4 ms·

FTTP or FTTN aside, aiming for 93% coverage in a country as sparsely populated as AU was a terrible idea to start with. I understand the need to support rural

by ccakes 9y ago

FTTP or FTTN aside, aiming for 93% coverage in a country as sparsely populated as AU was a terrible idea to start with. I understand the need to support rural areas but the the majority of the initial budget was to cover non-metropolitan areas and while the govt has been messing this up, private industry (TPG, First Path etc) managed to cover huge swaths of the population with little-to-no government assistance.

discodave 9y ago
That's actually not the problem. Australia has a similar percentage of people in cities and large towns as somewhere like the US. The low population density of Australia makes backhaul and overseas transfer of data more expensive, and the last 2-5% of people might be very expensive to get. But the original goals of the NBN were well thought out and modeled properly.
spangry 9y ago
This gets repeated a lot, but people seem to forget that a large part of the continent/island [?] is inhospitable desert. Our population distribution looks like this: https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-4afe2e7cc5078f81d6a9993b21724bb6 https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-4afe2e7cc5078f81d6a999... About 60% of the population is clustered in 4 cities [0] and we're one of the most urbanised countries in the world [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_Australia#Cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_Australia#Cities [1] https://infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure/pab/soac/ https://infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure/pab/soac/ & http://theconversation.com/density-sprawl-growth-how-australian-cities-have-changed-in-the-last-30-years-65870 http://theconversation.com/density-sprawl-growth-how-austral...
nl 9y ago
private industry (TPG, First Path etc) managed to cover huge swaths of the population with little-to-no government assistance. Hu? You mean how they used copper put in place by telco incumbent Telstra, most of which were built when it was government owned? And how they relied on government mandated access to the copper lines to enable that? Or are you talking about the small private fibre rollouts? Because they don't cover "huge swaths of the population".

by ccakes 9y ago

discodave 9y ago

That's actually not the problem. Australia has a similar percentage of people in cities and large towns as somewhere like the US. The low population density of Australia makes backhaul and overseas transfer of data more expensive, and the last 2-5% of people might be very expensive to get. But the original goals of the NBN were well thought out and modeled properly.

spangry 9y ago

This gets repeated a lot, but people seem to forget that a large part of the continent/island [?] is inhospitable desert. Our population distribution looks like this: https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-4afe2e7cc5078f81d6a9993b21724bb6 https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-4afe2e7cc5078f81d6a999... About 60% of the population is clustered in 4 cities [0] and we're one of the most urbanised countries in the world [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_Australia#Cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_Australia#Cities [1] https://infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure/pab/soac/ https://infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure/pab/soac/ & http://theconversation.com/density-sprawl-growth-how-australian-cities-have-changed-in-the-last-30-years-65870 http://theconversation.com/density-sprawl-growth-how-austral...

nl 9y ago

private industry (TPG, First Path etc) managed to cover huge swaths of the population with little-to-no government assistance. Hu? You mean how they used copper put in place by telco incumbent Telstra, most of which were built when it was government owned? And how they relied on government mandated access to the copper lines to enable that? Or are you talking about the small private fibre rollouts? Because they don't cover "huge swaths of the population".