[LINK] How far the fibre?

[Glen Turner]

On Sun, 2007-07-01 at 18:39 +1000, Richard Chirgwin wrote:

> ...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...

Hi Richard,

The extremely inhospitable bit is pushing it.  A hot and dry climate
is almost ideal for direct-bury fibre, which is something you can't
do in more populated areas.

> 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).

It's not the transport, techs have trucks and helicopters are cheap
to hire.  It's the electricity.  If it doesn't have power than a
simple regeneration hut becomes a $1m exercise in solar power.

The other problem is that manufacturers don't make kit for Australia,
they make it for the USA.  The USA has all the regeneration huts in
place that it will ever need, so there's no pressure on designers
for long hauls, unless they can double the current regeneration
distance (ie, skip half the huts).

Also, we'd happily swap bandwidth for greater reach, but that's
not a tradeoff that would work in the US marketplace so there's no
gear addressing that feature.

The metro fibre gear is the equipment that is pushing reach out
to several hundred Km. But you've got all the issues of buying
from start-ups with that kit.

> 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.

The other problem is that laws are made in the city, to benefit the
city.  As an example, the council built the road, probably based on
a exploration road the mining company put in. But when the council
takes over that mining road it has to remove any telecommunications
infrastructure the mining company may have installed.

I do think it's well possible to have fibre throughout RARA, but
not under the existing Telco Act. Fibre needs to move from an
asset which the Telco Act reserves for the use of telcos, to
something that all infrastructure providers (councils, elcos,
farmers themselves) can install, own and operate.

Unfortunately, that won't be popular. The monopoly on fiber
construction is a major parts of a telco's value.

The rules also need to differ between city and country. In
the city we have the reverse problem -- some streets are
so continually torn up to provide fibre access that the
street's ability to provide transportation is removed.

Later you wrote:

> My point is that while Internet delivery may improve these
> applications, 
> it is not indivisible from them. In the case of telemedicine, I would 
> argue that at least in diagnostic applications, the "best case" is a 
> high-capacity clear channel link, not an Internet service ... but
> that's a digression.

That's actually been really interesting to watch. Hospitals have
put major money into direct links. But they have been very
uneconomic and slow compared to a VPN across the Internet.

ISDN videoconferencing is pretty much relegated to being a
training tool, whereas the much better definition of IP
videoconferencing seems to allow a reasonable remote
consultancy (although not as good as being there).  I've
experimented with HD videoconferencing up to Darwin and
the doctors were delighted, not so much with the resolution,
but the lack of lag and the accurate colour rendering.
If that holds more widely you're looking at fibre to
hospitals as the basis for remote consultancy.

I've had a surprising number of gov't IT people questioning
me closely about making the Internet service and VPN of
hospitals resilient to nastiness. I must say that there
seem to be a lot of dodgy companies trying to sell stuff
into that market (appealing to the "one box to fix your
concerns" weakness of management when faced with a
technology question).

Cheers, Glen