[LINK] Indonesia Overtaking Australia with Wireless Internet

[Tom Koltai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Jan Whitaker
> Sent: Sunday, 5 June 2011 5:54 PM
> To: link at anu.edu.au
> Subject: Re: [LINK] Indonesia Overtaking Australia with 
> Wireless Internet
> 
> 
> At 05:41 PM 4/06/2011, Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> 
> >The limit of radio waves cannot approach the limit of fibre.
> 
> Yes, I figured the physics of the thing would come into play here. 
> And that's the message that someone needs to get to the NBN deniers 
> in the Liberal party so they just SHUT UP. Demand is going to 
> continue to grow. I heard an interview with the Acting CEO NBNCo on 
> Alan Kohler's show this morning. Alan asked if NBNCO had figured in 
> the Netflix/Hulu phenomenon, and the guy said they had and are 
> counting on that to affect revenue to the positive. If those two 
> applications take off here as they have in the US, wifi is cactus, 
> and the R&R users are going to be asking some hard questions of their 
> conservative members of Parliament.

Hmmm. Whilst I'm an avid fibre fan, I also believe that we should be
leaving the copper alone.
But I suggest that we haven't yet seen the last of WiFi.

3G ? Probably.
LTE ? Possibly...
4G Wimax ? Maybe...
WiFi (Don't forget the 802.xx WiFi includes such fibreless wonders as
Bluetooth, Zigbee, as well as 1.6 Gbps millimetre band,

And the latest HTC Tablet ? No 3G, No 4G... WiFi Only.

I don't think we can close that door on WiFi yet.

Why, in the very near future we might even see such wonders as P2P WiFi
Networks... 
Can it replace the fibre ? Nope.
Can it replace all voice and commercial communications apart from high
speed ultra wideband video content ?
Sure.

UltraWideband... Hmmm, didn't I just see something on UWB WiFi just the
other day ? I believe I may have. OK, scratch the Video qualification, I
believe UWB at 62 GHz might just have that covered.

What a shame the AAPT chaps don't have any vision for their 28 GHZ LMDS
spectrum...

Jan we need the NBN for backhaul from our future WiFi IPV6 devices to
our homes but we certainly don't need it for anything else...
Even the carriers need the NBN to deliver PicoCell connectivity to their
3G and ersatz 4G (LTE) - soon to be without ROI - dying networks.

Can we justify the Fibre and do we need it ? Yes.
Can we afford NBNCo. ? Probably not if they disconnect the copper.

Australia needs distributed fibre. Preferably to each community. Cisco
claims that in three years the world will be transacting 14 Exabytes of
Data per month.
If Australia's data consumption maintains its global share (unlikely)
then we will each need approximately 300 Mbps. I don't know of any
wireless technology that can deliver that today.

One thing that I did learn running ISP's in the nineties (and
Trailblazer 9.6's in the eighties)... No matter what bandwidth you
offered your users, it was never ever enough.

TomK