"And you think this despite knowing despite the US's huge appetite for wireless, land line installations are still growing there. I don't there is anything more I can add, Shadow."

Try:

"The volume of mobile data traffic!from!tablets, smartphones, laptops, and other wireless!broadband devices!is!growing at an exorbitant rate.
Cisco estimates the volume of US mobile data will grow 21 fold between 2010 and 2015, for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 83%. By 2015, US mobile data traffic will reach 914.6 million gigabits (or nearly an exabyte) per month – equivalent to sending 229 million DVDs over the Internet each month. Data traffic on AT&T’s mobile network is up 5,000% over the past three years, a compound annual growth rate of 268%"

http://www.hightechspectrumcoalition.org/PDF_SpectrumCrunch_OnePager_FINAL.pdf

The comparison between copper lines and mobile phones is similar. Note that the copper business is now shrinking. Fibre is the better version of copper faster, but still fixed.

The world needs a better mouse trap.

rstuart, the killer apps that drove rapid internet uptake and especially the demand for bandwidth in the last 10-15 years include online games, multimedia streaming, movie and music downloads.

Video conferencing has been a bit of a dud, but it will improve no doubt, although I'm not sure that it will become a major domestic app.

That was the point I was making: if there is no compelling new reason for bandwith demand to be increased by 3 orders of magnitude, then why are we bothering to increase capacity by that much? If a road planner said we need to expand the notoriously busy Hume Highway to 2000 lanes each way, don't you think somebody might question the need?

Distribution networks need to be as big as they need to be and no bigger, otherwise there is waste. If they are 1000 times bigger than they need to be there becomes a major incentive for the people employed to try to justify the waste and that leads to misinformation and bad decisions. Labor are treating this whole thing the same way they treated the railways until they managed to sell them off and the axe was then taken to all the fat in the system - with complete disdain for the genuine needs of the community. Look at the state of Australia's national rail infrastructure today to see the result.

What puzzles me in this whole process is that with the exception of the technically-literate Turnbull, there has been almost no genuine consideration of alternatives.

Ask yourself why Telstra was prepared to be left dangling on the end of a purely mobile network, ditto Optus...

@Antiseptic: That was the point I was making: if there is no compelling new reason for bandwith demand to be increased by 3 orders of magnitude, then why are we bothering to increase capacity by that much?

We aren't laying down a network that will be here for the short period Antiseptic can foresee. One hopes we will still be using this fibre at the end of this century. At the beginning of last century horses were the main form of transport. I bet they didn't foresee not getting wireless broadband while flying at 1000 km/hr at 10,000m being a major irritant. Methinks your vision is similarly limited.

@Antiseptic: Look at the state of Australia's national rail infrastructure today

You've lost me. I don't know enough about rail to know what you are talking about. The only recent government decisions I think were an appalling waste of money here in Queensland were Newman's new river crossings which have literally send billions down the tubes in the space of a few years. His is a Liberal of course. Unlike you seem to be doing here, I don't use the performance to characterise all Liberals.

@Antiseptic: What puzzles me in this whole process is that with the exception of ... Turnbull, there has been almost no genuine consideration of alternatives.

There was Anti. Do you remember how both governments, both Liberal and the Labor, tried to go down the path of negotiating with Telstra and Optus to build a new network? Both failed. Do you remember what the Liberals "broadband plan" was at the last election? It was to give a bucket of money to Telstra to build yet more infrastructure. Ie they were _giving_ money to a private monopoly to aid and abet extending that monopoly. Now I think about it, it sounds a lot like Abbott's carbon plan.

So the reason we are getting the NBN is not purely technical. It costs us less in the long term to rip out the entire network and replace it than it would to bribe the entrenched monopoly to upgrade the existing one.

@Shadow Minister: The volume of mobile data...is growing at an exorbitant rate.

That is a sales prediction and it might be a wee bit optimistic. Still there is no denying your basic point - wireless is growing very, very quickly. I still don't think it is relevant if broadband installations are growing at the same time, which they are. And that is fundamentally being driven by the fact that a byte delivered over a fixed line costs 1/10 of the same byte being delivered over wireless, and I can't see that changing.

@Shadow Minister: The world needs a better mouse trap.

Oddly I was chatting about what I now see is a similar thing over the weekend. One of the things that drives the internet is its charging model. The chap I was speaking to wanted a new charging model with the NBN. He wanted to be able to walk anywhere, connected to the local NBN using whatever means offered, eg ethernet or wireless, and have his account charged for the data. I thought he was nuts at the time, particularly as the NBN, being a local loop provider, has to be charged on a physical connection basis. But now that I think about it, it would be technically possible to layer such a structure over the NBN. The NBN already has the major element in placed needed to support this: charging for bit/s, not bytes.

That is just the sort of mouse trap that fix the wireless bandwidth problem. If you could somehow let anybody connect to a wireless access point you put in and collect a few cents per gigabyte the used the place would soon be blanketed with tiny wireless cells of the sort Anti envisaging. It would break the current wireless cartel (Vodafone, Telstra, Optus) wide open. You would need the NBN as a back haul of course.

@Shadow Minister, @Antiseptic,

This what happens when a wireless network gets overloaded and goes into its failure mode - which is total collapse as opposed to just slowing down like a fixed like does. It ain't pretty:

http://delimiter.com.au/2011/07/26/customers-continue-to-desert-vodafone/

So because Telstra and Optus didn't want to build yet another wasted network because they think wireless is the most likely path to future growth at best cost/benefit, that somehow makes fibre more important? Not sure if I agree with that sort of reasoning.

You seem to be saying in regards to need - correct me if I'm wrong - "build it and they will come". I'm happy to be convinced on that, all I'm asking is what might drive it. Even pie-in-the-sky stuff, after all this is 1000 times our present capacity you're advocating. I simply can't see it.

The rail analogy was to do with the way the railroads were run as a massively overspecified and hence overcost transport medium. Because they were featherbedded by every new Minister to assure Union support in the party room, they got fatter and fatter, despite carrying little more traffic because trucks were more flexible and cheaper. Although they couldn't carry as much as a train, most people didn't need a trainload of stuff transported and they did need it where they were, not where the train went to.

As a result they suffered a dramatic loss in funding and they were allowed to wither, while the areas that really needed rail, like mines and broadacre cropping largely got done by private enterprise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_National_Railways_Commission

Rstuart,

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10838&page=0

This was published last year, and does not even consider broadband. But what it does show is that whilst a small number of users will be in the position to use this capacity, the vast majority are going to see very little additional benefit. Having the nbn is like having a porsche in suburbia. It is nice to have, but with 60k limits, it is functionally no different to any other car.

Much of the ASDL copper and cable network is in good condition and delivers fast broad band. As 10% of the cost is the backhaul network and 90% is the fibre to the house, massive savings could be made simply by installing the fibre to the house when either the existing copper network degrades, or when the customer wishes to upgrade to a super fast system.

As for "And that is fundamentally being driven by the fact that a byte delivered over a fixed line costs 1/10 of the same byte being delivered over wireless, and I can't see that changing."

Unfortunately this is not true with the NBN, as the vast majority of the cost is recovery of the capital expenditure. Which is why the low end packages don't differ significantly from existing wireless offerings.