Trouble with oz that we insist on reinventing the wheel. 90% of infrastructure for the NBN is already in place. The fast train from Brissy to Rocky is anything but and could have saved half the cost of infrastructure if they adopted sucessful methods from other countrys.ie:tilt bogies on existing rolling stock. Reminds me of the old w class trams in Melb [ I drove one ] they had a top speed of 140KPH and could be driven at such speed on certain lines [ Royal park ]
but todays supa-duppa trams hardly get to half that speed because of track and traffic restrictions. Going backwards ?. The present coms network can support 100MBS and the twisted pair 10MBS [ forget the fact that 65% is already coax or fibre optic ]. What stuffs us all up is the server upgrade neglect. Just upgrade the number of backbone servers and data will fly like the wind.

Sorry pepper I think you do not understand much about it.
We can not build infrastructure buying from the tip shop.
NBN can not get the results with current copper, do you truly think both sides would let us build if it could.
Using ANYTHING other than purpose built rail corridors and trains would kill very many in a week.
That wheel? has no spokes needs new timber frame and turns out not to be round but square.
On considering rebuilding a house it may not be a good idea to use very second hand timbers.

"NBN cannot get the results with current copper" What results ?. Government is convincing us we should go to the stars instead of a base on the moon, Everyone doesn't NEED 100MBS on a home computer [ or do U]
we need capacity, not throughput.I wouldn't even notice a difference in speed if I could GET 10MBS or 100MBS but I don't. I'm coax and it supports 100MBS and I was assured of 10MBS but I aint seen anything over V90 in 2 years. Why ?, because the servers are overloaded by capacity, not speed. I was running fibre optic for telstra in 1972 between main exchanges [ Lonsdale metaconta ARM/ARF ]. It's like the freeway, once your on it, no worries, the problems start when you get to the end of it. If you can get 10MBS on old copper twist, the just replace the twist with new coax, it's 10 times cheaper [ and lasts 10 times longer - 50 years at least ] Now you have your 100MBS CAPACITY!. most of trunk is internet is coax or fibre now so the problem is 90% consumer connection. That's where all the money goes. But all this is dandy and fine, fine and dandy but if you junk your old car for a new one, you dont expect an engine p[ new as it may be ] to have the same horsepower as your old clunker. Without server capacity, you can have all the new infrastructure in the world with a capacity of 1000MBS, but it don't do squat if you have not got the servers to handle the capacitive load [ sheer volume of users . 90% of the infrastructure has the capacity for speed, the other 10% which is too old can be replaced but if you dont increase the number of servers, your just going to get a fraction of speed increase when you can quadruple it with more servers.

For what its worth pepper, there have already been two threads on the NBN right here on OLO. These weren't threads that got side tracked down some mud flinging blind alley. Well not for long anyway. They were ding-dong knock em down threads, based on referenced facts with links no less, on the merits of technological choices behind NBN, the politics, and the finances. Seriously, if you wanted to know something about the NBN, there are probably few better places to internet to go right now.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=4494
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=4595

But to answer the "facts" you do cite:

@pepper: the twisted pair 10MBS

The average internet speed in Australia is 6Mbit/s: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/347937/australia_falls_behind_mongolia_global_average_internet_speed/

@pepper: forget the fact that 65% is already coax or fibre optic

The NBN is not touching the trunk likes, only the connection from the premises to the exchange (which they now call the Point of Interconnect). Of those local connections currently 28% of households have Hybrid Fibre Coax passing by their house, not 65%.

But not all use them. Excluding wireless 22% of households use HFC for their internet access. (From figure 3 in http://acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib310665/the_internet_service_market_in_australia.pdf )

@pepper: on old copper twist, the just replace the twist with new coax, it's 10 times cheaper

Rubbish. Twisted pair is cheaper than coax per metre. But it's irrelevant. The dominate cost is pulling the cable, not the cable itself. As a consequence if you are going to run new cable instead of using the existing copper, in the long you are far better off running the best there is: fibre.

@pepper: I'm coax and it supports 100MBS and I was assured of 10MBS but I aint seen anything over V90 in 2 years.

You get what you pay for pepper. A cheap ISP has a higher contention ratio. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contention_ratio If you want faster access during peak hours pay for it. For what its worth, I have regularly seen 10Mbytes/s (ie over 70Mbit/s) when downloading from a distant site in Australia at Universities.

Now you have some referenced facts pepper you can have your discussion based on reality, not one off anecdotes.

Pepper proves in the end not every opinion is worth while.
My hobby Ham radio, gave this country its first Broadcast radio station.
And hand in hand with scientific experimenters,very often the same radio its self.
Few doubt our system is not up to world standards, even fewer think the idea is to play computer games or watch films.
In my hobby, just 20 years ago, radio and nothing else,was around to monitor and bring help to road trauma events.
Before the BRICK mobile phone that was it.
I am very happy we have progressed,no more radio on 24/7 even in bed, to bring help and try to save lives.
Right now, not more than 4 hours from our biggest city, police Ambulance and fire fighters, road rescue, all, have dead spot communications.
Right in the same spots phone will not work.
Mountain tops are great for radio/phone towers, but not if blinded by other hills.
NBN in this country can never serve every one, but NBN will serve more than any thing we have today and faster.
I will not benefit, my home is in too small a village to get it, our land line phone is not always capable of 25kb,s.
Our tower on a hill that is sheltered from this village by? its self twists and turns like a snake.
But the NBN is nation building.

Fibre everywhere is the Rolls Royce solution and it will have a long
life through many updates.
I have adsl2 and my connection to the exchange is 10 mbits.
Of course while I often get close to that, I think 8Mbit is fairly
typical. I can watch movies etc and any delays seem to be happening
at the remote server.
Can't see what more I could need.
We have all heard that chat about medical applications, well I had a
discussion with a friend in the medical data field and he said it is
a joke, that medical applications are all very low data rate.
I mean how often do you need to measure someones blood pressure in a
second let alone a millisecond ?

High definition xrays and scans can be transmitted quickly now, but
then it won't be seen by the specialist until he comes in later today !
Just remember it has become very political and is being spinned until
everyone is dizzy.

@Bazz: Fibre everywhere is the Rolls Royce solution and it will have a long life through many updates.

Just remember how we got here. The original idea (shall we call it NBN 0.1) was to just upgrade the copper using Fibre to the Node. In fact it looked very much like what Malcolm Turnbull proposed as the Liberal NBN the other day. http://delimiter.com.au/2011/08/03/new-coalition-nbn-policy-splitting-telstra-using-hfc/

The reason NBN 0.1 didn't go ahead wasn't because fibre was better. It was because the incumbent Telco's owned the copper. That means they had to be paid to upgrade it. The governments of the time (the NBN idea was born with the Liberals, then passed onto Labor) were prepared to do that, but there was a catch: if the government was going to pay the incumbents to upgrade it all retail providers had to have equal access. Telstra and Optus both said no.

The other alternative was to purchase the copper outright, but this was deemed too expensive because they would then have to pay for it based on some multiple of its current revenue per year which is huge. But because Telstra still owned the exchanges the copper connected to, that revenue had to be split between the government and Telstra.

The current NBN 1.0 was a rather sneaky solution. Because NBN 1.0 would be built by the government there was no need to spend a multiple of the current revenue on purchasing it - effectively they got it at cost. And because they owned everything they get to keep all the revenue. That halved the initial investment because it starts to pay for itself as it is being built, and it (at least on paper) means the government gets a positive return on it once it is built (7% as opposed to the 5% they pay to borrow the money).

(cont'd...)

(...cont'd)

The sneaky bit is because it is so much better than copper, they could go to Telstra and Optus and say: "After we build this your current land like networks will be worthless. But we are willing to pay you for your customers." The amount the paid was small compared to what the copper network was worth, but nonetheless it was an offer/threat the incumbent Telco's could hardly refuse. So now they have a guaranteed customer base for their new network, which eliminats one of the major risks in building it. The only other real risk I see is building it on budget. Some do argue there is a third risk - people abandoning land lines and switching to wireless for everything.

So that is how we ended up where we are. The end result is the taxpayer end up getting a Rolls Royce fibre network for roughly the same money it have cost them to buy the Holden copper network from Telstra.

If the corporate world requires NBN, let them form a company, sell shares and build their NBN. Then, if the succeed and the NBN is such a good thing as some suggest, then their shares will quadruple in value as many private ind will want to buy of piece of it.

Meanwhile, those of us who are happy with our current speed, can continue enjoying life as we know it and look forward to the next thing this government can find to waste our billions on.