using PFSense because all you can get in most of the cities is 100~ year old copper that's falling apart thanks to the hard right governments that are anti-technology and often anti-education from what I can tell. Recently I gave up on my three links and managed to get a point-to-point 5ghz wireless link from a beam off the top of my roof to a large building in line of sight which is better but obviously won't scale well.
- pmyjavec 10y ago
  This is really funny (sadly) and too true! If having a decent internet connection is even a slight prirority for someone in Australia, then it's really important to investigate what the internet is like before signing any papers! If you end up in a bad area, there isn't much that can be done about it apparently. I know people who have spent literally years trying to get an issue resolved.
- ianhowson 10y ago
  You live in Rhodes, right?
  - mrmondo 10y ago
    I'm sorry I don't understand? I haven't heard of Rhodes before.
    - ianhowson 10y ago
      Ah, sorry, poor guess on my part. Rhodes is a new super-high-density suburb in Sydney. There is zero new telco infrastructure and 45,000 residents. The nearest exchange is in Concord, about 5km away. So one or two buildings have NBN, a few buildings have (overpriced) internal fibre, but the vast majority have sub-2Mbps DSL. There were a few companies putting in fixed 4G links cos, y'know, 2Mbps barely qualifies for email and web browsing these days. I lived there a few years ago; perhaps the situation is better now.
Arcaire 10y ago
There's a six-hour old reddit thread[0] on this article with comments from (mostly) Australians in /r/australia, for the interested. It may provide additional context and opinions, although I'm sure you can imagine what the overwhelming opinion is going to be. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/5t3arf/nbn_ceo_says_australians_do_not_want_superfast/ https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/5t3arf/nbn_ceo_s...
prawn 10y ago
Had a mild argument with a friend before the "NBN election". He thought that our internet was just fine. He could read news sites and so on. I argued that, before long, we'd be streaming video as a matter of course, and it would be high definition. More people would be working remotely or storing information online. I remembered this the other day. The kids were watching Netflix, my wife was watching Stan (another streaming service) and I was live streaming sport. We almost never switch on regular TV. Without NBN in our area for years yet, this makes for a lot of buffering and quality degradation. And if anyone needs to be working, the streaming generally stops. At work, my docs, time tracker, email, backups and so on are all in the cloud. Multiply that by every person in the office. As a nation, we can't compete on manufacturing. We should be making sure our infrastructure for online services (education, entertainment, etc) is exceptional.
- vacri 10y ago
  Do you remember the "No household would really use more than two HD streams. That's enough" comment, made at a time when 4k monitors already existed? Fun times.
shmerl 10y ago
Yeah, yeah. Telegraph should be good enough too. It's the pinnacle of innovation after all. Or may be this guy should just stick to the pigeon post.
andrewstuart 10y ago
This would be a Murdoch newspaper?
esie 10y ago
asdf
qzervaas 10y ago
One thing that the US-based HN crowd do well is mobilise in order to contact their local politicians. Australians aren't so inclined generally. In case you are though, you can contact Prime Minister Turnbull through this form: https://www.pm.gov.au/contact-your-pm https://www.pm.gov.au/contact-your-pm

60 points by prawn 10y ago

Context for international readers: The original plan was to roll out fiber to each house to for 90% of the country, despite the large size of the country and low population we are very urban so this was doable. Then the other party had to differentiate themselves and promised brand new copper for a about 2/3rds the price (know looking to cost a lot more). So the debate isn't so much do we need fantastic fiber connections to every house, it's should we spend a bit more to get a more future proof result.

voycey 10y ago

Sure - who doesn't love 1mb/s down and 256kish up? I'm in the process of moving apartment and I am living in the Melbourne CBD and it's fringe and I would say at least 60-70% of the apartments are still ADSL only! I can't do my job on infrastructure like that!

voycey 10y ago
Actually maybe that's why I got a permanent visa over here, I'm British and I DO want fast internet, so I can... you know... be efficient!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ClassyJacket 10y ago

This guy was specifically installed to hold back the project as much as possible for the sake of partisan politics and making profit. He's well aware that he's installing a useless network, that's his job. They're actually actively installing slower connections than people had before, and spending around 2300$ per house to do so. And the technology they're using has no capability to be upgraded. At all. Ever. Labor wanted fibre, so the Liberal Party wanted copper. The current plan is to waste the entire NBN budget so that even if the other government gets back in power, they still can't give us good connections. There is no excuse for deploying fibre-to-the-node in 2007, let alone 2017. It's a deliberate, political move. Jobs, education, small businesses, science, research, film, art -- all of these will sadly be held back in Australia for at least a decade while we wait for decent internet. Thanks for destroying our future, Turnbull. But at least a few Telstra shareholders got a bigger mansion.

Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
I felt like the up-vote just wasn't enough. Well said!
helthanatos 10y ago
Man. Looks a lot like America... Spending money just to waste money AND to hurt your citizens.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  Indeed, I seem to recall a massive subsidy given to American telcos in the 1990s to deliver fiber to the consumer (we all know how that turned out).
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
To be fair VDSL is good enough for a single household to run a 4K stream or two and other activities provided you actually get the whole 55Mb downstream and not the BS "up to" line the telcos like to use for their craptastic DSL offerings. 100Mb+ isn't really a necessity for most people.
- sumedh 10y ago
  > 100Mb+ isn't really a necessity for most people. Maybe today, what about the future.
- hiisukun 10y ago
  Could you imagine telling someone that moves a lot of files around their computer, or compiles large projects regularly, that they don't need a faster HDD/SSD? Would you tell someone who renders 3d movies for their job or hobby that they don't need a faster CPU/CPU? Telling people who regularly pull (and upload!) docker containers, software packages, or meaningful work data like pictures, videos or backups that they don't need to have time shaved off their activities is equally strange. A decade ago we had to 'imagine' what quality internet we might need in 2017. But now it is 2017.
- 10y ago

kirrent 10y ago

As always, get the story through Google to bypass the paywall. https://www.google.com.au/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=Y0adWIbZCI_Y8AfT5LZ4#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.couriermail.com.au%2Ftechnology%2Fnbn-ceo-says-australians-do-not-want-superfast-broadband-speeds%2Fnews-story%2F822bc8b57836bc8dc80cc9bd285d56d5 https://www.google.com.au/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=Y0adWIbZCI_Y8AfT5LZ4...

djsumdog 10y ago
Or use archive.is and avoid google tracking: http://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/nbn-ceo-says-australians-do-not-want-superfast-broadband-speeds/news-story/822bc8b57836bc8dc80cc9bd285d56d5 http://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/nbn-ceo-says-austra...
jlardinois 10y ago
That's what the "web" link at the top of every thread is for.
- kirrent 10y ago
  You learn something new every day.

tlow 10y ago

Sure. You can survive without high speed internet. This website is fantastic for me because I do not have a high speed connection. Australia would do itself a disservice to write off the impressive power of connectivity high speed always on connections provide. As a side note, a friend from several years ago attended University of Queensland, and at that time they implemented a program to provide only extremely limited volume of bandwidth to students which made geographically distributed collaboration much more difficlt.

TRManderson 10y ago
Current UQ student here. They currently provide 40GB a month. If that's not enough, you're probably torrenting.
- dpark 10y ago
  You cannot be serious. I use ~120GB a month and I don't consider myself a heavy user. I don't torrent. I do watch Netflix. Edit: 40GB a month works out to one hour a day at 3.2Mbps. I have a 100Mbps connection. If I used half its capacity for only an hour a day, I'd consume about 630GB/month.
- jordsta 10y ago
  The year after I finished at Griffith, they implemented a 'Unlimited free internet downloads during off-peak hours' policy. Just reading up on it though, it's not as good value as I first thought: the first 5GB are full-speed, then thereafter you're capped to 64kbps off-peak for the rest of the calendar month.
- tlow 10y ago
  This was UQ Ipswitch (at that time that's where the IxD program was, no?) ? And this was 2009. I think they had a maybe 200 MB/mo. At the same time at Stanford, I was using about 50 TB/mo. Edit: update: I was one of the largest bandwidth users, they sent me a letter every month. No I will not go into detail.
  - 10y ago

qzervaas 10y ago

For those who are unaware, NBN stands for National Broadband Network, the Government-funded project to bring "high speed" Internet to all of Australia, both urban and rural. This article is about comments the CEO of the NBN company made yesterday.

ctphipps 10y ago

Can't agree with this sentiment more. I've been involved directly in two separate decisions over the last 5 years where US companies decided not to invest in product and operations launches Australia specifically because of the cost of bandwidth to residential users. This is not just about home users wanting to streaming movies, Australia is losing jobs because of this short-sighted, political farce over the NBN. The clincher is that my mother, who lives in the nation's capital, has only two options for Internet connectivity at her home, both are ADSL1, neither offers downlink speeds in excess of 8Mbps and uplink is capped at 256kbps, with actual speeds more like 2Mbps down/128kbps up. Why? Because Telstra, the national telco decided to implement micro-exchanges in the form of roadside cabinets (RIMs) in the 1990s, thus locking out all other players from offering ADSL access, and themselves from being upgraded to ASDL2/2+. Almost 30 years later, these RIMs are still a key part of their landline infrastructure and due to lack of competition and the delays in the NBN, they're able to charge the poor customers that are connected to them top dollar (~AUD$70/month) for third world Internet speeds.

kid0m4n 10y ago
At my third world home, I get a 125 Mbps fiber to home connection for around USD 74 per month.
nikcub 10y ago
> I've been involved directly in two separate decisions over the last 5 years where US companies decided not to invest in product and operations launches Australia specifically because of the cost of bandwidth to residential users Cost of bandwidth and last mile network are completely unrelated. Australian bandwidth is the most expensive in the world because it is poorly peered mostly one-way expensive transit. You could install gigabit to every home tomorrow and you'd still have 100GB download caps because an international link is $25/Mbps+ I find a lot of people confuse these issues, which is unfortunate because all of this NBN energy directed towards the price of Australian bandwidth could actually fix something tangible.
- ctphipps 10y ago
  I'd take good domestic bandwidth as a good (albeit primitive) first start. Overseas bandwidth/peering can be a commercial next step - if the last mile and domestic bandwidth is the bottleneck then there's no catalyst to kick-start international connectivity negotiations. Let me run a stable FaceTime chat from Canberra to Sydney. Then let's worry about Canberra to Los Angeles...

mrmondo 10y ago

I remember moving from New Zealand where I'd had 100-200Mbit/s fibre for several years to Australia in 2012, when I arrived I moved into a brand new apartment in the first suburb to get fibre to the home, turns out it wasn't to all homes... and I was stuck with 2Mbit/s, which is what i had when I started high school in NZ many many years ago. 2017 is here now and I literally spent over an hour today trying to help someone figure out how to get better than her 2.5Mbit/s ADSL to her house which is not at all far from the CBD, turns out there's nothing she can do. Up until recently I was paying for 3x ADSL lines all set to annex-M and peered together using PFSense because all you can get in most of the cities is 100~ year old copper that's falling apart thanks to the hard right governments that are anti-technology and often anti-education from what I can tell. Recently I gave up on my three links and managed to get a point-to-point 5ghz wireless link from a beam off the top of my roof to a large building in line of sight which is better but obviously won't scale well.

pmyjavec 10y ago
This is really funny (sadly) and too true! If having a decent internet connection is even a slight prirority for someone in Australia, then it's really important to investigate what the internet is like before signing any papers! If you end up in a bad area, there isn't much that can be done about it apparently. I know people who have spent literally years trying to get an issue resolved.
ianhowson 10y ago
You live in Rhodes, right?
- mrmondo 10y ago
  I'm sorry I don't understand? I haven't heard of Rhodes before.
  - ianhowson 10y ago
    Ah, sorry, poor guess on my part. Rhodes is a new super-high-density suburb in Sydney. There is zero new telco infrastructure and 45,000 residents. The nearest exchange is in Concord, about 5km away. So one or two buildings have NBN, a few buildings have (overpriced) internal fibre, but the vast majority have sub-2Mbps DSL. There were a few companies putting in fixed 4G links cos, y'know, 2Mbps barely qualifies for email and web browsing these days. I lived there a few years ago; perhaps the situation is better now.

Arcaire 10y ago

There's a six-hour old reddit thread[0] on this article with comments from (mostly) Australians in /r/australia, for the interested. It may provide additional context and opinions, although I'm sure you can imagine what the overwhelming opinion is going to be. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/5t3arf/nbn_ceo_says_australians_do_not_want_superfast/ https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/5t3arf/nbn_ceo_s...

prawn 10y ago

Had a mild argument with a friend before the "NBN election". He thought that our internet was just fine. He could read news sites and so on. I argued that, before long, we'd be streaming video as a matter of course, and it would be high definition. More people would be working remotely or storing information online. I remembered this the other day. The kids were watching Netflix, my wife was watching Stan (another streaming service) and I was live streaming sport. We almost never switch on regular TV. Without NBN in our area for years yet, this makes for a lot of buffering and quality degradation. And if anyone needs to be working, the streaming generally stops. At work, my docs, time tracker, email, backups and so on are all in the cloud. Multiply that by every person in the office. As a nation, we can't compete on manufacturing. We should be making sure our infrastructure for online services (education, entertainment, etc) is exceptional.

vacri 10y ago
Do you remember the "No household would really use more than two HD streams. That's enough" comment, made at a time when 4k monitors already existed? Fun times.

shmerl 10y ago

Yeah, yeah. Telegraph should be good enough too. It's the pinnacle of innovation after all. Or may be this guy should just stick to the pigeon post.

andrewstuart 10y ago

This would be a Murdoch newspaper?

esie 10y ago

asdf

qzervaas 10y ago

One thing that the US-based HN crowd do well is mobilise in order to contact their local politicians. Australians aren't so inclined generally. In case you are though, you can contact Prime Minister Turnbull through this form: https://www.pm.gov.au/contact-your-pm https://www.pm.gov.au/contact-your-pm