[LINK] Four Corners NBN

[David Boxall]

On 12/04/2011 12:53 AM, Frank O'Connor wrote:
> Nice presentation, but seems to me that the 'rift' and conflict is
> ideological and not based on communications/physics facts.
>
> Everybody seems to think that more bandwidth and better network is
> good ... the nay-sayers tried to bring out the wireless turkey again,
> but this was not accepted by the program.
>
> Other (less visionary shall we say) commentators said we should be
> building for now, not 10 years down the track .. and one guy (Malcolm
> Turnbull's ex attack dog now resident in Europe) ... said the
> European experience was that only 17% elected to take it up when
> offered to them. (17% in 18 months - when the European fibre network
> is still only 40% built ... not bad I would have thought.)
>
> Yeah, heaps better to build a hodge-podge of interconnected networks
> using heavily obsolescent technology with the same old peering and
> other inefficiencies as we've had in the past.
>
> Turnbull and others pointed out that private enterprise is always
> better and can do these things more efficiently, and the whole NBN
> thing was a government monopoly secured by legislation that prevented
> the private sector from cherry-picking its way to profit ... whilst
> presumably expecting the government to socialise the loss making
> geographic and social sectors if that cherry picking hadn't been
> prohibited.
> ...
Privatise the profits and socialise the losses; it's the market 
extremist way. Tellingly, such extremism relies on socialising the 
losses; it can't exist without socialist support.

 From <http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2011/s3188338.htm>:
STEPHEN CONROY: The market has conspicuously failed. The market cannot 
deliver ubiquitous, cheap and affordable access to broadband across the 
whole country. It hasn't happened, won't happen and it won't happen in 
the future. John Howard gave 11 and a half years of opportunity for the 
market to fix this problem, and it failed.

...
> Nobody pointed out that past major infrastructure projects ... from
> roads and public transport, to telecommunications (in the days of the
> old PMG), to hospitals and health, and the rest were all built by
> government. ...

Actually, they did:
DAVID KENNEDY: One thing I think we can say is that every big 
infrastructure in this country - the electricity grid, the rail network, 
the road network, the old telephone network - have all been built or led 
by government on the sort of cross subsidy model that the NBNCo also 
embodies.

And a couple of paragraphs down from that:
PHIL BURGESS: Australia is the only country in the world, the only 
country in the world that has renationalised its Telco network. That 
ought to tell you a bundle right there.

It tells me that Australia is the first country in the world to do 
something about correcting its blunder in privatising vital national 
infrastructure.

>
> And that's why our communications infrastructure is what it is today
> ... basically reliant on infrastructure put into the ground by
> government (under the aegis of the PMG and then Telstra before it was
> privatised), laying all that copper, building all those exchanges,
> laying all that fibre up to 1997 ... everything that's been done
> since has been playing around the edges, maximising use of an
> existing infrastructure. Sure mobiles and wireless are new ... but
> they don't involve a fraction of the setup costs and effort that the
> original (and still the core) infrastructure did. And the cash cow up
> until recently has been fixed line and exchange based comms ...
>
> Private industry simply couldn't or wouldn't do an NBN. Telstra maybe
> could have done it ... but they elected not to do so for more than 20
> years, they elected not to bid for the initial NBN project, and they
> basically sat on their hands and invested in multiple failed overseas
> investments as an alternate investment policy over the years. Telstra
> couldn't afford it today.
>
> So, was Four Corners a wasted opportunity?
>
> No. I liked the explanation of the possibilities of fibre using
> 'colours' instead of 'channels' as a geek would have explained it. I
> liked seeing the experience of remote users with high bandwidth
> fibre, of the difficulties faced by that cystic fibrosis lady in
> Bendigo under the current 'high bandwidth' environment, of the bloke
> employing 600-700 people in the bush in a photo-processing company,
> of how ADSL performance falls off rapidly with distance, of the
> realties and limitations of our current communications environment. I
> knew about them before, but I doubt Joe Public did.
> ...

I found the biosecurity angle interesting.
JEMMA BERGFELD: It's going to be crucial for Australia's bio-security 
industries because the quicker we can diagnose diseases, the faster we 
are able to prevent their spread.

STEPHEN LONG: It's is a high security site. Scientists go through 
airlocks to analyse diseases such as the hendra virus and foot and 
mouth. Now they can beam images to colleagues outside the barrier, and 
right across the country.

JEMMA BERGFELD: The resolution of this image is absolutely amazing.

STEPHEN LONG: But it requires big broadband. The plan is to link 
multiple sites but just linking with Sydney chews up the bandwidth.

SYDNEY TECHNICIAN: ...We're peaking here the highest performance of the 
network so that's basically 40/50 megabits that have transferred across 
the sites here.

STEPHEN LONG: The real breakthrough will come when farms have fast 
broadband connections and vets in the field can beam back high quality 
images of sores on sick animals.

JEMMA BERGFELD: Particularly with disease like foot and mouth disease 
where you've only got 24 hours to diagnose the disease and put in 
control measures, being able to see the lesions as they are occurring on 
the animal in a remote location is going to be absolutely crucial.

...
> It won't stop the hoo-hah, it won't stop the self-interested turf
> protecting local press, it won't stop other self-interested parties
> from trying defend existing turfs, it won't stop the Sydney and
> Melbourne shock jocks, and it won't stop the politics.
>
> But it was a reasonably good relatively unbiased coverage of the issues.
>
> Definitely worth a watch on iView if you missed it.
> ...

More at:
<http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/national-broadband-network/>
 From one of the slides on that page:
> 1975
>
> Telecommunications and postal functions are separated with the passing of the Telecommunications Act. The result is the Australian telecommunications Commission trading as Telecom Australia.
>
> A fibre-optic cable network is predicted to be Australia's future in a new report titled, 'Telecom 2000'.

The 4 Corners report gave a bit of the history that led to 
fibre-to-the-premises, which we tend to forget (some of us deliberately).

-- 
David Boxall                    |  Dogs look up to us
                                |  And cats look down on us
http://david.boxall.id.au       |  But pigs treat us as equals
                                                    --Winston Churchill