[LINK] NBN is FTTH

[Frank O'Connor]

At 4:13 PM +1000 7/4/09, David Boxall wrote:
>
>OK, so it will take 8 years and reach 90% of premises. What happens in
>the interim? What happens at the edges?

Wireless and other technologies (that will no doubt improve over the 
next 8 years) will fill in some of the rural gaps, satellite and 
other less constrained by LOS technologies will cater for others, 
Telstra might get off its butt and try to steal a march on the NBN 
... who knows? The possibilities are endless.

>
>Could DSL technologies be employed to provide bandwidth higher than
>wireless can manage beyond the limits of the fibre, both as it pushes
>out and where it eventually stops? I have 9.5 km of copper between my
>home and a RIM (see entry dated Monday, 2 February 2004 in
><http://david.boxall.id.au/ISDN.html>). It's possible the fibre that
>currently stops at the RIM will be extended to within DSL distance of my
>place. Then again, Telstra owns that infrastructure, so maybe not.

FTTH to your place (under the new NBN) would probably be the goer. 
Any way you look at it, ADSL over copper has serious distance from 
exchange issues.

>
>What about other fibre that Telstra's installed over the years (see
>entry dated Friday, 30 January 2004 at the same URL and entries dated
>from 9 August 2003 in <http://david.boxall.id.au/Phone1.html>)? There's
>no commercial incentive for Telstra to donate their asset to a network
>it won't control. Unless the government's going to commandeer it.

Mmmm ... Telstra might actually have to do something with all that 
fibre. ''Use it or lose it' ... How sad.

>
>Looks like a lot of infrastructure will be duplicated. That seems a bit
>of a waste, but might be the path of least resistance.

True. But the last time Telstra 'pushed the envelope' as they say ... 
network wise at least ... was back in the mid 1980's when they 
finished laying the fibre to 'within 700 feet of most homes' in 
Australia. They never did anything with that fibre. They never took 
it to the next level. They never even looked like doing FTTH ... 
which was the plan in the 80's  ... that got dropped when bean 
counters rather than engineers took over the network. It was supposed 
to replace that copper we're still paying hideous amounts of line 
rental on. But a captive market will still pay heaps of line rental 
for existing copper .... until mobiles come in and there goes you 
client lock in. So waiting on the market (when only one player was 
seriously in the market) to work for us wasn't a winning strategy.

Telstra penny ante'd it's way out of hundreds of thousands of 
customers and did little or nothing for the future of the network.

>Wireless is of limited use in my (mountainous) area. For example, I'm
>less that 3 km from a Telstra tower, but 3G (or NextG) service is weak
>to none. For my neighbours, 100 metres away, it's reliably none.
>

As I said ... FTTH looks like your best option, and with the new NBN 
that looks like happening. (Under the old NBN we'd have had FTTN and 
you'd have been left in the dust.)

The other alternative would be satellite, but that currently peaks at 
about 400 KBs from memory which is a long way from what FTTH (or even 
current urban solutions ... ADSL and cable) can do, and the providers 
seem to charge like wounded bulls for it.

						Regards,