[LINK] What I don't like about Turnbull's NBN

[Frank O'Connor]

This whole thread seems to have become politicised (hey, when Alan Jones unimaginative and spiteful 'Juliar' appellation makes an appearance in any debate you know we've reached the lowest nadir possible), and gotten away from the relative technical limitations inherent in Turnbull's NBN ... so, I just thought I'd whack something out there for consideration that is hopefully technically and politically neutral:

So, what's not to like?

1. Less bandwidth. Way less bandwidth. A max of 50 MBs vs 1 Gbs or better. Can anyone here seriously imagine that they will be happy with 50 Mbs or 100 Mbs in 10 years time? (At the moment, right out here in the boondocks I get a consistent 10-11 Mbs on ADSL 2 ... 10 years back I got less than a 10th of that in the inner city.)

2. Relies on badly decayed copper that even Telstra has admitted was effectively falling apart. The only reason they haven't dumped the copper is because it's still worth about $30 per month in line rental per subscriber ... but maintenance wise Telstra much prefers its mobile network.

3. Adds another 60,000 major prospective points of failure (the cabinets) to the 4-5 million minor prospective points of failure (the last yard of decayed copper) that already exist. Doesn't exactly make me confident about its reliability.

5. Ensures a high maintenance infrastructure regime that will need to be progressively repaired and replaced over the years. Turnbull has somewhat optimistically included $9 billion in addition to the $20 billlion construction cost to account for this. I think it will be much higher than this ... especially if power and heat in the cabinets will be a problem, and the cabinets hence be filled with moving parts (fans etc.) to dissipate same. Water, wind, fire, flood and other weather factors also carry their own penalty with high power cabinets left out in the elements ... and that's a real concern here in the boondocks.

6. Probably won't scale as well as Turnbull estimates, and the signal attenuation and drop-off is much higher than he estimates. Only those living right on top of the cabinets (read ... just outside their door) will get 40-50Mbs ... the other 80 to 100 or so clients per cabinet will get from there down to 5 Mbs ... with I estimate a mean value of about 10-15 Mbs.

7. Has high fixed costs inherent in the architecture.  Probably 100 times more power/energy intensive than the full fibre alternative, 

8. Attempts to marry two essentially incompatible mediums (fibre and copper, light and charge, ) which brings the end performance down to what a copper only network could be expected to do under the current regime.

9. Has little in the way of vision or imagination ... what we'll be getting is pretty much the same as we've got now, but some people will have up to twice the speed the currently get. Doesn't take into account asynchronous performance and applications which would use same, multiple people and/or hardware items in the same premises using high bandwidth applications on the Net simultaneously, the multi-casting joys of IPv6, the move away from the media broadcast model toward a model which consumers control when, where, what and how they listen to, watch or otherwise experience media and multi-media, or health, education and other applications which REQUIRE two way high bandwidth communications etc etc. The Turnbull assumption seem to be that nothing is going to evolve in the next 10 years, no new applications will appear, and people will be happy doing the same thing as always ... whereas experience over the last 10-20 years is far different.

10 As a value-for-money proposition ... compared with the existing NBN ... it fails multiple tests. Need more speed in the future? Well, we'll upgrade the puppy to fibre to the premises ... at the users costs of course. And at $2-4000 per home and with say 10 million homes on the network that can be done for another $40 billion or so ... of course it won't be a tax to do it, it'll be a charge.

11. Given it's high repair and maintenance overheads I can't see how the Turnbull network could attract the premium price that a low maintenance high performance full fibre network would. I mean, with a basically 'trapped' clientele the full fibre NBN would be worth big bucks to interested enterprises or shareholders from Day 1 ... because they'd know it would last and see out any conceivable bandwidth demands for at least 50 years, it would be essentially low maintenance and have low overheads. 

Turnbull's NBN? Not even a quarter as attractive. By the time they got around to selling it (say 2019 or 2020) it would be obsolete and under strain. Whoever bought it would have to either sink a mint into it converting to full fibre, or have to convince a pretty hostile customer base that the customer themselves paying for it would be a good idea.

There's probably a heap of other reasons that Turnbull's NBN stinks ... and feel free to add to them or critique the one's I've given ... but the one's above are what stick out in my mind.

Nah ... 'Mr Broadband' is on a loser with this puppy. The term 'Mr Broadband' will probably become synonymous with 'loser' or 'moron' in future. "Turnbull" could come to mean mentally challenged.

It's wonderful how language develops ...