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Australia Government Network

Australian National Broadband Network Releases 3-Year Plan 121

Posted by samzenpus from the internet-to-the-people dept.
New submitter pcritter writes "The Australian Government has just announced the 3-year roll-out plan for its ambitious National Broadband Network. The plan details 3.5 million premises (30%) across the country to be connected to the NBN by mid-2015. A map is available showing coverage areas. The plan represents a major milestone in the NBN project, which aims to connect all of Australia with high speed broadband by 2021, with the 93% of the population on fiber to the premises (FTTP) of speeds up to 1000Mbits, and the rest on fixed wireless or satellite."
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Australian National Broadband Network Releases 3-Year Plan More

Australian National Broadband Network Releases 3-Year Plan

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  • And it's mostly areas that have decent ADSL cover (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Pointless.
    Most of the country has O.K. network coverage, the problem is in the rural areas where ANY net access is thin, so they are pushing this into the high density area - at increased customer cost, where it's not actually needed.

    • Re:And it's mostly areas that have decent ADSL cov (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Nursie ( 632944 ) on Friday March 30, 2012 @06:57AM (#39521039)

      No, it doesn't.

      Most of the country has slow, horrifically overpriced ADSL, which is patchy even in some urban areas. The Telcos were not and are not doing anything about it. The government stepping in is exactly what was needed.

      • As one of privileged I get at best 1.5Mb with serious crc error counts over my ADSL2 connection with daily dropouts (usually at the most important times) - that's the best my line can do and I'm in the nice dense suburbs. Thanks Telstra.

        I beg thee, bring fiber to my house please.

      • Exactly, I'm on the Wacol exchange about 10k from the Birsbane CBD - at the end of 4k of wet copper. Lucky to get 1.8mbs and thats dodgy. NBN work is starting this year, should be connected by this time next year. Can't wait - naked DSL and VOIP finally!

    • Seconded to previous poster, my parents live in the 'burbs in Sydney on the border of two exchanges and can't get ADSL, so no, this isn't a complete waste.

      Targetting higher value areas where they are going to get a large take up and get income to support the roll out is also a good business decision.

      CSIRO is building the technology to do NBN for rural. It's called Ngara:

      http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/380377/csiro_pushes_digital_dividend_face_nbn_spectrum_buyout/ [computerworld.com.au]

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cyssero ( 1554429 )
      I'm in a regional (not rural) district and every suburb here has ADSL2+ connectivity. If you can't get ADSL2+, you can still get the pricey ADSL1 8Mbit through Telstra or Telstra wholesaler.

      Even though I get 13Mbit~ at a good price, fibre is still very necessary as we're already starting to push the limits of what's available to us today. What I try and explain to people is that this is infrastructure that all communications will pass through for decades to come. It's one of the first times in my life wher
  • Does it include the coalitions plan to scrape it when they are returned to power at the next election?
    • You sound like it's a certainty that the coalition will get back in. I'm not so sure. After all, Abbott is leading the party...
      • yeh its not a given. i just hope it is.

  • No singing or dancing... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Now if they gave the people 1000Mbits at current adsl prices, then we could sing and dance about this. The crazy thing is that there is no real benefit for the people, the cost of broadband will still be the same as what people pay now for the lowest bandwidth (adsl equiv) entry to the NBN. In fact it will probably cost more for the people, we have to pay for this with taxes as well. This is just one big pork barrel project.

  • Please, any non-Aussies reading this story, do not judge our nation on our Prime Minister's elocution in that video. We know. We're sorry.

    • Re:Judgement (Score:4, Insightful)

      by james.mcarthur ( 154849 ) on Friday March 30, 2012 @05:29AM (#39520653)

      I'd like to apologise for the ill-informed comments from the "Aussies" above who think that Australia's current telecommunications infrastructure is "good". When areas 5kms from the cities CBD can't get broadband because of the incumbant telco, or are forced to use wireless that drops out when it rains, or aren't in the big three cities so there is no chance of broadband delivered by the cable network, or ... Problems that probably affect every other first world nation where warped conservative, fascist ideology has driven communications infrastructure deployment.

      The NBN is already delivering benefits. They've significantly altered the backhaul networks around Australia so anyone who doesn't live in Sydney or Melbourne have the chance of receiving ADSL at a competitive rate (for the non-Aussies, and people who live in Sydney/Melbourne, Australia is more than just those two cities). They've managed to get the incumbant telco to agree to seperate their wholesale and retail arms and hand over infrastructure to NBNCo. More importantly they are actually building infrastructure that will be used for generations and will offer a return to successive Governments.

      The Coalition's plan is to sell off what has been built already (because private industry can do it better, the same private industry that sat on their hands for the last 20 years..) to deploy wireless to some places (and do nothing about the gouging which the private companies do with wireless data whilst offering blistering fast speeds of up to 12Mbps) and a combination of FTTN/DSL/Cable to marginal electorates. Spending anywhere from $11 - 20b in the process.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by CoopersPale ( 444672 )

        >>They've managed to get the incumbant telco to agree to seperate their wholesale and retail arms and hand over infrastructure to NBNCo.

        This is a gross misrepresentation of the situation. The government is paying Telstra $11 Billion for access to its pits and manholes and the sale of _some_ of its infrastructure - they're certainly not handing over anything.
        And private industry has historically been less effective in Australian telecommunications due to the dirty great monopoly of Telstra - which is j

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          You are missing something.. the Government SOLD Telstra (then Telecom) for $80M.

          So, let's do some basic maths.
          Telecom sold for: $80m
          Government buying back most of it today for: $11m

          Profit: $69M

          Not too bad a profit for a 15 year venture.

        • And private industry has historically been less effective in Australian telecommunications due to the dirty great monopoly of Telstra - which is just being replaced by the dirty great monopoly of the NBN.

          Telstra was a monopoly in both the wholesale and retail sector. With this they could simply move the wholesale costs of services for competitors to just below that of their retail service offerings with their retail arm having to pay none of the wholesale costs, just overheads of a traditional retail business.

          This is the current 'price squeeze' under investigation by the ACCC, again.

          The NBN is a wholesale only network.. I fail to see how they could abuse a monopoly position in this manner... other than

      • i agree, you cant convince some people though so lets jsut wait for 3 years once stage 1 is deployed and then ask them to take their foot out of their respective mouths.

  • Up to 1Gbps is actually 100Mbps only (Score:5, Informative)

    by bertok ( 226922 ) on Friday March 30, 2012 @05:44AM (#39520729)

    The summary is wrong (isn't it always) -- essentially nobody will be getting 1Gbps on the NBN, at least not for the first decade or so. The fibres are rated at 2.5Gbps downstream, but they're split, so each house will be getting 100Mbps maximum. I certainly haven't heard of any ISPs offering more than 100Mbps, so even if the fibre can physically transmit more than that, you can't buy it as a service.

    Apartment complexes can receive a dedicated fibre with more than 100Mbps capacity, but that's till split up between the apartments, the difference is that the splitter is on the premises. I think this caused a lot of confusion, because some of the logical diagrams showed a 1 Gbps fibre going to a building, and journalists didn't notice that only 100Mbps connections were going to each apartment.

    One interesting issue with the NBN is that while we're going to have plenty of bandwidth, our latency to most services is still terrible. America is 200ms away, and there's not a lot in the English-speaking corner of the Internet that's closer. I hope Google, Amazon, and Microsoft start building data centres locally, or the upgrade will be largely unnoticeable for anything other than video streaming.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ColaMan ( 37550 )

      The fibres are rated at 2.5Gbps downstream, but they're split,

      Split where? The NBN fibres in my town here in Tassie end up in your house. There's a 4-port distributor on the power pole outside, and when a person connects a fibre goes from there to the NTD. The distributor isn't powered, it's just a weatherproof connector.

      They do get aggregated further upstream somewhere, so I guess there could eventually be some congestion there.

    • The only reason ISP's wont offer more than 100Mbps, is because they will have to fork over $4,000 per month, per peering point just to supply enough peak bandwidth for one customer to get 100Mbps while other people are also using their connections. To provide just 1Gbps at one peering point, will cost an ISP $40,000 per month. Even if you only have one customer who barely uses their connection.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by seb42 ( 920797 )
      "essentially nobody will be getting 1Gbps on the NBN" I think they offer a business service 1000M down 400M up service, you must just need your own fibre that is not shared. A home user service is up to 100M down 40M up.

    • One interesting issue with the NBN is that while we're going to have plenty of bandwidth, our latency to most services is still terrible. America is 200ms away, and there's not a lot in the English-speaking corner of the Internet that's closer. I hope Google, Amazon, and Microsoft start building data centres locally, or the upgrade will be largely unnoticeable for anything other than video streaming.

      na, the most interesting issue with it is download caps. Download caps on ALL the traffic. It would make mild sense to do download caps on traffic that crosses undersea cables, but all the traffic? Sounds like you are getting screwed.

    • One interesting issue with the NBN is that while we're going to have plenty of bandwidth, our latency to most services is still terrible. America is 200ms away, and there's not a lot in the English-speaking corner of the Internet that's closer. I hope Google, Amazon, and Microsoft start building data centres locally, or the upgrade will be largely unnoticeable for anything other than video streaming.

      I see this as a positive for local industry. Service providers will be able to offer products locally that give a better user experience than those hosted on the other side of the world (moving us further towards a knowledge based/service provider economy etc).

      Not everything important on the internet (to many Australians) is hosted in the US!

    • Umm...Google have one in Sydney. Everyone uses Akamai (or other CDN) and there are heaps of local caches. I have one in my ISP.

    • They said it would be offered on application. It's not a standard consumer plan, that's all. Dedicated fibre links are available too. And the fibre is "rated" for far higher than 2Gbps - it's capable of terabits/second. There's already a planned upgrade path to 40Gbps.

      Latency is an issue, but caching can help many things, and fibre shaves off 20-40ms compared to ADSL.

  • I got a first post, mate - chuck me a tinny!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by oztiks ( 921504 )

      No .... Uhhhh .... No ..... If you're going to mock Aussie slang atleast slag it off properly.

      Tinny? You mean stubbie ..

      • A tinny is a can and a stubby is a bottle. You put them both into a stubby holder though...

        • A tinnie is also a small boat with an outboard motor...something to drive whilst you're sinking a few stubbies. Who drinks beer out of cans?....Neanderthal!

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by oztiks ( 921504 )

          People need to stop reading junk off the net to justify an argument ... Maybe once upon a time in the last 200 years someone somewhere in Australia used the term tinny to describe a beer ... 99% of Aussies will think your talking about a boat if you use the term tinny.

          • I must be one of the 1% then....beer is the first thing that comes to mind when someone says "tinny" to me. For what it is worth, I neither drink beer nor go out in boats.

          • Maybe it's an east coast/west coast thing. The last time someone used the term tinny to refer to a can of beer was last night, when my Dad asked me for one.

  • For some suburbs named in the plan (i.e. Weston, ACT) detailed planning doesn't commence until September 2015 and homes in the suburb cannot expect to actually have an active connection until September 2016. The roll out has been poorly planned in that it overbuilds many suburbs where coaxial cable running at 100Mbps is available now, while ignoring areas where ADSL is unavailable and people are relying on 3G wireless. Take up rates in the small number of suburbs where the NBN has been built of about 14%.

  • How Dare those Liberal Communists!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tgatliff ( 311583 ) on Friday March 30, 2012 @06:30AM (#39520919)

    Everyone knows that the best way to have the fastest wireless and internet service is to have a free market system. I mean, my free market AT&T service is spectacular giving me at least 2kbps (at least when there is no one else on the network), which is perfect for... well.. Wireless is VERY expensive to do and people in the US could never afford 1000M anyway. Also, the US is WAY to large for 1000M wireless internet... Oh, and having 1000M wireless internet wouldn't be safe anyway because of... terrorists..

    The point is everyone knows that a free market system where private enterprise blazes the way is always the best path to prosperity. I mean its like American and stuff...

    (Brought to you by the American Telecom Industry)

    • But the Liberals are not Communists they are conservatives. :)

    • I'm not sure why you are trying to use AT&T cellular as a guage for the US internet? From the article

      About 4 per cent of premises will receive broadband through fixed wireless networks

      A very low percentage of this plan has anythiing to do with wireless. The rest is wired, so your silly "2kbps from AT&T" comment is both ridiculous and irrelevant.

      Now from someone else's comment

      Most of the country has slow, horrifically overpriced ADSL, which is patchy even in some urban areas. The Telcos were not and are not doing anything about it. The government stepping in is exactly what was needed.

      So the private industry failed them, thus the government stepped in. Now onto the US.. how exactly has the private industries failed to provide fast & affordable internet? Where is only "slow, horrific

      • Probably because I have been having issues with service lately and I was really annoyed that their network just dropped a very important customers call?? There is little doubt in my mind that AT&T is one seriously messed up company (and network).

        It was not my intent of putting a free market vs. socialism. Both have their key advantages as well as key disadvatages. The socialism disadvantages are obvious simply looking at government. However, an great example of a bad free market system (in my opin

      • "So the private industry failed them, thus the government stepped in. Now onto the US.. how exactly has the private industries failed to provide fast & affordable internet? Where is only "slow, horrifically overpriced ADSL" available?"

        Easy, try moving outside of a city. I live 15 miles east of Colorado Springs and my only choice is ADSL resold by the local phone company, 6up 1down for the low, low price of $59.99 per month. Yeah I know I choose to live in the country but you asked where is only slow, ho

  • I don't know why so many Australians are complaining about this network. I've seen many countries waste money in much worse ways. Just look at the USA spending hundreds of billions of dollars for things half the people don't agree with and not batting an eye (wars, military bases, foreign aid, social security). Just a few years ago with this bailout thing, whoops, a few trillion dollars spent in bailouts and QE. Take a look at Indonesia and the Philippines, just a random example, where tons of tax doll

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Basically it's because there's a sizable number of the Australian population that are informed by the Murdoch-ran media (our branch of FAUX News) which attacks this network. The rest I'm sure you can fill it in.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by i-reek ( 1140437 )

      I don't know why so many Australians are complaining about this network!

      Because it's become an ideological issue. It's a Labor party policy so, ipso facto, rusted on conservatives hate it.

      So they sit in waiting for the inevitable cost blowouts, delays, pork-barrelling, and logistic implosions that befall every large infrastructure program and use them to hammer the Labor party over the head with. And the faithful take their cues from that.

      Had the conservatives introduced the NBN it would be the other way around.

      I predict that once the NBN is completed and its value dem

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thogard ( 43403 )

      Some of the complaints are technical in nature.
      Lots of stuff has been promised that simply can't happen with the current stuff that is being installed. For example the ONTs didn't have the ability to have different VPNs for data or voice traffic. The solution was to layer a VPN on a VPN and the last time I heard, it cost the same for a data+voice channel as just a data channel or a voice channel.

      Some of the equipment being installed had American telco inventory tags on it. If the original equipment owner

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