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The top of the page tells me nothing about what they're campaigning for. FTTN? NBN? FTTH? English people. English! I'm not even sure if this is a parody. The

by jschuur 13y ago

The top of the page tells me nothing about what they're campaigning for. FTTN? NBN? FTTH? English people. English! I'm not even sure if this is a parody. The Liberal Party of Australia: Reconsider your plan for a 'FTTN' NBN in favour of a superior 'FTTH' NBN Australia needs the right NBN. Vote at change.org if you agree!

jschuur 13y ago
And yes, I realize the change.org site has more details. But once again, the whole top of that page has no actual info in the title except a bunch of acronyms.
- kaliblack 13y ago
  In Australia, where this petition is relevant, these acronyms are well understood by the public and don't need further explanation.
  - devnetfx 13y ago
    I am in Australia and these acronyms are not well understood by the public. Luckily jdaley explained these well in his comments above.
    - chewxy 13y ago
      This is exactly the problem. Also, the vox populi interviews in newspaper from older people saying "25 mbps is fast enough" makes me rage so hard. Oh, 25 Mbps is fast enough? So if I were to offer you $25 or $1000 which would you take? Ugh. The NBN is a good idea, but poorly sold to the older generation who cannot seem to grasp the idea of its importance,
      - dbaupp 13y ago
        > 25 mbps is fast enough Of course it's fast enough! You can fill your entire 640 kB of RAM (who needs that much anyway?) in 200ms with that raw speed.
        mcauser 13y ago
        What's a kB? :p
        stephengillie 13y ago
        http://xkcd.com/394/ http://xkcd.com/394/
      - cturner 13y ago
        So if I were to offer you $25 or $1000 which would you take? That's not a great analogy. For much of the life of the internet, we had the experience where everything was slow and awkward. Modems sucked. But now, people have things they want to do online and they find it's fine - they can access their email, and websites, and youtube, and play games. There was a similar transition with computers. All computers used to be slow, and they used to suck. Then during the Windows XP era, the slowness and suckiness of a computer started to decline, and people didn't think about it any more. They stopped buying new desktops and wanting OS upgrades. You can point out things that would be possible with faster computers or bandwidth - fine. Regardless, for the things that people are doing now, people tend to be content about things where ten years ago they were unhappy, often very unhappy. The opposition case to the NBN claim that the government was forcing taxpayers into a vast, unbudgeted public works scheme, and that it wouldn't even be delivering something that was strongly needed by the people. The opinion of the man in the street about their current internet is a reasonable metric in estimating the value of the NBN. Maybe the reason that Australians only have the speed that they currently have is because there isn't a pressing need for more speed. Imagine that. Billions of dollars saved with no effort.
      - joezydeco 13y ago
        I'm someone from an older generation (and I'm also a non-Aussie), so forgive me for asking: What do you need to do at 1Gbps that you can't do at 25Mbps?
        XorNot 13y ago
        It's what can you do with a 40 mbps upload speed that you can't do with 1mbps? Which is, you know - a lot. In the age of user created content, telecommuting and cloud services being unable to upload faster then 128 kilobytes per second is a killer. If you're dealing with any type of multimedia content you can be needing to move 10-20 megabytes per cycle between a few people with ease - that time adds up, and it constrains how you work.
        joezydeco 13y ago
        How much upstream bandwidth is coming from servers and multimedia producers in residences, and how much is coming from mobile devices?
        XorNot 13y ago
        802.11n in your house is 100mbit. Mobile devices have been used as misdirection throughout the NBN debate, because very few people are uploading large YouTube videos from their smartphones over 3G and for anything that's got some level of production to it they'll be working on it on laptops and desktops at home and the like.
        joezydeco 13y ago
        So the future of Australia's economy, and the reason that an entire continent should be wired with FTTH, hinges on citizens being to efficiently upload to YouTube from their homes?
        XorNot 13y ago
        Yes. Clearly no value of any sort has ever been created from the digital economy, and the richest companies in the world definitely produce nothing to do with content creation and distribution over the internet.
      - andrewaylett 13y ago
        From a cursory scan of the comments, it seems like there's a time element: $25 'soon' or $1000 'later'. I suppose which you'd take depends on how quickly you need the money, and whether you trust the $1000 plan to actually get finished. For reference, I'm in the UK and have a 6Mbps connection, which I could upgrade if I thought it was worth paying more.
  - jellicle 13y ago
    That's grossly and utterly wrong. I'll bet if I interviewed 100 people on the street, maybe 10 would have any idea what this page was about. This is an important lesson for ANY sort of activism or public outreach (or marketing): people know a LOT less about your area of concern than you think they do.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
noloqy 13y ago
I just spent 5 minutes looking up what all the acronyms meant.
chris_wot 13y ago
Fibre To The Home vs Fibre To The Node. National Broadband Network.
jdaley 13y ago
To help others decode the acronyms, and to explain the situation... In 2009, the Australian Labor Party, in power as the federal government of Australia, initiated construction of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN). The network is replacing copper phone lines across Australia with a new fibre to the home (FTTH), also known as fibre to the premises (FTTP) network, meaning optical fibre will be run around the country, down every street, through every front yard, and into our houses (except some regional areas, where satellite will be used). Two days ago, a federal election was held. The Australian Labor Party was defeated by the Coalition, an alliance led by the other major political party in Australia - the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party's policy for the NBN is to build fibre to the node (FTTN) instead, meaning optical fibre will be run to cabinets on street corners, which will service small areas, but the existing copper lines will still be used for the "last mile". The petition is to convince the Liberal Party, now in power, to stick with the original plan of FTTH.
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
Clark and Dawe had a go at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TptIs0k-spg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TptIs0k-spg I think they did another one too (Fibre To The Boat) but can't seem to find it. FTTN - Fibre To The Node FTTH - Fibre To The Home NBN - National Broadband Network
korynunn 13y ago
Yay for Github, Someone else did this for me.
- Cameron_D 13y ago
  You're welcome :)

by jschuur 13y ago

jschuur 13y ago

And yes, I realize the change.org site has more details. But once again, the whole top of that page has no actual info in the title except a bunch of acronyms.

kaliblack 13y ago
In Australia, where this petition is relevant, these acronyms are well understood by the public and don't need further explanation.
- devnetfx 13y ago
  I am in Australia and these acronyms are not well understood by the public. Luckily jdaley explained these well in his comments above.
  - chewxy 13y ago
    This is exactly the problem. Also, the vox populi interviews in newspaper from older people saying "25 mbps is fast enough" makes me rage so hard. Oh, 25 Mbps is fast enough? So if I were to offer you $25 or $1000 which would you take? Ugh. The NBN is a good idea, but poorly sold to the older generation who cannot seem to grasp the idea of its importance,
    - dbaupp 13y ago
      > 25 mbps is fast enough Of course it's fast enough! You can fill your entire 640 kB of RAM (who needs that much anyway?) in 200ms with that raw speed.
      - mcauser 13y ago
        What's a kB? :p
        stephengillie 13y ago
        http://xkcd.com/394/ http://xkcd.com/394/
    - cturner 13y ago
      So if I were to offer you $25 or $1000 which would you take? That's not a great analogy. For much of the life of the internet, we had the experience where everything was slow and awkward. Modems sucked. But now, people have things they want to do online and they find it's fine - they can access their email, and websites, and youtube, and play games. There was a similar transition with computers. All computers used to be slow, and they used to suck. Then during the Windows XP era, the slowness and suckiness of a computer started to decline, and people didn't think about it any more. They stopped buying new desktops and wanting OS upgrades. You can point out things that would be possible with faster computers or bandwidth - fine. Regardless, for the things that people are doing now, people tend to be content about things where ten years ago they were unhappy, often very unhappy. The opposition case to the NBN claim that the government was forcing taxpayers into a vast, unbudgeted public works scheme, and that it wouldn't even be delivering something that was strongly needed by the people. The opinion of the man in the street about their current internet is a reasonable metric in estimating the value of the NBN. Maybe the reason that Australians only have the speed that they currently have is because there isn't a pressing need for more speed. Imagine that. Billions of dollars saved with no effort.
    - joezydeco 13y ago
      I'm someone from an older generation (and I'm also a non-Aussie), so forgive me for asking: What do you need to do at 1Gbps that you can't do at 25Mbps?
      - XorNot 13y ago
        It's what can you do with a 40 mbps upload speed that you can't do with 1mbps? Which is, you know - a lot. In the age of user created content, telecommuting and cloud services being unable to upload faster then 128 kilobytes per second is a killer. If you're dealing with any type of multimedia content you can be needing to move 10-20 megabytes per cycle between a few people with ease - that time adds up, and it constrains how you work.
        joezydeco 13y ago
        How much upstream bandwidth is coming from servers and multimedia producers in residences, and how much is coming from mobile devices?
        XorNot 13y ago
        802.11n in your house is 100mbit. Mobile devices have been used as misdirection throughout the NBN debate, because very few people are uploading large YouTube videos from their smartphones over 3G and for anything that's got some level of production to it they'll be working on it on laptops and desktops at home and the like.
        joezydeco 13y ago
        So the future of Australia's economy, and the reason that an entire continent should be wired with FTTH, hinges on citizens being to efficiently upload to YouTube from their homes?
        XorNot 13y ago
        Yes. Clearly no value of any sort has ever been created from the digital economy, and the richest companies in the world definitely produce nothing to do with content creation and distribution over the internet.
    - andrewaylett 13y ago
      From a cursory scan of the comments, it seems like there's a time element: $25 'soon' or $1000 'later'. I suppose which you'd take depends on how quickly you need the money, and whether you trust the $1000 plan to actually get finished. For reference, I'm in the UK and have a 6Mbps connection, which I could upgrade if I thought it was worth paying more.
- jellicle 13y ago
  That's grossly and utterly wrong. I'll bet if I interviewed 100 people on the street, maybe 10 would have any idea what this page was about. This is an important lesson for ANY sort of activism or public outreach (or marketing): people know a LOT less about your area of concern than you think they do.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

noloqy 13y ago

I just spent 5 minutes looking up what all the acronyms meant.

chris_wot 13y ago

Fibre To The Home vs Fibre To The Node. National Broadband Network.

jdaley 13y ago

To help others decode the acronyms, and to explain the situation... In 2009, the Australian Labor Party, in power as the federal government of Australia, initiated construction of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN). The network is replacing copper phone lines across Australia with a new fibre to the home (FTTH), also known as fibre to the premises (FTTP) network, meaning optical fibre will be run around the country, down every street, through every front yard, and into our houses (except some regional areas, where satellite will be used). Two days ago, a federal election was held. The Australian Labor Party was defeated by the Coalition, an alliance led by the other major political party in Australia - the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party's policy for the NBN is to build fibre to the node (FTTN) instead, meaning optical fibre will be run to cabinets on street corners, which will service small areas, but the existing copper lines will still be used for the "last mile". The petition is to convince the Liberal Party, now in power, to stick with the original plan of FTTH.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

Clark and Dawe had a go at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TptIs0k-spg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TptIs0k-spg I think they did another one too (Fibre To The Boat) but can't seem to find it. FTTN - Fibre To The Node FTTH - Fibre To The Home NBN - National Broadband Network

korynunn 13y ago

Yay for Github, Someone else did this for me.

Cameron_D 13y ago
You're welcome :)