[LINK] tRe: NBN white-elephant-to-be ...

[Kim Holburn]

On 2010/Aug/26, at 3:23 PM, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:

> Kim Holburn wrote:
> <snip>
>> Because those towers, nodes need to be connected to something to  
>> be  useful and what we use to do this today is fibre.
>
> so, how will that change...though I think there are also
> microwave connections, which someone else implied in
> their comments,  somewhere in this thread.

I said, maybe others.  Microwave I think is dying out.  Replaced by  
fibre.  Fibre just has so much bandwidth, and pretty much noise free  
and low maintenance bandwidth.  Not affected by rain, storms.  (But  
can be affected by backhoes!) I imagine you could rent a 45Mb pipe in  
a fibre much cheaper than all those towers, all that adjusting,  
maintenance etc.  Say between Canberra and Sydney, how many towers,  
how many relays, how much power for say 45Mb compared to one fibre?   
Maybe a relay or two but all but built in to the cable.  In a dense  
city, fibre unlike microwave, can't go rogue and gently warm people.

>> Not sure where you're going with that.  You can use radio while   
>> driving but TV?  Dangerous!  TV as such has simply not ever been  
>> as  flexible as radio.  Not until youtube and broadband.  Not until  
>> 4G and  skype.
>
> It was to illustrate the difference between mobile and
> stationary wireless reception. Note, we can now receive
> radio signals on our tv...however, I am not sure these
> signals can be received reliably in a moving vehicle.
> Whether you want to watch tv, talk on your mobile phone or
> text in your moving vehicle is a different issue.


I don't know about you but I wouldn't accept the kind of service and  
reliability we've come to know and love on the mobile network for a  
serious internet connection.

As for mobile, I can't imagine that free-to-air TV would work very  
well in a car, certainly not on a trans-city journey.  As soon as you  
move out of range of a city all the channel frequencies would change.   
Not designed for it.  Listening to an audio broadcast on a TV channel  
is a waste of bandwidth and processing power.

On the other hand I've seen and talked about a new kind of car radio  
that uses a 3G+ internet connection to allow you to listen to hundreds  
of internet radio stations and possibly podcasts.  That is seriously  
better than what we have now with local radio broadcasts.  Of course  
it wouldn't work in Australia because of download caps and costs  
largely because Telstra owns most of our pipes to overseas.  Sigh.

-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
T: +61 2 61402408  M: +61 404072753
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