13 ms·

Australian Government will offer 1Gbps this year to all NBN-connected homes

anigbrowl 14y ago
I wish the US government would get its act together on this. The Constitution includes a grant of power to Congress to create a national system of post roads (Article 1, Section 8.7) and my understanding is that the founders included this because they recognized the importance of a public communications infrastructure rather than a privately held one [1]. Considering the criticality of our communications infrastructure in an era of cyber-attacks, I find it disappointing that Congress seems to have abandoned this important role to the private sector. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurn_und_Taxis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurn_und_Taxis
- wyager 14y ago
  Do you really want the government to be in charge of data transport with its track record of blatantly ignoring the right to privacy? Aren't you the least bit concerned that we'll end up with something like in the UK or China, where government control over internet infrastructure has lead to extensive monitoring and censorship? I'd rather take (possibly) slower and/or more expensive internet that the government has to put a lot of elbow grease in to censor or monitor than a (possibly!) cheaper and/or faster internet that the government has extensive control over. If you've worked in telecom, you might know how extensive the government's data monitoring infrastructure already is. I sure as hell don't want to make it any bigger.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    I'm concerned about the creation of the infrastructure, rather than the operation of it. And no, I don't lose a lot of sleep over this, any more than I lose sleep over having my mail opened.
    - wyager 14y ago
      >any more than I lose sleep over having my mail opened. You know, that does bother some people. Are you bothered with having your incoming and outgoing mail checked for un-approved messages and then having those thrown away?
      - anigbrowl 14y ago
        I'm not bothered by it because it isn't and hasn't been a problem in this country. We have laws against such abuses that work quite well and have, if anything, strengthened over the lifetime of this country.
  - jeza 14y ago
    With the NBN, the government is just a wholesaler. They just provide a physical medium and end users will still get a retail service from a private company. Besides the government has the same responsibility to adhere to privacy laws as any private company, in fact government have their own privacy requirements with additional channels to resolve complaints. Ethnically I don't see why a government that you vote for would have any less reason to respect privacy than a private company (who you pay money to). Finally, the government could just pass legislation to monitor/censor within a private network, so it doesn't really matter whether it is public or private from this perspective. It's more a matter of voting for the right representatives.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      > With the NBN, the government is just a wholesaler. The Minister responsible for the NBN -- Senator Conroy -- is also the guy who wants ISP-level internet filtering based on a secret blacklist.
jameswyse 14y ago
They'll find some way to cripple it for sure, like sticking a 200GB/month cap on it. Australia can't have nice things :/
- elithrar 14y ago
  > They'll find some way to cripple it for sure, like sticking a 200GB/month cap on it. Australia can't have nice things :/ If you look at many of the plans already offered by ISP's, you'll find that this isn't the case.[1] Once more homes are connected, these limits are only likely to increase (as they have each year prior). Perhaps we shouldn't have limits at all, and just pay for a pipe of a certain bandwidth; but from an ISP's perspective they implement these caps to protect themselves from abuse by a small % of users. Personally I'd rather know my cap is there, as opposed to the odd behavior of many US ISPs in targeting "high usage" users with what seems like little transparency. [1]: http://www.iinet.net.au/nbn/nbn-plan-residential.html http://www.iinet.net.au/nbn/nbn-plan-residential.html
  - cynix 14y ago
    > If you look at many of the plans already offered by ISP's, you'll find that this isn't the case. The largest plan offered by iiNet has a quota of 1000GB. If you're on the 100Mbps plan, this can be consumed in less than 1 day. How is this not the case?
    - kondro 14y ago
      Because you won't consume it in less than a day. For the present time, 1TB is enough for almost all home users. As history has shown us, these limits will increase as demand does. And iiNet overage at $0.10/GB is pretty favourable as well… what does AWS charge again?
      - cynix 14y ago
        > Because you won't consume it in less than a day. I would if I could… > And iiNet overage at $0.10/GB is pretty favourable as well… Well, I suppose it's reasonable. I don't think it's fair to compare it to business-grade services like AWS though; it would be more appropriate to compare the NBN to Google Fiber or one of the Japanese/Korean ISPs.
zmmmmm 14y ago
That's kind of a tautology ... all the homes in the US connected to 1Gbps fibre "this year" will also be connected to 1Gbps fibre "this year". The salient missing fact is that the NBN is going to reach only a tiny tiny miniscule minority of homes "this year" (my house is not even scheduled on the plan that stretches out past 2017).
- treelovinhippie 14y ago
  True, just that "XXX,XXX homes currently connected to the Australian Government's NBN initiative, will have 1Gbps speed enabled by the end of the year" is a bit long for a title. I've made a small title edit :) Here's the NBNCo targets: June 2013 - 661,000 "passed or covered" and 92,000 premises with active service June 2014 - 1,681,000 "passed or covered" and 551,000 premises with active service http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/nbn-co-corporate-plan-6-aug-2012.pdf#page=35 http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/nbn-co-corporate-pl...
davidjohnstone 14y ago
Of course, we're having an election sometime this year, and the Liberal's — who are probably going to win — are planning on making the NBN slower and cheaper[1] (100Mbps by utilising the existing copper network, rather than fully replacing it with fiber). 1. http://www.zdnet.com/coalitions-nbn-to-cost-almost-30bn-7000013702/ http://www.zdnet.com/coalitions-nbn-to-cost-almost-30bn-7000...
- quink 14y ago
  Up to 100 Mbps. By they'll try to get at least 25 Mbps. Don't ask about upload speeds, those apparently don't matter.
  - arbitrarywords 14y ago
    Not to mention latency, which is the most significant factor for me. I'm on semi-NBN and now have a 4ms ping to work. Only have to leave the house once a week (Warning: side-effects may vary).
    - joshschreuder 14y ago
      What's semi-NBN?
      - oohmeplums 14y ago
        Opticomm or something similar?
      - arbitrarywords 14y ago
        Nah, it's South Brisbane. They knocked down the old exchange for the hospital extension, Telstra installed fibre, supposedly eventually it will be rolled into the official NBN network, but until then, we get rates way worse than ADSL and I'm forced to pay $30/mth for a "landline" which I never use... still, it's worth it for the latency.
  - tacticus 14y ago
angersock 14y ago
Pardon my ignorance, but aren't the pipes that actually go to Australia relatively small? So, wouldn't this just increase burden on those interconnects and maybe not help unless connecting to somebody else in Australia?
- nness 14y ago
  I don't know much about the pipes actually, but I do believe a new one is being constructed. That said, I am curious to know the answer to this question too. I guess torrenting within the borders will be a speedy affair however.
  - Schwolop 14y ago
    Allow me some time to find the statistics again on this, but from what I've gathered following the NBN debate for a few years now: No. The pipes are more than double our current requirements and growing faster than requirements do due to some funny incentive scheme. Total capacity: ~2TB/s [1], but the PPC-1 line has potential to add another 2.5TB/s. The others are being upgraded too [2]. "Currently, Australia has a theoretical 5637734.4Mbit/s of transpacific bandwidth, however lit capacity is much less."[3] "The total international capacity in use for the Australian market in 2009 is estimated to be around 300 gigabits per second."[4] References: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_Australia#Submarine_cables http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_Australia... [2] http://www.itnews.com.au/News/157753,ppc-1-delivers-more-speed-than-expected.aspx http://www.itnews.com.au/News/157753,ppc-1-delivers-more-spe... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia#International_connectivity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia#Internati... [4] http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn#nbn_faq http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn#nbn_faq (See section 5.7 - "Does Australia have the international capacity to provide every customer with 100 megabit internet?")
- mcbridematt 14y ago
  The days of this being an issue are long gone, especially since there is now good competition in the submarine cable space. Last mile is starting to be the bottleneck.
jacques_chester 14y ago
I hate to be the guy who says that this looks like an election-year stunt to try and "save the furniture", but ... well, it does. Edit 2: A mate of mine pointed out that they made the same announcement before the 2010 election: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/nbn-download-boost-ups-ante-in-web-war/story-fn59niix-1225904128498 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/nbn-downloa... Part of the problem with the NBN is the highly selective veil of secrecy. It's a public project and it's being backed by the Commonwealth. The lenders who are loaning the funds are not doing it because they think NBNCo would be allowed to go broke; everyone knows that these are really Australian Government bonds in a dress. But the government still uses "Commercial-in-Confidence" to stymie all oversight. This would be more reasonable in dealing with a company at arm's length, but NBNCo is 100% government owned. They would be well within their rights to waive the requirement for confidence. Consequently, nobody really knows how the rollout is going or what it costs. NBNCo claim they can't give Parliament information about particular streets because they don't track to that level of granularity, yet mysteriously they are able to claim in aggregate to be on track. Leaving to the side of whether this is the right thing to build, there's still the important question of building it the right way. And IMO that's not been happening, and it really bugs me. edit: I know people don't like this point of view, but if you disagree, the done thing on HN is to reply, not downvote.
- oohmeplums 14y ago
  The upgrade to 1Gbps was always in the roadmap: http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/initial-roadmap.pdf http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/initial-roadmap.pdf Frankly, I think they should've launched with 1Gbps to begin with -- customers don't have to pay for the higher speed tiers if they don't want to.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    Ah, I hadn't realised that. So it's a stock standard re-announcement.
DigitalSea 14y ago
The whole NBN has been a joke from the beginning. The roll-out delays for what was originally a 100mbps fibre network that is now supposedly going to offer 1gbps speeds conveniently announced right around the time Quigley is about to be grilled in parliament over the delays and so close to an election it looks like Labor will be losing in a landslide. While the prospect of 1gbps speeds sounds great as a developer, the very fact those speeds will only be affordable to businesses at a cost of what looks like could be close to the AUD $200 per month mark initially and no doubt rise with minuscule bandwidth provided for the cost. The reason current Internet offerings in Australia are so expensive is because of the small number of cables that connect us to the rest of the world and monopoly of our limited selection of ISP's, are they planning on laying more deep-sea cables to handle the increased load? Will the high-speeds only apply to Australian content like Optus's fraudulent high-speed 100mbps addon pack promises for cable subscribers which only could promise close to those speeds for Australian content, not content from overseas. On the outside this looks like a Godsend for Australia and while it undoubtedly is in some aspects as we saw with the rise of ADSL in the early 2000's, the project has been poorly managed from the start and this sounds like a stunt more-so than a reality based on what we've seen so far. Having said that, I would be more than happy with 100mbps speeds compared to the 20mbps connection I currently have which costs me $75 per month through Optus Cable. And overall the premise and vision for the NBN is still better than the archaic coalition "high-speed" network plans they have of their own.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  The odds that a project of this magnitude and complexity would be done on time and budget were basically zero. But it's very hard to tell what could have been better because of the Commercial-in-Confidence veil. Quigley is not an idiot; he's a smart, well-educated bloke with decades of telco experience. He had no control over the schedule -- Treasury (remember those guys? they're the ones who said that the European carbon price would continue rising to hit $29 by 2015) pretty much drew up an estimate for a press conference and that's what got chucked over the wall. In Quigley's position I'm pretty sure anyone would have struggled to make it work.

I wish the US government would get its act together on this. The Constitution includes a grant of power to Congress to create a national system of post roads (Article 1, Section 8.7) and my understanding is that the founders included this because they recognized the importance of a public communications infrastructure rather than a privately held one [1]. Considering the criticality of our communications infrastructure in an era of cyber-attacks, I find it disappointing that Congress seems to have abandoned this important role to the private sector. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurn_und_Taxis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurn_und_Taxis

wyager 14y ago
Do you really want the government to be in charge of data transport with its track record of blatantly ignoring the right to privacy? Aren't you the least bit concerned that we'll end up with something like in the UK or China, where government control over internet infrastructure has lead to extensive monitoring and censorship? I'd rather take (possibly) slower and/or more expensive internet that the government has to put a lot of elbow grease in to censor or monitor than a (possibly!) cheaper and/or faster internet that the government has extensive control over. If you've worked in telecom, you might know how extensive the government's data monitoring infrastructure already is. I sure as hell don't want to make it any bigger.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  I'm concerned about the creation of the infrastructure, rather than the operation of it. And no, I don't lose a lot of sleep over this, any more than I lose sleep over having my mail opened.
  - wyager 14y ago
    >any more than I lose sleep over having my mail opened. You know, that does bother some people. Are you bothered with having your incoming and outgoing mail checked for un-approved messages and then having those thrown away?
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      I'm not bothered by it because it isn't and hasn't been a problem in this country. We have laws against such abuses that work quite well and have, if anything, strengthened over the lifetime of this country.
- jeza 14y ago
  With the NBN, the government is just a wholesaler. They just provide a physical medium and end users will still get a retail service from a private company. Besides the government has the same responsibility to adhere to privacy laws as any private company, in fact government have their own privacy requirements with additional channels to resolve complaints. Ethnically I don't see why a government that you vote for would have any less reason to respect privacy than a private company (who you pay money to). Finally, the government could just pass legislation to monitor/censor within a private network, so it doesn't really matter whether it is public or private from this perspective. It's more a matter of voting for the right representatives.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    > With the NBN, the government is just a wholesaler. The Minister responsible for the NBN -- Senator Conroy -- is also the guy who wants ISP-level internet filtering based on a secret blacklist.

jameswyse 14y ago

They'll find some way to cripple it for sure, like sticking a 200GB/month cap on it. Australia can't have nice things :/

elithrar 14y ago
> They'll find some way to cripple it for sure, like sticking a 200GB/month cap on it. Australia can't have nice things :/ If you look at many of the plans already offered by ISP's, you'll find that this isn't the case.[1] Once more homes are connected, these limits are only likely to increase (as they have each year prior). Perhaps we shouldn't have limits at all, and just pay for a pipe of a certain bandwidth; but from an ISP's perspective they implement these caps to protect themselves from abuse by a small % of users. Personally I'd rather know my cap is there, as opposed to the odd behavior of many US ISPs in targeting "high usage" users with what seems like little transparency. [1]: http://www.iinet.net.au/nbn/nbn-plan-residential.html http://www.iinet.net.au/nbn/nbn-plan-residential.html
- cynix 14y ago
  > If you look at many of the plans already offered by ISP's, you'll find that this isn't the case. The largest plan offered by iiNet has a quota of 1000GB. If you're on the 100Mbps plan, this can be consumed in less than 1 day. How is this not the case?
  - kondro 14y ago
    Because you won't consume it in less than a day. For the present time, 1TB is enough for almost all home users. As history has shown us, these limits will increase as demand does. And iiNet overage at $0.10/GB is pretty favourable as well… what does AWS charge again?
    - cynix 14y ago
      > Because you won't consume it in less than a day. I would if I could… > And iiNet overage at $0.10/GB is pretty favourable as well… Well, I suppose it's reasonable. I don't think it's fair to compare it to business-grade services like AWS though; it would be more appropriate to compare the NBN to Google Fiber or one of the Japanese/Korean ISPs.

zmmmmm 14y ago

That's kind of a tautology ... all the homes in the US connected to 1Gbps fibre "this year" will also be connected to 1Gbps fibre "this year". The salient missing fact is that the NBN is going to reach only a tiny tiny miniscule minority of homes "this year" (my house is not even scheduled on the plan that stretches out past 2017).

treelovinhippie 14y ago
True, just that "XXX,XXX homes currently connected to the Australian Government's NBN initiative, will have 1Gbps speed enabled by the end of the year" is a bit long for a title. I've made a small title edit :) Here's the NBNCo targets: June 2013 - 661,000 "passed or covered" and 92,000 premises with active service June 2014 - 1,681,000 "passed or covered" and 551,000 premises with active service http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/nbn-co-corporate-plan-6-aug-2012.pdf#page=35 http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/nbn-co-corporate-pl...

davidjohnstone 14y ago

Of course, we're having an election sometime this year, and the Liberal's — who are probably going to win — are planning on making the NBN slower and cheaper[1] (100Mbps by utilising the existing copper network, rather than fully replacing it with fiber). 1. http://www.zdnet.com/coalitions-nbn-to-cost-almost-30bn-7000013702/ http://www.zdnet.com/coalitions-nbn-to-cost-almost-30bn-7000...

quink 14y ago
Up to 100 Mbps. By they'll try to get at least 25 Mbps. Don't ask about upload speeds, those apparently don't matter.
- arbitrarywords 14y ago
  Not to mention latency, which is the most significant factor for me. I'm on semi-NBN and now have a 4ms ping to work. Only have to leave the house once a week (Warning: side-effects may vary).
  - joshschreuder 14y ago
    What's semi-NBN?
    - oohmeplums 14y ago
      Opticomm or something similar?
    - arbitrarywords 14y ago
      Nah, it's South Brisbane. They knocked down the old exchange for the hospital extension, Telstra installed fibre, supposedly eventually it will be rolled into the official NBN network, but until then, we get rates way worse than ADSL and I'm forced to pay $30/mth for a "landline" which I never use... still, it's worth it for the latency.
- tacticus 14y ago

angersock 14y ago

Pardon my ignorance, but aren't the pipes that actually go to Australia relatively small? So, wouldn't this just increase burden on those interconnects and maybe not help unless connecting to somebody else in Australia?

nness 14y ago
I don't know much about the pipes actually, but I do believe a new one is being constructed. That said, I am curious to know the answer to this question too. I guess torrenting within the borders will be a speedy affair however.
- Schwolop 14y ago
  Allow me some time to find the statistics again on this, but from what I've gathered following the NBN debate for a few years now: No. The pipes are more than double our current requirements and growing faster than requirements do due to some funny incentive scheme. Total capacity: ~2TB/s [1], but the PPC-1 line has potential to add another 2.5TB/s. The others are being upgraded too [2]. "Currently, Australia has a theoretical 5637734.4Mbit/s of transpacific bandwidth, however lit capacity is much less."[3] "The total international capacity in use for the Australian market in 2009 is estimated to be around 300 gigabits per second."[4] References: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_Australia#Submarine_cables http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_Australia... [2] http://www.itnews.com.au/News/157753,ppc-1-delivers-more-speed-than-expected.aspx http://www.itnews.com.au/News/157753,ppc-1-delivers-more-spe... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia#International_connectivity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia#Internati... [4] http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn#nbn_faq http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn#nbn_faq (See section 5.7 - "Does Australia have the international capacity to provide every customer with 100 megabit internet?")
mcbridematt 14y ago
The days of this being an issue are long gone, especially since there is now good competition in the submarine cable space. Last mile is starting to be the bottleneck.

jacques_chester 14y ago

I hate to be the guy who says that this looks like an election-year stunt to try and "save the furniture", but ... well, it does. Edit 2: A mate of mine pointed out that they made the same announcement before the 2010 election: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/nbn-download-boost-ups-ante-in-web-war/story-fn59niix-1225904128498 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/nbn-downloa... Part of the problem with the NBN is the highly selective veil of secrecy. It's a public project and it's being backed by the Commonwealth. The lenders who are loaning the funds are not doing it because they think NBNCo would be allowed to go broke; everyone knows that these are really Australian Government bonds in a dress. But the government still uses "Commercial-in-Confidence" to stymie all oversight. This would be more reasonable in dealing with a company at arm's length, but NBNCo is 100% government owned. They would be well within their rights to waive the requirement for confidence. Consequently, nobody really knows how the rollout is going or what it costs. NBNCo claim they can't give Parliament information about particular streets because they don't track to that level of granularity, yet mysteriously they are able to claim in aggregate to be on track. Leaving to the side of whether this is the right thing to build, there's still the important question of building it the right way. And IMO that's not been happening, and it really bugs me. edit: I know people don't like this point of view, but if you disagree, the done thing on HN is to reply, not downvote.

oohmeplums 14y ago
The upgrade to 1Gbps was always in the roadmap: http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/initial-roadmap.pdf http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/initial-roadmap.pdf Frankly, I think they should've launched with 1Gbps to begin with -- customers don't have to pay for the higher speed tiers if they don't want to.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  Ah, I hadn't realised that. So it's a stock standard re-announcement.

DigitalSea 14y ago

The whole NBN has been a joke from the beginning. The roll-out delays for what was originally a 100mbps fibre network that is now supposedly going to offer 1gbps speeds conveniently announced right around the time Quigley is about to be grilled in parliament over the delays and so close to an election it looks like Labor will be losing in a landslide. While the prospect of 1gbps speeds sounds great as a developer, the very fact those speeds will only be affordable to businesses at a cost of what looks like could be close to the AUD $200 per month mark initially and no doubt rise with minuscule bandwidth provided for the cost. The reason current Internet offerings in Australia are so expensive is because of the small number of cables that connect us to the rest of the world and monopoly of our limited selection of ISP's, are they planning on laying more deep-sea cables to handle the increased load? Will the high-speeds only apply to Australian content like Optus's fraudulent high-speed 100mbps addon pack promises for cable subscribers which only could promise close to those speeds for Australian content, not content from overseas. On the outside this looks like a Godsend for Australia and while it undoubtedly is in some aspects as we saw with the rise of ADSL in the early 2000's, the project has been poorly managed from the start and this sounds like a stunt more-so than a reality based on what we've seen so far. Having said that, I would be more than happy with 100mbps speeds compared to the 20mbps connection I currently have which costs me $75 per month through Optus Cable. And overall the premise and vision for the NBN is still better than the archaic coalition "high-speed" network plans they have of their own.

jacques_chester 14y ago
The odds that a project of this magnitude and complexity would be done on time and budget were basically zero. But it's very hard to tell what could have been better because of the Commercial-in-Confidence veil. Quigley is not an idiot; he's a smart, well-educated bloke with decades of telco experience. He had no control over the schedule -- Treasury (remember those guys? they're the ones who said that the European carbon price would continue rising to hit $29 by 2015) pretty much drew up an estimate for a press conference and that's what got chucked over the wall. In Quigley's position I'm pretty sure anyone would have struggled to make it work.