[LINK] How far the fibre?

[Richard Chirgwin]

In another thread, Karl wrote:
> Well, duh. Why should people face that choice? Run fibre. Everywhere.
>   
Were I of a more incendiary personality, this may have signalled a 
flamewar. Instead, I did some research... and because this next bit is 
relevant, I kept it.
>> Yes, you get delay - 
>> but it is at least a backfill for places that simply can't get any other 
>> connectivity.
>>     
>
> Such places are very very few. If there's a road, there should be fibre.
> If there's power or rail, there DEFINITELY should be fibre.
>   
...So like I said, I did some research. Looking at WA, there are places 
whose distance to the nearest telephone exchange is measured in 
*hundreds* of kilometres - but people live there. I won't put a warranty 
on my calculation, but the distances involved look like around 500 km - 
Paris to London, then turn around and come back, and do it while pulling 
an optical fibre through extremely inhospitable country, so as to 
connect communities which would fit inside a respectable city hotel and 
still leave room for the APEC summit...

And leave lots of electronics in places that electronics don't 
particularly suit, and unlike the run across the Nullabour, do it in 
places where we don't even have transport stops to provide a semblance 
of civilisation for the techs that have to go out and fix things when 
the cables get rat-bitten or whatever (yes, it happens).

I don't think it will ever happen. Moreover, someone is going to have to 
answer the question "what's the distance limit to public funding for 
fibre-to-the-whatever?"

The problem is, in an air-travel and 4WD age, people really do 
under-estimate the scale of Australia. We forget that some people take 
longer to get to Perth by the best route available than you or I could 
fly to London.

So the fibre's going to stop somewhere. Who gets to decide where? Who 
gets to choose the rollout schedule? Who decides that some place on the 
edge of the Simpson Desert just isn't worth the effort? Or is the 
sponsorship of "fibre everywhere" vision limited to "enough fibre to 
satisfy the agitators, who will then be too busy with Bittorrent to 
worry about some dump on the east edge of the Simpson Desert?"

(And I guess there's a charge of, if not racism, at least indifference, 
that all participants in this debate, myself included, must at least 
answer: because of course the most remote places that nobody much cares 
about aren't full of urban whitefellas, are they?).

RC