[LINK] Peter Martin Economist (?) blames Labor for NBN!

[Jim Birch]

$50 billion for a national FTTN network is a lot of money.  This very close
to the Australia's annual expenditure on road infrastructure.  The value
has been estimated at $280 billion.  I don't have a split for maintenance
v. improvement.

A per premise cost of $4k for FTTN as 25 years loan at 4% (the sort of rate
the the government borrows at) is about $250 per year per premise. Or
$5/week.  The FTTN network won't be zero maintenance but it is stable
infrastructure.

Obviously there is an opportunity cost question that would need to be
looked at, but given how much the Internet is used...  It would also be
interesting to have a figure on the annual maintenance cost of the copper
network.

This kind of long term cost v benefit investment consideration seems to be
lost to politics.

Jim

On 10 August 2017 at 10:38, David Lochrin <dlochrin at key.net.au> wrote:

> On Thursday 10 August 2017 at 09:50 Hamish Moffatt wrote:
>
> > Which bit of his argument do you disagree with?
>
> Right up front Peter Martin quotes "Australia's foremost
> telecommunications analyst" Ian Martin - any relation?
>
> "Let's be clear, technology is not the issue in slow speeds," he wrote in
> the Australian Financial Review this month. "Hybrid fibre coaxial and fibre
> to the node are well able to handle speeds of 50 megabits per second and
> 100Mbps or more. In some places the copper component is old and slow but
> this is not an issue across the board and can be dealt with other than by
> an expensive upgrade to fibre to the home nationally."
>
> How a technology performs under lab conditions is almost irrelevant to how
> it performs in the field, especially when it's implemented commercially.
> And neither HFC nor the copper network were engineered to be part of a
> broadband network in the first place.  The article is flawed from the
> beginning.
>
> We need more engineering and much less politics & economics.
>
> David L.
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