[LINK] The PLAN, and broadband speeds?

Adrian Chadd adrian at creative.net.au
Fri Jun 22 18:32:16 AEST 2007


On Fri, Jun 22, 2007, Craig Sanders wrote:

> i'm all in favour of high bandwidth to the home or office, FTTH (i think
> FTTN is a waste of money on infrastructure that will need to be replaced
> with FTTH in less than a decade).  the faster, the better.

*shrug* FTTN isn't a bad idea, it at least runs fibre out to distribution
points you can then run FTTN off.

> i just think that videophones are not the killer application that
> justifies it. i think they are, for the most part, a solution in
> desperate need of a problem.

There's plenty of applications for video conferencing. I've seen people
do videophone stuff over 3G, but the pricing certainly doesn't allow them
to do it all the time. I know people use videoconferencing for long distance
- eg talking to your family back home when you're overseas, saying hi to
your toddler kids, etc - there's definitely use. I believe whats missing
is a way to tie it all together and package it in a shiny bundle that
people want. (Think: Youtube wasn't unique, it certainly wasn't new,
but somehow it was the right thing at the right time..)

> and it's not technology, or even expense holding us back. it's monopoly
> interests kicking and screaming and lobbying hard to hold on to their
> monopoly. they know that eventually they will inevitably lose, but they
> want to hold on to it for as long as possible.
> 
> that's why we have volume charging in australia, and it's why telstra
> charges for upload as well as download volume. they're STILL trying to
> force the internet (an inherently P2P communications medium) into the
> same old service-provider vs consumer model of old media. it doesn't
> fit, never has fit, and never will fit....but they can drag it out for
> at least a few more years before conceding to the inevitable.

I think you'll find infrastructure costs hurt. It costs real money for
kit, it costs even more for fibre to exchanges, interstate bandwidth
(although birdies keep whispering the only pain in the butt is getting
bandwidth Perth<->anywhere!), and international transit is expensive.
ISPs are hell-bent on maintaining their existing infrastructure -
which rolls in money, right? - but doesn't scale to the sorts of
bandwidth numbers people here are throwing around.

Personally, I'd love to see P2P -viable- in Australia, by having
well-built broadband infrastructures that allow client-to-client chatting
without having to head through a central aggregation point like it
works now (for at least all the ISPs I've been peripherally involved with).
Its quite a departure from the current model which works fine - treat
ADSL as dialup infrastructure, and then shape wherever you can to
ensure your infrastructure doesn't develop hotspots at aggregation points
or links to exchanges.

Foster local content and local data exchange; rather than trying to push
everything out over international transit..

(That and why people haven't been rolling out perfectly functional web
caching technologies from the 21st century to get 20-30% more HTTP
traffic for free; and instead of shaping P2P as hard as possible look
at investing in an open source P2P cache project to actually work
-with- the high bandwidth apps, not against them. But then, I'm not
working for ISPs these days, i have no idea what goes on in peoples'
heads..)



Adrian




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