[LINK] How fast is the NBN?

[Paul Brooks]

On 26/02/2016 8:30 AM, Tom Worthington wrote:
>  
>
> The first mile of fiber is cheap to install. The expensive part is getting the fiber
> from the street into people's homes. It is much easier to put an antenna on a pole
> outside in the street.
Easier? perhaps. Cheaper? probably not, since you've got to do a truck-roll or two anyway.

How about this Tom - deploy this radio network of yours, and we'll appoint you Chief
Maintenance Officer. You'll be responsible for the cost of the vast fleet of repair
vans, spares holdings, warehousing, and technicians to keep all those radio
transceivers and antennas all running, fixing all the blown power supplies and
transceivers after lightning strikes within CSG timeframes, and then you can press the
'go' button each time the firmware in the radio transceivers on the poles needs to be
updated and reflashed, hoping you've ensured compatibility with the units inside the
homes so that all the millions of radio links come back up again once their reboot
cycle completes - because you're also responsible for the call-centre that will take
the complaint calls when the radio links break.

> Six laptops seems a lot for the average home of less than three people. I doubt that
> they will have any laptops or desktops in the future. All you need is a docking
> station for your mobile device, to connect it to a large screen and keyboard.

'average home of less than three people'? - thats like saying the average human being
has precisely one boob AND one testicle, and then building a factory to make clothes
for that average person - I would hazard a guess that actual homes of three people
don't form a large proportion of homes. I do know that in my household of 4 people we
have three desktops, four laptops, plus tablets and phones - and that doesn't count
the obsolete ones that aren't turned on much - because devices are generally cheap
enough that you can use one appropriate to your needs at the time.