Re: The Lounge Wi-Fi Speedtest Thread
I hope he's too busy not planning to spend my taxes on infrastructure that goes beyond what's necessary for most punters. Giving everyone a taxpayer-paid Ferrari when I only actually need a BMW 7 Series is beyond a waste, especially with the current budgetary situation. If anyone wants a Ferrari instead, they should spend their own money.
We won't agree I suspect, and not to hijack the thread, but presently I run my two (small, laptop and personal interaction based) businesses perfectly well off the 3G network because I live out-of-town and don't have ADSL even. (And neither premises will get the NBN!) Would love to have greater speed, but I do get by perfectly well. When I'm in Canada or Germany I get access to much higher speeds, but my laptop work honestly doesn't get 2x or 3x or 10x more efficient or productive. I'd rather go much faster and have it cost a bundle, than going faster again where the cost is commensurately greater but I can't actually notice the difference. (and others use for fiber speeds acknowledged - just talking about my own uses / opinions.)
/me bangs head against the table repeatedly.
1) The NBN
is beyond what most "punters" need now, but it won't be in the (not too distant) future. On the "punter" front, it's being built for 5-10 years time, and then the 40 years after that. Unfortunately these things take time to build, so you gotta start early. Plus, there are also
plenty of other business, education, health, etc uses for it that are relevant
right now. And not to mention, this sort of network being available
will drive the development of applications for it - if the internet-age-to-date has taught us nothing else, it's taught us that.
2) The NBN is clearly not being built for you, in the sense of how you use the internet for your business now. Nor is it built for the way those Australians who have access to decent broadband use it now. If technology / infrastructure was planned like that, we'd all still be living in the stone age. Just because
you can't see a use for it now, doesn't make it worthless.
3) The NBN is not a drain on the budget - it's a money-making enterprise that will pay for itself and more, even on conservative estimates. It's not counted in the budget, it's funded by debt (which it will pay back), and from a monetary perspective at least it's not realistically preventing any spending on anything else. There was extensive discussion of this earlier in the thread, including references, etc - suggest having a look back through them. I'll also add that the coalition's FTTN proposal will at some point in the not too distant future need to be upgraded again to FTTH, and I strongly suspect the total cost of the two upgrades will far surpass the NBN's cost (but also acknowledge that's just my suspicion - I haven't seen any detailed analysis done).
4) The NBN is not the "Ferrari". The "Ferrari" would be point-to-point fibre to the home, which the NBN is not (it's GPON - a kind of shared fibre). Ironically, I'd say the NBN
is probably the 7 Series in your example. The coalition's FTTN proposal is perhaps a 10 year old Commodore - works fine right now, but needs constant maintenance, doesn't do anything well other than being basic and functional, and will need to be replaced in the near future. The current situation... I don't think I need to keep drawing car analogies here.
the alternatives being offered by the 2 major parties only differ in whether we go much faster or super-dooper fast.
I've picked this part of your post out specifically as it's just so... wrong. Not a shred of opinion here, just fact.
The NBN is:
- theoretically much faster right now (and more so in the future), as you pointed out
- in practice much faster, as whatever speed is quoted is what you get - no "up to x mbps, but it'll be slower depending upon where you live / how good your phone line is / whatever"
- incredibly upgradeable, and more important easily and cheaply upgradeable (e.g. 1,000mbps is coming later this year, and with fibre far faster is possible in the future)
- far closer to being symmetrical in the connection speed it offers (actually not truly symmetrical for consumers though, which is a common misconception) - you may not appreciate this now, this is becoming more and more important
- reliable, as it's not at all reliant upon the
ancient and severely under-maintained copper network
The alternative NTTN solution is
none of these things.
To finish on a more positive note, despite my head-banging above, I am
so pleased that you didn't say we should just do it wirelessly instead - and even more pleased that the coalition seems to have
finally dropped this piece of stupidity too.