[LINK] web: The NBN satellite Malcolm Turnbull never, wanted prepares for liftoff

[Chris Johnson]

Sorry you cannot simply distinguish technical difficulties as being
binary (everything is technically possible, or not) because technical
solutions come with differing costs - which is not solely a political
issue.   Doing the engineering for any problem means finding a
technically feasible and sufficient solution at an acceptable cost (in
dollars and on other bottom lines like human lives risked in
construction, environmental damage, skills required). So "fibre
everywhere" may be "technically" feasible but not at an acceptable cost
- it's silly to call this politics alone, it's an real engineering
consideration. (The Star Wars defence system was considered technically
feasible (by some) but would have required a large number of technical
breakthroughs at unknown cost and time required. That's political if you
like.) But calling any consideration of cost "political" is itself a
statement about expectations of politics as practised. Politics and
economics are part of the collective toolkit for accounting and helping
to make judgements about how much human effort we as a communityare
willing to expend for something - and having fibre go past is not the
same as terminating - unlike old coaxial cable ethernet, you can't just
vampire-tap into fibre at any point along the way.

Karl Auer wrote:

On Tue, 2015-09-01 at 11:34 +1000, David Boxall wrote:
>> On 31/08/2015 10:39 PM, Andy Farkas wrote:
>>> I'm in rural Queensland. Fibre is not an option.
> The idea that some places "just can't be reached by fibre" is just plain
> wrong. (I know you didn't say that Andy - your email was just the
> trigger for my rant :-)
>
> There is almost no place on earth that cannot be reached by fibre. It
> can certainly reach any spot that a human can reach, and many more
> besides. We have fibre running over mountains, THROUGH mountains,
> through forests, across the depths of the oceans, running thousands of
> kilometres underground and underwater, not to mention strung on poles
> here and there. About the only area where as far as I know there is no
> fibre is in the arctic and antarctic regions.
>
> Getting fibre to some places is more expensive than others, and some
> environments are more hostile to fibre than others, but there is
> literally NO technical impediment to connecting any square centimetre of
> Australia we like by fibre.
>
> Can we PLEASE stop assuming that the difficulties are technical? They
> are political, and only ever were.
>
> Regards, K.
>

-- 
Chris Johnson PhD MACS CP MIEEE
p 02 6282 1993
m 0401 498 684
e chris.johnson at anu.edu.au