Colin, I think the views of Ziggy Switkowski in the Oz, Harold Mitchell in the SMH and Paul Budde on his own website and elsewhere, all of whom are much closer to the issue than you and all of whom are more positive, are more persuasive than yours.

Even scarier are the statistics provided by Paul Kerin, professional fellow at Melbourne Business School, in today’s The Australian. Japan reached 100% FTTP 10 years ago, “but today’s FTTP penetration (subscriptions per 100 inhabitants) is 11.0%. “Most countries have neither FTTP, nor plans for it”.

The current EU system offers FTTP/N (premises/node). Their current penetration is just 0.2%. Even if Australia were able to achieve similar penetration to Japan in say ten years time, the cost per subscriber ($5,370) quoted by Collin Mullane would be ten times this or $53,750.

Given the alternate technologies available now and the option to grow current bandwidth organically based upon demand, I have to wonder what RuddPond is all about. Perhaps someone could let us know if this is a technological, political, economic or ideological solution.

"Given the alternate technologies available now and the option to grow current bandwidth organically based upon demand, I have to wonder what RuddPond is all about."

I don't think that's true. People can only make purchasing decision from the options available to them. For example, Europeans are always stunned to learn that we have per month caps on downloading, but we have no choice because the de facto telecommunications cartel likes to keep it that way.

Currently, customer demand comes second to the telco's reluctance to spend on infrastructure. But hopefully after the roll-out they'll have no more excuses to keep us a decade behind the rest of the world

Whilst the idea of the high speed network is a good one, what now is the defenition of "high speed'? 100mbs seems slow compared to what is available in other countries. Surely, if we are building this network from scratch it should be able to offer the highest speed available anywhere, and the headroom for expansion as technology develops. Anything less should not be acceptable.

Spindoc,

What are the "alternative technologies available now"? And is "growing current bandwidth organically" putting band-aids on band-aids? I have a friend in East Hills, Sydney who can't get ADSL despite living next door to a CityRail station! Is comparing FttH take-up in the last decade relevant to FttH take-up in the next decades given the scope for new users for the network?

I’m utterly baffled by the apparent support for the RuddPond proposal. It seems that the laser light of reality is unable to register.

Sancho, the Europeans to whom you refer as “stunned to learn that we have per month caps on downloading”, are they part of the 0.2% that have become subscribers to their FTTP/N system? Should we not be equally “stunned” at their abject lack of interest in their own available products?

Listohan, as to your friend who lives in East Hills, just give them a call and tell them about wireless broadband, if they can’t even get ADSL they will find the $39.90 per month stunning value and light years ahead of what they obviously have at the moment.

“Is comparing FttH take-up in the last decade relevant to FttH take-up in the next decades given the scope for new users for the network?”

I assume from this question you are challenging statistics you don’t like, namely those from disastrously low 11.0% subscriber support in Japan. You then reluctantly accept this in the second part of your question by suggesting the “scope for new users” as justification for going ahead.

Thanks to the internet we have all become experts in everything, and that’s good for OLO however, we also have to allow reality to emerge at some stage. Inventing justifications for the unjustifiable is futile. Why? because the government can’t/won’t provide any business case and seem unlikely to do so until perhaps late 2010. So what makes us think we can make sense of it?

I was in southern California in 1992 when the US cut the first trench for the “Information Superhighway”, a massive 100mm fiber optic bundle. I watched the launch of an AT&T satellite, one of many that can handle 1,770 channels. Civilian use seems unlikely to max out on current capacity until about 2030. And boy do they have the consumer products to bung down the pipe.

What RuddPond proposes is certainly visionary, sadly that’s all it’s got going for it, unless you’re a banker funding our national debt