[LINK] NBN to cost 24 times South Korea's faster network, says research body

[Birch, Jim]

Marghanita da Cruz wrote:

> There has to be some point at which congestion/contention becomes an
issue on the fibre.

There is but it's going to be resolved by upgrading the equipment and on
trunks by adding dark fibres to the link.

The theoretical capacity of the glass fibre itself is virtually infinite
but it's the capacity of the end equipment and routers that provides the
practical limit.  These have a cost trade-off so more dollars gives a
faster link.  The local speed chosen by the NBN reflects this cost
trade-off at the proposal time.   Over time the cost to speed decreases
so we can expect that the customer equipment will be replaced multiple
times over the lifetime of the NBN fibres.  That is, if we can come up
with the applications that use the bandwidth.   In the case of backbone
connections, multicore cable is laid that has redundancy and growth
capacity so there's both newer equipment or more fibres options.

Current maximum single fibre record* is around 69 TB/s which is a few
orders faster than what the NBN is offering to customers.  It's a bit
hard to see how that type of bandwidth could be used at home until
someone makes the machine that teleports totally intrepid travellers off
to holiday destinations (and the highly reliable receiving unit.)

- Jim

* multiplexing 432 wavelengths over 240 km, but not on your standard NBN
customer fibre, I guess.



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