The gist of the Government's spin is that NBN is for the future. How far into this future is what I'd like to hear. What if some college kid invents a gadget next year which would do away with NBN ? Invest by all means but 50 Billion for unproven technology ? We all know how quickly digital technology changes now yet we're still made to believe that NBN will be for the long term.

@individual: How far into this future is what I'd like to hear.

They signed contracts for land line rollout in the ACT, NSW and QLD last week. The period of the contract is 4 years, with an optional 2 year extension.

The also signed contracts for the wireless rollout, the period being 10 years.

So if the labour government gets in for another term, it will be all over bar the shouting by the end of that term. If the Liberals get in - well your guess as to what they would do is probably as good as mine.

@individual: We all know how quickly digital technology changes now yet we're still made to believe that NBN will be for the long term.

The silicon changes pretty rapidly. But don't confuse that with the wires that connect those silicon chips together - they change very slowly. This bodes well for the NBN, as the cost of the rollout is almost entirely in laying down the wires. They are in effect re-wiring the country.

To give a couple of illustrations of this, the cat5 networking cables popular now were standardised in 1991, back when networking speeds were 10Mbit/sec. Those same wires now carry 1000Mbit/second. Although there is a successor to cat5 (called oddly enough cat6), it only gives a small boost and is more cantankerous to boot. I have my doubts whether its use can ever be justified in a house, so it is entirely possible us plebs will still be using cat5 cabling in 20 years time.

The copper wire we laid in the ground 60 or so years ago is just coming to the end of its life now. When we laid down those copper wires there wasn't a better technology around. The same is true now with fibre. There is no hot new technology or material on the drawing boards in some backroom. We know of nothing that can carry information faster than mono mode glass fibre. We are discovering ways to pump information through those fibres faster, but the fibre remains the same.

nbn has bought back the inground copper line
that should never have been sold

so on condition
it wont ever be sold again
i say put in fibre to the node
this is what we voted for

you talk about download speed...thats like a racecar
but most of us are riding bikes...we wont be bying into nbn
[thus leave our copper lines alone..!..]

further my line is only ten years old
not as old as many are claiming falishishly[faulsly].

much of the main lines have ben updated..as we went
say up untill..hawke/howards neglect's

howard selling the 'pipes'
is insane..as revealed by telstra
NOT UPDATING THE LINE's..[long ago]

fibre to the node
all the extra is a scam
[odious debt*]..im refusing to buy into

i own morally a share in the copper
leave it the heck alone

if that needs more liberal excess..so be it
ditto the c02 carbon tax LIES
not to mention the 'other' taxes

the labrats gotta go
id rather xtian guilt..than athiestic free/marketeering

Rstuart,

Fibre to the node, or to the towers etc is exactly what I am talking about. For this function you need the terrabyte capability that fibre carries, as they service many customers.

This terrabyte capacity is essentially wasted on fibre to the home. Road trains are fantastic and efficient in delivering goods between cities, but are an overkill for the household car.

Existing copper cable can deliver 12Mb/s over a kilometre or two, and with upgrade technology at and between the nodes, can deliver vastly more than presently available for 1/10th of the $50bn price tag that the NBN will cost.

For the 5% that want this additional capacity this can be installed as required. The other 95% won't need it for decades.

PS. Glass fibre is useless if there is a power failure in the home, whereas existing copper can guarantee phone capacity in emergencies.

Dear spindoc,

Geez mate anyone would think you had Tourettes. But you’re right I’m probably a bit of a bunny when it comes to the technical side of telecommunications. I know the difference between things like cat5 and cat6 but I am missing the overall picture therefore to go to places like Whirlpool or Znet to soak in what I can and gather opinions of people imbedded in the industry like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Start quote;

Wozniak said that while the fibre-to-the-home project was good for Australia, he didn't think that the United States would ever see a similar project.

"It'd be a great model, but I don't think it will ever happen in the US. I'm sorry, I'm really, really negative about [its] prospects," he said.

Wozniak said that he is unable to get fixed-line broadband to his house due to carrier limitations, and now uses a Long Term Evolution wireless service from his local network. While he said that there's currently no requirement to run fixed broadband to his home, he still feels the lack of fixed infrastructure is an issue for the country.

"I've spoken right up to the chairman of the [Federal Communications Commission] about these complaints," he said.

In his most recent State of the Union address, US president Barack Obama announced a vision to provide 98 per cent of homes in North America with access to high-speed wireless broadband by 2016.
"Within the next five years, we'll make it possible for businesses to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage," he said at the time.

"This isn't just about faster internet or fewer dropped calls. It's about connecting every part of America to the digital age."
Wozniak however feels that Obama's pledge is just another in a long line of broken presidential promises.

"Every ... president since the start of the internet ... said you've got to have broadband, we've got to get broadband to everybody! They all say it, but nothing's ever happened to bring it to me!

"I find it very frustrating."

End quote.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/us-wont-copy-aussie-nbn-steve-wozniak-339316189.htm

@Shadow Minister: Fibre to the node, or to the towers etc is exactly what I am talking about.

Were you? I only saw word wireless in your response. How odd.

But then if I were part of the Liberal party flak machine and had just seen my claim wireless was the answer wither, I would change tack too. I gave you an opening with FTTH, why not take it and claim it was what you were talking about all along?

@Shadow Minister: This terrabyte capacity is essentially wasted on fibre to the home.

Indeed a terrabyte is overkill shadow. However 100 MB/sec isn't, and copper can't deliver that. In fact people are maxing out their copper connections now. Fibre can deliver it, and as you point out it has decades of headroom to spare. 100 MB/sec is roughly what you need to deliver all the services easily envisaged in the next 20 years or so - Internet, DBV, and telephony. That is why countries who decide to re-write their countries use fibre. If you are going to spend the billions of dollars to do it, rolling out a technology that will be obsolete by the time you finish doesn't make a whole pile of sense.

The NBN plan is to do this with tax payer playing the role of banker, ie without spending a cent of tax payers money in the long term. It looks to be they have a reasonable chance of pulling it off, mainly because as they have managed to capture all land line based revenue. Now the Liberal plan may be $4 billion instead of $40 billion, but don't I see how they plan to earn a cent of that back. You can hardly justify taking over all the copper if you don't plan to change it.

I did in fact read the Libs counter proposal to the NBN at the previous election. It boiled down to giving Telstra a few billion to upgrade the copper network. That wasn't a plan Shadow. That was insanity.