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"Australia rapidly needs to grow other industries. " We should have focused on tech. If only there was some sort of plan to install gigabit fibre internet to e

"Australia rapidly needs to grow other industries. " We should have focused on tech. If only there was some sort of plan to install gigabit fibre internet to every house and business... (The joke, for non-Australians, is that we had this, and it was under construction, but then the coal loving conservatives got in power and spent the same 70 billion dollars on installing copper phone line vDSL internet instead, which has actually been a downgrade for many people).

broodbucket 7y ago
Is it VDSL? We've had VDSL2 in Canberra for many years now (built privately) and it's better than most people's NBN.
- ClassyJacket 7y ago
  Yes, fibre to the node uses VDSL, but with ridiculously long copper lengths, meaning only around 1/4 of premises can reach 100Mbps, some get less than 10, many are plagued with dropouts, and it can never be upgraded.
tialaramex 7y ago
Gigabit is _massive_ overkill, that's the real dirty secret here. That plan was a colossal waste of Australia's resources. I had Gigabit network access twenty years ago (because I was a student). I could buy it today where I live now, I have plenty of money but I use 40/10 vDSL instead. Because it's fine, that's what having Gigabit all those years ago made apparent to me. The UK has a horde of people who were absolutely 100% certain that Gigabit speeds will magically unlock... something. And they became available. And nobody cared, because it makes no difference. Bigger numbers aren't better if the numbers you have are already perfectly fine. 8bit PCM at 11kHz sucks. 16bit PCM at 48kHz is fine. 24bit PCM at 96kHz is... not any better. 56-bit DES encryption sucks. 128-bit AES is fine. 256-bit AES is... not any better (yes it may be faster in some cases, it's complicated, but straightforwardly it isn't better) The biggest problem in people's home networks tends to be Buffer Bloat, which isn't fixed by Gigabit except that it'll maybe make the vast buffers a bit more expensive and so the vendor will only put far too big a buffer, not far, far, far too big a buffer in your device.
- te_chris 7y ago
  Where is gigabit available in the UK? I live in Zone 2 in London and best I can get is Virgin's crappy, contended, DOCSIS rubbish. Back home in NZ I could get actual FTTP and it was fantastic.
  - jozzhart 7y ago
    I had Hyperoptic 1GB/s in Greenwich and was paying special offer of GBP7.5 / month. In regional Australia if pay $80 / month for 35MB/s (maximum line speed). I find it makes a massive difference as a remote web developer. So many 30 secs to 2 minute waits during the day that interrupt your workflow compared to London, where that just wasn't the case. Definitely has a negative effect on my productivity. On top of that, there's a lot more outages.
- schappim 7y ago
  >> 256-bit AES is... not any better (yes it may be faster in some cases Faster? I thought it was 40% slower. Please tell us more!
- nutjob2 7y ago
  You've completely missed the point of the NBN. One reason for installing fiber is because it's superior infrastructure. It's not simply a gigabit network and gigabit speed is a irrelevant. Fiber will happily transmit hundreds of terrabits per second given the right endpoint hardware. It's install once and reap the benefits for many, many decades. Another reason is because you don't know what innovations will arise from pervasive fiber connectivity until you have it and there is a ready market for those innovations. Just like mobile phones unlocked all manner of innovations no-one could foresee. Australia could have been at the forefront of internet connectivity, instead they have a third rate network for billions of dollars spent, all due to political interference.
  - daemin 7y ago
    It would also have made the entire network more or less homogeneous, meaning that you wouldn't need to use different companies and different technologies depending on which street you lived in. Though I would say that apartment buildings in the metro areas could have just used Fibre to the basement, that would have been fine. Let the building landlords upgrade the connectivity based on demand from the occupants. Also because a lot of attention had been fixated on the speed of the infrastructure, that let the Liberal party call it overbuilding and unnecessary, and now we have a dog's breakfast of shitty technologies used. Meaning a varied network street by street, house by house, all a mess, and nobody has a clear understanding of what the NBN is meant to be.

broodbucket 7y ago

Is it VDSL? We've had VDSL2 in Canberra for many years now (built privately) and it's better than most people's NBN.

ClassyJacket 7y ago
Yes, fibre to the node uses VDSL, but with ridiculously long copper lengths, meaning only around 1/4 of premises can reach 100Mbps, some get less than 10, many are plagued with dropouts, and it can never be upgraded.

tialaramex 7y ago

Gigabit is _massive_ overkill, that's the real dirty secret here. That plan was a colossal waste of Australia's resources. I had Gigabit network access twenty years ago (because I was a student). I could buy it today where I live now, I have plenty of money but I use 40/10 vDSL instead. Because it's fine, that's what having Gigabit all those years ago made apparent to me. The UK has a horde of people who were absolutely 100% certain that Gigabit speeds will magically unlock... something. And they became available. And nobody cared, because it makes no difference. Bigger numbers aren't better if the numbers you have are already perfectly fine. 8bit PCM at 11kHz sucks. 16bit PCM at 48kHz is fine. 24bit PCM at 96kHz is... not any better. 56-bit DES encryption sucks. 128-bit AES is fine. 256-bit AES is... not any better (yes it may be faster in some cases, it's complicated, but straightforwardly it isn't better) The biggest problem in people's home networks tends to be Buffer Bloat, which isn't fixed by Gigabit except that it'll maybe make the vast buffers a bit more expensive and so the vendor will only put far too big a buffer, not far, far, far too big a buffer in your device.

te_chris 7y ago
Where is gigabit available in the UK? I live in Zone 2 in London and best I can get is Virgin's crappy, contended, DOCSIS rubbish. Back home in NZ I could get actual FTTP and it was fantastic.
- jozzhart 7y ago
  I had Hyperoptic 1GB/s in Greenwich and was paying special offer of GBP7.5 / month. In regional Australia if pay $80 / month for 35MB/s (maximum line speed). I find it makes a massive difference as a remote web developer. So many 30 secs to 2 minute waits during the day that interrupt your workflow compared to London, where that just wasn't the case. Definitely has a negative effect on my productivity. On top of that, there's a lot more outages.
schappim 7y ago
>> 256-bit AES is... not any better (yes it may be faster in some cases Faster? I thought it was 40% slower. Please tell us more!
nutjob2 7y ago
You've completely missed the point of the NBN. One reason for installing fiber is because it's superior infrastructure. It's not simply a gigabit network and gigabit speed is a irrelevant. Fiber will happily transmit hundreds of terrabits per second given the right endpoint hardware. It's install once and reap the benefits for many, many decades. Another reason is because you don't know what innovations will arise from pervasive fiber connectivity until you have it and there is a ready market for those innovations. Just like mobile phones unlocked all manner of innovations no-one could foresee. Australia could have been at the forefront of internet connectivity, instead they have a third rate network for billions of dollars spent, all due to political interference.
- daemin 7y ago
  It would also have made the entire network more or less homogeneous, meaning that you wouldn't need to use different companies and different technologies depending on which street you lived in. Though I would say that apartment buildings in the metro areas could have just used Fibre to the basement, that would have been fine. Let the building landlords upgrade the connectivity based on demand from the occupants. Also because a lot of attention had been fixated on the speed of the infrastructure, that let the Liberal party call it overbuilding and unnecessary, and now we have a dog's breakfast of shitty technologies used. Meaning a varied network street by street, house by house, all a mess, and nobody has a clear understanding of what the NBN is meant to be.