So you have lost control of your family, It won't be compolsory to connect , only the ones that want to..

"It won't be compolsory to connect"

http://www.comparebroadband.com.au/article_730_Conroy-we-will-use-federal-law-to-make-NBN-connections-compulsory.htm

Also, even if the government were not making it compulsory, employers may, or schools, and there is likely to be much pressure from class-mates as well.

Although the "only" compulsory part is installing the NTU box on the side of your home, the slippery-slope is there for Young-Master to want what his little "friends" have, to make demands and throw tantrums. Not all parents have the strength to resist - and even for those who can, why add that burden? why introduce this plague in the first place? also, not all parents have the understanding of the dangers, so as it says in the bible (Leviticus 19:14), "Thou shalt not place an obstacle in front a blind person".

Hmm. The same old arguments about country imposing on city dwellers.... as though communication was a one-way process, and only country callers benefit from city-country communications.

It's as though potatoes just pop up on the fringes of the city, and people don't have to call country areas to get supplies. And when city people outnumber the country people by a sizeable ratio, maybe there are grounds for believing there are actually more city people initiating comms on some "country" circuits than there are country people starting them? Last time I worked at the city markets, there were more calls going out than coming in.

Clearly I don't know anything about communication and computers, after about 30 years working in the area. Interesting that no one has noticed that operating systems which used to fit into 4k of memory (CP/M) and later 650k of memory (MSDOS) now take up megabytes because they do more complicated things and are compiled in more memory-expensive ways. Or that things like total capacities of updates for these systems get bigger as the systems get more complicated. Or that the application programs that run on them are actually thousands of times larger than their forebears. (And in binary data, which still doesn't compress all that brilliantly, last time I looked.)

Interesting to find that it's apparently irrelevant that the ADSL solution is asynchronous, so that acclaimed "satisfactory" speeds talked about seem to ignore once again that communication is a two-way street, and uploads don't work like downloads.

Wonder why there's a popular commercial market for terabyte storage capacities in hard disk while there's apparently no reason to believe real time data communications requirements might have to increase at about the same rate as the storage media?

Tried backing up a terabyte data disk to remote backup via ADSL? Nah.. you probably just ship the disk by courier. That'd make more sense.

'Interesting that no one has noticed that operating systems which used to fit into 4k of memory (CP/M) and later 650k of memory (MSDOS) now take up megabytes because they do more complicated things and are compiled in more memory-expensive ways. Or that things like total capacities of updates for these systems get bigger as the systems get more complicated. Or that the application programs that run on them are actually thousands of times larger than their forebears. (And in binary data, which still doesn't compress all that brilliantly, last time I looked.) '

Yep, grandpa on the farm needs all that doesn't he. As I said, those companies that need it already have the bandwidth necessary. Fibre doesn't have to go to the home.

'Tried backing up a terabyte data disk to remote backup via ADSL?'

Who would need to do that? Oh right, grandpa wants to back up his life time photo album off site.

Terrible systems design in the first place. Who creates a new terrabyte of data to be remotely backed up every day. Ever heard of incremental backups?

I noticed you side-stepped the cultural reasons rather than technical reasons nobody works from home. You're definitely no salesman. I'd love someone to come up with a convincing argument for us to have this new toy.

Hey maybe the governmnet could fund every family with a Terabyte portable had drive and save millions! Maybe even a fire proof safe for the garage!

> Yep, grandpa on the farm needs all that doesn't he. As I said, >those companies that need it already have the bandwidth necessary. >Fibre doesn't have to go to the home.

"Grandpa on the farm"? What kind of ignorant patronizing irrelevance is that?

People on farms and mining people in regional towns want to use computers more and more for weather, geographical and market data. Ever seen any geographical files or tried to download them via mobile or slow ADSL? Get real! There are enterprises all around the country that could make good and productive use of loads of data of these kinds if only they had the chance. They certainly don't have the bandwidth available. Get out of the city and open your eyes a bit, sonny.

(See? Patronizing's catching!)

Incremental backups ?

If for example, you had a land information office located in somewhere like Bathurst NSW, and someone there could work from home, I wouldn't be at all surprised if a single delta from some of that work ran to at least half a terabyte, and possibly more. Check on the size of the original files they are dealing with, daily.

That may be an extreme case. But there are similarly huge data requirements growing all the time.

BTW, last time I looked, there was a Land and Information centre in Bathurst, NSW.

Probably got some grandpas there, too.

Examples of huge data sources and rapidly expanding requirements are all around us.

A reasonable expectation of regional development is that companies and organizations can move to regional areas. So why aren't regional "grandpas" just as entitled to work from home without being sneered at ?

Nobody is entitled to work from home. As I've said repeatedly, bosses hate workers, and just don't trust them. Otherwise the traffic in Sydney would be no problem at all. My company could save thousands on rent as we get about 1 visitor to our office a month, and we have 1 meeting a week if that. The available bandwidth has zero to do with people not working from home.

Anyway besides the fact there is no trust in the majority of workplaces, when someone deals with a company, they want to go to an actual office and see the size of the company they're dealing with, proof that they have employees etc.

This working from home is pie in the sky stuff, like the paperless office.

I can rattle off about 50 people I know who don't need and will never need more than 1MB connection but they'll all have fibre to their homes. Waste of money. Like having a secretary who uses Word and Excel sometimes having a $20k server at her desk. These people have at least 30 years to live and half of them don't even own a computer and those that do barely have the ability to read the 2 emails they receive a week.