Nobody knows!

How much will I pay for the use of the NBN?

Will I have to pay for it even if I don't use it? Happens with other services!

Are we really in a position to take such a gamble?

Do you think our youth, our future, will sacrifice their freedom (mobile network) for a bit more speed (land line Internet)?

I think most would agree that the majority of us are at financial breaking point, and interest rates are reasonably low.

Can we afford both? Especially since we look like having yet another tax.

Will it not make it easier for much of our 'IT' work to be taken off shore, along with our jobs? Much of our manufacturing is now being out sourced. Won't this make that easier?

Does anyone trust labor to administer this monster without stuffing it up?

Given the revelations of the past week or so, do you all think madam PM is telling us the truth about NBN?

Can we afford to place this huge amount on our credit card and hope we can pay it back, or hope it works?

Ultimately, what happens if it fails?

A lot of questions there, but all hypothetical.
What makes you think it will be law to connect.
Gas meters are treated the same way, all new houses have a gas meter if you want it or not. That doesn't mean you have to use gas.
A big part of the fiber optic cable cost, is the expensive joining technique. To have these joins done as it happens, will be better in the longer term.
The cable will be available for you to connect, or it will be available for the next tennant to connect if wanted.
For the cable to be available to every house is no different than a telephone line terminating at your back door

The fact that we are discussing the pros and cons of this "ideological" save face issue does not surprise me. Given the country is fast filling with imbeciles who have been so well cocooned in the society that was built for them that they have lost touch with the reality of life and are overseeing the enslavement of that same society to the financial caliphate.

But given Labor have delivered nothing complete, satisfactory, or cost effectively in four long years regretably the NBN will be a screw up and a few lucky ones will grow rich from it as our we and our kids pay it back. This reply is about reality, in the past four years the word BILLION has lost its worth to a great many Australians.

Imbeciles do not comprehend relativity, so let’s talk about the figure of a BILLION.

The entire Snowy Mountains Scheme cost $6 BILLION in today’s dollars, one seventh of the cost to lay Gillard’s cables.

The Mayor of Christchurch says it is going to cost $15 billion to rebuild the city of Christchurch, and that is virtually starting again for all intents.

It costs $60 million to build and staff a teaching hospital, we could build 680 hospitals.

Australia’s current account deficit is $20 odd billion and we are going to spend twice that on laying cables.

The earth is 40,000klms in circumference; 40 BILLION klms would travel around it 100,000 times.

A billion is a big number and imbeciles do not grasp that, whatever positive NBN brings it is not worth paying $40 BILLION so Gillard and Labor can attempt to save face.

Rehctub, I apologize for not sticking to the core of the thread, but attempting to reason with imbeciles who are only capable of regurgitating rhetoric is akin to reasoning with a toddler. We have to get rid of compulsory voting, then the scheiser will sink to the bottom again.

ah hem, REAL and Facts?
Some what out of place here.
36 BILLION that is the costs.
leave you blokes to this one
several hundred posts in a handful of threads have just dug more trenches no one is moving.
Truth is indeed the first victim in war, this is both war and an inability to think out side a fixed area.

The latest shenanigans are that Labor is trying to write new legislation into networking to prevent anyone else building a network to compete with the NBN unless they build for everyone and price identically.

The NBN cannot function without complete protection from competition. This is not just a monopoly it is deeply corrupt.

Sonofgloin;
It would be a pretty small teaching hospital that you would get for
$60 million ! It would have to be in the hundreds of millions.

Bazz, I stand corrected, the figure should be $160 million, I misread the page.

The costs aren't fungible, sonofgloin.

>>It costs $60 [or $160, whatever] million to build and staff a teaching hospital, we could build 680 hospitals.<<

The question is, why would you want to build 680 [or whatever] hospitals.

Hospitals generate costs. And once built, their burden on the taxpayer is permanent and continuous, rather than once-off.

There are already around 760 public hospitals, costing $33 billion a year. Every 23 more hospitals will cost another billion, and rising, every year.

We already spend over 9% of GDP on health costs. And they go up every year. Investing the equivalent of twenty weeks of health costs on infrastructure that could lower transaction costs, permanently, across the board, seems a relatively smart move.

Pericles:>> The question is, why would you want to build 680 [or whatever] hospitals.<<

The point is not that I want to build hundreds of hospitals or rebuild the Snowy Scheme, it is that we could do more with $40 Billion than dig holes and lay cables.
My expectation of what government should deliver with our taxes and trust is basic.
1. Don't let me starve.
2. Ensure the water supply.
3. Fix me when I am sick.
4. House me if I cannot.
5. Take care of the existing infrastructure and build new infrastructure when needed.
6. Legislate to support local business and industry.
7. Implement laws that stop the commercial and financial sectors taking "unfair" advantage of me.

Previously both sides of government focused on these basic requisites, neither side does now, and we have signed United Nations protocols that have taken away the sovereignty of the sitting government’s legal ability to do that. It began with the Lima Agreement and the sole purpose was and is the "re distributing of the wealth" from the first world to the second and third.

But the only re distribution of wealth in the first world has been the turning of the middle class into the working class and the working class into the working poor. In second and third world nations Lima turned subsistence farmers into subsistence factory workers, an elite has also grown but percentage wise it is neglibable. Where did the redistributed wealth go? Right now and over the past 40 years, year by year the majority of the wealth of the globe has moved to the hands of a growing ultra minority.

>> A study on The World Distribution of Wealth by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development and Economics Research reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the worlds assets in total.<<

Pericles we are being enslaved and as I understand your post you want to enslave our kids with a $40 BILLION debt for holes and cables.

Pericles re your health cost, get rid of the over administration.

If you are from NSW you are double struck by wasted funds given that NSW has more administrators for our hospital system than any other state.

579, I heard on the 'grape vine' that we will be charged about $130 per month simply because it is there.

Now may well you laugh at me referring to the 'grape vine', however, it's about the only option one has to find much out about the NBN.

BTW, we get charged for garbage collection and sewerage, regardless of whether or not you flush the toilet or place your bins out for collection.

Just remember, our capacity to replenish the consolidated revenue 'bank account' is dwindling and our governments either have to come up with a more efficient tax system, or, find new ways to tax us more. At the end of the day we are going backwards and as long as we continue to have waste and mismanagement within governments, we can only ever head south.

sonofgloin>> We have to get rid of compulsory voting, then the scheiser will sink to the bottom again.

Could not agree more. Those with their noses in the trough usually vote for the one who will cause them the least amount of grief and, I will bet that if the had the choice, they could not be bothered with voting.

we could do more with $40 Billion than dig holes and lay cables.
sonofgloin,
Spot-on ! Considering that digital technology is already like a runaway train we should sit back & think if the NBN will not be out-dated half-way through construction.
I wonder how much good only half of that money could do in securing pension funds etc.
I don't think NBN would be a good investment for Australia as a whole. As per usual only some overseas CEO's would be the main beneficiaries but not the australian public.

That's quite a laundry list of what you require nanny to do for you, sonofgloin.

But what's this?

>>5. Take care of the existing infrastructure and build new infrastructure when needed.<<

Ummm. The NBN is communications infrastructure.

So where's your problem?

With this type of negative thinking about technological advancement I'm amazed that Telstra ever bothered to invest in anything beyond the magneto phone and overhead phone wires, let alone mobile telephony. (Which itself has been replaced and upgraded several times already with little public hysteria).

The chances of optical fibre being suddenly outdated in the forseeable future are ridiculously remote. The original fibres that Telstra laid 29 years ago are still in service and operating at speeds that were previously unimaginable.

Also, what is the possible business case for building Teaching Hospitals anyway? Hospitals are a drain on public funds and create no profits at all. That's what public infrastructure is.

Wobbles,

The fibre to the house is like delivering a 6 inch water main. It can supply your entire monthly needs in a few minutes, but mostly the tap is closed to a trickle.

TPG is offering unlimited access at about 12Mb/s for $30pm which is less than half what you will pay for 25GB under the NBN.

If this is so competitive, why is it necessary to remove the existing lines, and create legislation to forbid anyone from building alternative local lines?

The tax payers will be paying a huge premium for this service for many decades.

As for obsolescence, mobile phones are more expensive than land lines, at a lower quality. However, more than double the calls go through this media.

Wobbles,
I think what we've got to ask ourselves with communication is, who are the main users of this supposedly even faster service. Not revenue producing companies that's for sure. The main beneficiaries will be the mindless masses of dumbcrap music & junk mail merchants. They're already clogging the system now & they'll clogg the new system also. Not much revenue coming from them & no benefit to the country either. I'm using Telstra wireless broadband for the past 3 years & more often than not I'm either down to basic speeds or lose connection altogether. I have no problem if users pay for an NBN but as per usual the junkies will free-ride & clogg it all & we'll still be frustrated with down times. This may be negative thinking in your eyes but until we have a user pays system it'll prove to be yet another huge waste of good funding. Also, what is the back up plan if the NBN goes down ? Our local supermarket has chaos when the EFTPOS is down for 5 minutes. Just imagine how easy it would be to bring the whole country to its knees if lets itself to become so utterly dependent on this technology.

There's your problem, individual, right there...

>>I'm using Telstra wireless broadband for the past 3 years & more often than not I'm either down to basic speeds or lose connection altogether<<

Change your provider. I have been Telstra-free for several years, and next to giving up cigarettes, it was the best personal commercial/financial decision I have made. The speeds are good (I also have an ADSL2 connection, so I am aware of what "good" means in this context), and dropouts are very few and far between.

I'm pretty sure we will look back on this in a few years time and wonder what the fuss was all about. Sure, they'll get the initial pricing wrong. Any time a bunch of public servants are involved in estimating future traffic that will happen... did somebody say "Clem Jones Tunnel"?

But it will settle down.

The Water Main analogy is a good one to illustrate the difference between fibre and wireless.
You may get reasonable water pressure at various times of the day but when everybody in the street has their taps on at the same time, that's when wireless speeds slow to a trickle (which is what Individual's wireless experience demonstrates).

Not so long ago, 52kHz Modems and 20Meg Hard Disc drives were all that anybody would ever need.

As for changing providers, is most cases all you are changing is the interface at the Point Of Interconnect (ie the hardware at the entry point of the Telephone Exchange) and then going via the Telstra network anyway. In many other cases it's actually the same physical service all the way but merely wholesaled,rebadged and resold under a different name. Even those providers who lease capacity on the OPTUS network still get there through Telstras copper and duck in and out of their network as required.

It's the overall reliability and guarantee of availability that you are really paying for, not just speed.

I have no intention of driving around the country but my taxes help pay for the National Highway network. I don't frequent all the Parks, Swimming Pools and Art Galleries in my Municipal Council area but I'm still charged for them through my rates.

The 6" water line to the house does not help if the backbone is insufficient. The pilot project in Tasmania dropped to 12Mb at peak in spite of having fibre to the door.

With new wireless towers, there is no need to drop lower than 12Mb.

Look, lets put this wireless v Fibre to bed once and for all.

The radio spectrum is too valuable to be wasted on the internet.
A certain amount of spectrum is made available for mobile internet for
those particular applications that need it.

That is where it should start and finish. The radio spectrum should not
be used for normal domestic and business internet usage.
Too many people think the internet has the highest priority.
It does not !

Now, fibre is a system that will probably never be replaced or become
redundant. It is a fundamental speed of light signalling method.
Only the terminal equipment will change over time, but the cable
itself is there forever.

It is not the size of Australia that is the cost problem.
Every town already has fibre or microwave links installed now.

However it is the cost of putting it into every house, every shop,
every business, in every building, in every factory, in every service
station, in every council depot in every street in every village
in every town in every city in Australia is where the monumental cost
will be expended.

Those outside the 2km from the exchange could have fibre run to their
area and have adsl2 on their copper line. This is the fibre to the
node that was the original proposal.
I believe that 12 Mbit is to be the normal service delivered to the
normal customer. Well at 2km from the exchange I get 10 Mbit on adsl2.

So I will not benefit one little iota from having the fibre laid into
my house.
The vast majority in towns and cities will be in that situation.

Most user are not aware that the delays and slower speeds they see
are at the remote server plus network congestion and switching delays.
They will be very disappointed to see the same delays on fibre.

All that trenching and cable pulling is not necessary and is a total
waste of money.

What trenching are we talking about. Where ever there is a landline now the NBN will be in there also. New connections will require trenching.
The trenches are dug and cable laid at the same time, with the same machine. The time consuming bit is the joining of the fibre optic cable.
The majority of money spent will be in joins.

Bazz,

Your analysis is very sad, and so technically wrong, however, it is a perception perpetrated by the NBN and Labor. Modern technology allows the same bandwidth to be shared by towers with overlapping areas, and the number of towers determines the number of connections in an area.

For remote areas where a fibre connection costs tens of thousands of dollars, a single tower can do this for a fraction of the cost.

Change your provider.
Pericles,
You obviously are unaware of remote area phone & internet services. You can only choose between Telstra & nothing.
A little like passenger transport & cargo & mail. We used to have competition but the Qld Labor government made sure that people in remote area pay top rates to monopoly service providers.

The NBN will improve competition ? If it's as good as they'd have us believe it'd be an outright monopoloy, wouldn't it ?

Why would it be a monopoly, telstra, optus ,etc co share copperwire now when telstra allows. so whats the difference. Instead of bying space from telstra, they bye space from govt;

Shadow Minister,
From your comment on towers, I think you are presuming an
architecture like the mobile phone system.
I cannot see that being suitable for more remote areas.
Much greater ranges will be required than is possible with mobile
phones. A quite different protocol would be used and as an example
Mt Canoblas near Orange would have a base station there and farms out
to around 100KM with suitable antennae would have service.
In an area with few farms etc only one channel would be needed
but in a more dense area a couple more channels could be used.

That seems to me to be the most practical way to service remote and
scattered users of the system. It certainly would be a lot cheaper
than erecting hundreds, if not thousands of sites using mobile phone
techniques, even using existing mobile phone sites.

I have not heard what NBN is planning on using except the old and
venerated phrase "wireless" has been stated.

Guilty as charged, individual.

>>Pericles, You obviously are unaware of remote area phone & internet services. You can only choose between Telstra & nothing.<<

There is another problem though.

If getting services to a remote community is expensive to provide, then any commercial private enterprise is going to whack you for it. Your only hope is to have it subsidised in some way.

I would suspect that a substantial part of the $40 billion is being spent on rural areas; coverage in cities are a piece of cake, in comparison. On that basis we city folk will be subsidising your internet services forever and a day, whichever way you cut it.

So a little thanks might be in order.

Send cows.

Pericles,
What I would like to have explained by service providers is why can people in Bangladesh, India & Indonesia afford to call Australia without much concern of cost yet to call these countries from Australia is almost prohibitive on my slightly above average wage ?

Spacing of mobile towers isn't just a function of the number of users, it's also related to the frequency band and also has a lot to do with advancing or retarding the signal transmission to stay within the allocated timeslot for the call while the handset is moving toward or away from the transmitter.

With higher frequencies the timesolts are "narrower" so the calls need to be handed-off much sooner, so more cells are required.

The coverage of the cell also shrinks with the number of users to adjust the overall transmit power.

After the original AMPS system was closed down the GSM network didn't have the coverage to meet rural demand so Howard brought in CDMA to keep the farmers happy.

Remember?

That gave a 35km radius for omnidirectional transmitters which was later stretched to about 70km under ideal conditions.

The 3G network Base Stations are only about 1km apart in the Sydney Metropolitan area and Hutchison (the original 3G providers) needed about 600-odd for Sydney alone.

With higher speeds they will need to be even closer together or suffer chronic dropouts as a result.

If you're thinking about plain old WiFi HotSpots for high speed coverage, it will be much the same thing.

Then there is the cost of providing all those transmitters, the transmission path plus all the associated equipment (at both ends) for every additional tower - not to mention the ongoing property leasing, access and power costs for every site. Every set of aerials or tower you see on private property costs the provider money continually just to have them, let alone ongoing maintenance costs.

At best, wireless (like satellite) is a way to plug up holes in remote areas where it's impractical to put in fibre but to see it as some sort of magical cheap overall solution is just like flogging a dead horse.

It's more a political debate than a technological one and not a viable option - just another convenient way to keep hammering at the ALP.

Wobbles, I think you were agreeing with me that the mobile phone
architecture is not suitable for data over remote areas.
In any case you do not want to mix voice and data in the same service.

There are a raft of VHF and UHF ex analogue TV channels becoming redundant.
Some of them would be available for remote area NBN.
The coverage of these frequencies would be very suitable for internet usage.
Also the very remote users could use high gain antennas pointed
at the nearest mountain top data transmitter.
A farmer could place such an antenna on his nearest hilltop and use
a wifi link down to his house. All these techniques are old hat.

Wobbles and Bazz.

You might like to update your technological outlook to the 21st century. What you can get now from one tower is 10 to 20 x the data transfer rate you could get even 5 years ago.

Our offices at work are all wifi, as this is cheaper than cabling, and we are getting speeds of greater than 100Mb/s with hundreds of users. Not everyone is downloading data at once.

Shadow Minister;
Thats right data speeds are higher.
However those data rate increases are not confined to mobile phones.
I was not talking about data rate anyway, but network architecture.

The mobile phone network services a dense area of low power
transmitters and receivers with miniature antennae.

In remote area internet we are talking about high powered
transmitters (relatively) and high gain antenna at the customer site
with, say for argument sake, a 25 watt transmitter.
The mountain top transmitters would be of the order of hundreds of
watts to several thousand watts depending on terrain and the size of
the service area of that transmitter and the required signal to noise ratio.
All this gear is available off the shelf now.

As you can see this is nothing like the wifi office application to
which you referred.
If the NBN is not considering something like this I just cannot see
it being a success or it will cost as much as the fibre.

It's a little off-topic, individual. But let's take a closer look.

>>Pericles, What I would like to have explained by service providers is why can people in Bangladesh, India & Indonesia afford to call Australia without much concern of cost yet to call these countries from Australia is almost prohibitive on my slightly above average wage ?<<

I've found some for you.

This one's $0.08c a minute, after a $0.25c flagfall. So you can get a ten minute call to Bangladesh for a dollar. A touch more expensive for Indonesia.

http://freesim.lebara-mobile.com.au/aus-free-sim/?tmcampid=54&tmad=c&tmplaceref=GGL_0020338

There's also a company offering free calls to Bangladesh.

http://www.cherrycall.com.au/asia/phone-bangladesh.jsp

I wonder how they pull that trick.

Altogether not what I'd describe as "prohibitive", individual.

Particularly for someone like me, who can recall, most vividly, the "pound a minute" it used to cost to call Australia.

And that was when the pound was actually worth something...

Bazz,

Things have changed since your ham radio days.

The frequencies are much higher, where the noise is lower, while being mostly line of sight, the power requirements are far lower.

Sorry, your comment makes no sense to me.

>Things have changed since your ham radio days.
Anyway my days are current.
No, things havn't changed, are you suggesting that 2.4 gig could be
used for that sort of service ?

The signals would be lost in the trees every time it rained.
I am afraid you have been mesmerised by wifi.
Next you will be telling me that BPL is a goer.

If you want to cover a greater area more power is going to be needed.
In fact a great deal more power. How else are you going to cover an
area say 75 km+ in radius with perhaps a couple of hundred users ?
By putting up mobile towers every few of KMs ? One for every customer
all connected by fibre I presume.

Really !

Bazz with a couple of hundred people, you are not looking for fibre connected towers, only repeaters.

The reception at the distant houses is greatly enhanced with directional antennae which cost very little.

it,s the country that needs fibre not the city.

SM Repeaters have transit times.
They have to fully receive a packet before they repeat it.
So each time the packet passes through a repeater the same delay would
occur. Believe me, been there done that.
High gain antennae at the customer site is what I said, yagi antenna
with 12 db gain would help no end.

A high powered site could serve a considerable area and would save the
cost of all those repeaters and be faster as well.
There are a number of VHF and UHF analogue TV channels becoming
available and a few of them could be used for the NBN.
Much more reliable, greater coverage and not subject to rain fading.