[LINK] Telstra WiFi Network

[Paul Brooks]

On 22/05/2014 8:22 AM, Tom Worthington wrote:
> On 21/05/14 01:42, Stephen Loosley wrote:
>
>> ... Telstra ... showering the country with new modems for
>> broadband customers who choose to act as wi-fi hotspots using Fon ...
> A colleague of mine is a very enthusiastic user of Fon in Europe. This 
> is a system of WiFi equipped routers which share the bandwidth securely 
> between the customer who has the device in their home and nearby users: 
> http://blog.tomw.net.au/2008/12/la-fonera-20-linux-wireless-broadband.html
>
> It is unfortunate that a WiFi sharing facility was not built into the 
> NBN. That way customers would not need any extra equipment or cabling to 
> use the service.


...but it would be extra cost built into the construction cost of the NBN that would
be outside its charter and raison d'etre.
The NBN is already a camel - it doesn't need extra straw loaded on its back, lest the
camel's back breaks.


If NBN built such a WiFi facility in, it would be providing a retail service to
end-users which is inconsistent with the NBN charter. They would also need to put in
all the administrative, billing and OSS/BSS crap that is required when dealing direct
with end-users, which is a huge extra cost overhead. In this case, the FON system is a
function loaded into the consumer's WiFi-enabled broadband router - which NBN Co does
not (and should not) supply. If they did in order to do as you suggest, they would be
removing choice of the end-user in which broadband router they could use and dictating
gold-plating functionality to end-users and ISPs.

If they built it in as a facility to be wholesaled, they would need to do it in such a
way that it could be multi-tennanted and up to hundreds of ISPs could simultaneously
use the functionality to provide an ISP-labelled WiFi service - which is not a trivial
exercise.

For this NBN-enabled WiFi service to be of any practical use in improving
communications in the community NBN Co should install it in the outdoor plant, since
end-users can already install WiFi within their homes. However, until recently NBN Co
wasn't going to have any significant outdoor plant. Now they are doing FTTN with
outdoor cabinets polluting the footpaths every few hundred metres they probably could
- but then so could any of the ISPs.

Instead, it is fortunate the NBN concentrates on solving the problem it was created to
solve - lack of competition in last-mile connectivity - and lets each ISP wholesale
customer of NBN choose whether to install such a WiFi function themselves, at their
discretion and cost, and run it as a retail service as they see fit.

You could also say It is unfortunate that they also didn't don't build a bike-rack on
the side of the fibre cabinets, and a dog-poo bag dispenser as often seen in council
ovals, as a community service to help keep the country clean...and...and...and...but
the same arguments apply.