[LINK] fibre distance issues?

[Richard Chirgwin]

Craig Sanders wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 07:37:17AM +1000, Richard Chirgwin wrote:
>   
>> Not all communities have power, and many of them have roads that
>> demand a very loose definition. To the power question: the national
>> retail electricity grid does not have 100% coverage. Many places rely
>> on local diesel generators or, increasingly, solar.
>>     
>
> yes. it's silly to let the debate about comms infrastructure be hijacked
> by extreme cases that are NEVER going to be adequately served (by city
> standards).
>
> if we can reach 90, 95, 98% of the population with FTTN (or better,
> FTTH) then we should do so. the rest of the population are special cases
> that should get what makes most sense for their situation.
>   
Thanks for the voice of reason ... your thoughts about housing are also 
worth a short observation (excuse the snip).

[snip]
> e.g. every time i see video on TV about remote communities, i look at
> the houses and wonder why they're such dreadful brick and fibro shacks
> - it would be cheaper and better to build strawbale houses. excellent
> insulation, cheap building materials, cheap house design (basically a
> post-and-beam structure with rendered strawbale wall infill), and an
> abundance of dirt for a mud-render.
>   
This is heresay, but I trust my nephew's care with facts and it's 
probably a good thumbnail.

Those appalling brick and fibros you see in the outstations cost about 
half a million, simply because of the cost of transport. This has an 
interesting impact re the intervention: some bright spark in Canberra 
wants people to pay "market rents" to occupy them, forgetting that if 
you start with a house with capital cost of $500,000, the market rent is 
vastly greater than for the same house 10km from Darwin, where it may 
have cost less than $200,000 to build.

Adobe is actually an ideal "arid zone" building material if you're not 
earthquake-prone. Or hell, if we want to insist on modern materials 
(because there will always be some people screaming "racist" if you 
suggest alternative techniques for aborigines), then autoclaved concrete 
blocks are cheaper to transport and better insulators...

RC
> transporting strawbales might be expensive, but not when compared to
> transporting bricks or other mainstream construction materials.
>
> with sufficient water, mud-brick houses are an option too.
>
> another advantage is that the "plasticity" of the mud-render would
> allow the occupants to make each house a work of art, the mud can be
> manipulated into any shapes or patterns before it dries - encouraging
> emotional investment in the housing and reducing vandalism (people
> vandalise what is ugly, what they don't value)
>
> and repairing damage is just slapping on another coat of render. easily
> done by unskilled labour - probably the occupants themselves.
>
> IMO, a lot of good could be done by sending teams of experienced
> strawbale and mudbrick builders up there to run workshops teaching the
> communities how to build their own cool, efficient (eg simple stuff like
> passive solar design, north-facing, wide eaves/verandahs, etc) houses
> using local materials.
>
> of course, housing and overcrowding aren't the only problems in remote
> communities - not by a long shot - but they are significant.
>
> craig
>
>