As someone who is very “pro” technology and likes to be on the cutting edge, I find myself staring at many of my colleagues and acquaintances in the industry with disbelief when the topic of the National Broadband Network comes up. People I know (and some just email or tweet me) ask if I’ve bumped my head and forgotten what I do for a living. It even has had me re-thinking my views, but ultimately I keep coming to the same place.
Here’s what I think…
First of all, $42b is a ridiculous sum of money to spend on anything. It is even crazier when the country finds itself coming off a $22b surplus and staring down the barrel of $100b of debt. I don’t think this is at all right now about need, but is entirely about our ability to cover the cost of such a thing. Our Federal government, no matter who wins, is going to be spending about $5b – $6b per year just servicing that $100b debt – on the $30b of debt on the NBN, you’d be looking at close to $2b of servicing costs per year alone! Why not get back into surplus, in 2012 and revisit this whole situation then? If the US economy fully recovers, Europe looks stable and forecasts for the Australian economy look good and project us paying off that massive debt, then awesome, let’s come up with a plan and build a world class network.
The next problem I have is around the actual execution. Does anyone think that having this big capital works program run by a guy with a hardware vendor background and some consultants is a good idea? Not only that, it seems like they are doing it on the fly. If we’re going to spend all this money, couldn’t we at least see a coherent plan of what’s going to be built BEFORE they start awarding contracts. This is the exact same mess Labor created with the Insulation Program and the Building the Education Revolution – lots of spend, very poor controls, not enough safeguards and very poor oversight. I’m not a fan of the NSW Labor Government (they don’t have many fans) but thumbs up to Premier Keneally for spending a bit more money on Project Management and diligent execution – my kid’s school is getting six new classrooms, on time and presumably in construction (of which I know a bit about) that probably means on budget. When I hear the NBN Co talking about satellites and all kinds of other unplanned crazy, this things starts smelling like many IT projects, $42b will quickly become $50b and so on.
I have an issue with the necessity as well. Many of my colleagues and friends in IT are running around crazily screaming that 100Mbps isn’t enough for people – we need 10Gbps. Huh? That’s just stupid. Right now, most people are operating on their home internet connection at under 2Mbps and some have gone up to 8Mbps with ADSL2. Take up on ASDL2 hasn’t been 100% – many people have chosen to remain happily on lower speeds. I’ve had Telstra Cable and used to routinely get 15Mbps or more and I’m about as much of a power user as you’re going to find and that was good enough for me. Right now and I’d venture a guess and say for the next 10 years, 100Mbps is going to be more than enough to meet the needs of the average person.
Capacity is my other issue. I don’t have figures to back me up, so I’m openly winging this bit – let’s call it an educated guess. My understanding is that a significant majority of traffic consumed by Australians comes from overseas and presumably like most other countries, the US would be a big part of that. The NBN plan does nothing to increase the capacity between the US and Australia – so aren’t you just building a giant fat pipe to try and suck a pea through a straw? As I’ve said on Twitter, if the NBN included a fibre run to Guam/Hawaii and onto the US, then I’d be more excited. This would go a long way towards getting rid of “usage” based rates for internet connectivity in the US (typo, sorry) and provide a more, “all you can eat” style.
I also don’t fully understand the use cases for all this bandwidth. One of the first things you hear talked about is remote communities getting better medical care. Ok, maybe we’ll be able to move high-res X-Rays and MRI results around, but I think you’d have a better chance of finding a unicorn than finding a doctor willing to remotely diagnose a patient over a high speed internet connection. Insurance companies will step in and crack down – I mean we struggle to keep obstetricians from leaving the industry because of malpractice, imagine what this would create?!?
The other big use case is improved education. Again, I don’t understand this. The technology exists today to record lectures, stream them live or have them up for download and with the use of stuff like Skype, people can participate remotely. What are we talking about here, better resolution? Come on!
The final use case myth is around the magical undiscovered future technology that is going to require bigger bandwidth or we’ll all move back into caves and be forced to live like Bear Grylls. That is Future FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) – nothing more, nothing less. People who want this to go through use the fear of “falling behind” as a passive aggressive sales technique. The FUD runs so deep that you can’t say things like, “I can’t think of anything that could cause that disruption” because the FUDsters jump in and say, “Of course not, it hasn’t been invented yet, that’s why you should plan for it.” Sorry, I don’t go in for that kind of thing. When we get to that Minority Report style, 3D holographic future, then we’ll surely have seen it coming via a small series of increasing evolutions and we should then react accordingly, but technology normally doesn’t have such abnormal disruptiveness – technology is an ecosystem of continual progress, standing on the shoulders of giants.
My last issue is with the evolution of technology. Right now the Net Neutrality debate is raging in the US. One ugly aspect of where the discussion is headed is wireless falling outside the scope of Net Neutrality agreements. This is simply because the carriers know that the best way to solve the last mile issue is with better wireless technology and that’s where the R&D is going. Digging up trenches and running fibre across telephone poles is 20th Century methods of solving a 21st Century issue. Then you have the same “technologists” who say we need all of this fibre to protect from “future unknown technology” while also saying that wireless and copper technology won’t evolve – you can’t have it both ways, you can’t KNOW what the limits of copper or wireless are while saying some undiscovered tech will come along and obliterate out bandwidth.
Overall, the best part about my position is, if I’m wrong, the country just needs to get on with building it. However, if Labor are wrong and spend $42b on this network and it is under used and becomes a great big white elephant for the next 15 years, then what? You can’t get that money back again.
No related posts.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Unfortunately, the Labor government is only about spin. Never ending spin.
What makes me really puke is the "we ushered Australia through the GFC" claim by ex-cricket club treasurer Wayne Swan.
Which actual splurge of public spending was the cause? Perhaps it was it the free Korean LCD screens to appear in every home? Money was even sent to dead people – explain that !!(I can prove that by the way).
They claim it was the speed and extent of the spend – like no other country in the world acted swiftly or with as much spending abandon. Labor – you did nothing during this period to affect any different result!! Same goes for the Libs. Labor was just Johnny on the spot (pardon the pun) – well done on your timing – that's it, Wayne!
Regardless of whether Labor or Liberals were in power, we had already done the hard yards in reigning in the banking system. Our banks carried nothing like the toxic debt encumbering the US and European banks.
This National Broadband Network is nothing more than another idealistic vision with absolutely no substance.
Can someone please start a simple list of Labor's failed projects – both Federal AND State. Why should we differentiate like they are different organisations entirely? Something really simple for the nongs who voted Labor back into State power can understand.
Hi Brad,
Thanks for the comments…
For me I think the key is to separate out "meat & veg" from "lollies & pudding". All this talk of "needing" 10Gbps to the door is just fanciful nonsense. For the near to medium term a speed of 100Mbps is more than ample. Anyone saying otherwise is not thinking logically.
I think what Labor is preying on that I dislike is this "jingoism" about Australia needing to be the world leader. I've said it here and elsewhere, the NBN is not going to dramatically improve the technology sector of Australia, it is going to give us faster access to YouTube.
In terms of capital works, I think $42b is gross on fibre optic cable when our transport, education and health systems are creaking with age and stress from overuse. Everytime I see a demountable acting as a permanent classroom, I see that as a failure of government. When I pay a toll to use a highway, that's a failure of government. We're having a migration debate not because refugees or migrants are bad people but because our governments over the past thirty years have neglected our basic infrastructure (water, roads, hospitals, electricity and schools) so much that we can't accomodate these people. So my view is, put away the razzle dazzle of the NBN and go solve the intrinsic issues that are hurting the long term growth prospects of the country.
I just think we have debt to pay off before we indulge in an NBN. Like you said, hospitals are falling down around our ears. There is no mental health service to speak of. Nowhere to put new immigrants. Trains always run late in Melbourne. Someone in the Australian wrote the other day that he'd like a Ferrari, but it wasn't fair to expect the taxpayer to foot the bill. I think ordinary Australians have more pressing priorities than faster Internet right at the moment.
Ben,
You're looking to be very technologically illiterate. 10GB fibre is not available today. 10Gbps fibre is. The NBN isn't going to be 100MB/s. It'll be 100Mbps or 12.5MB/s which makes watching a 20MB/s stream quite an interesting experience.
So I'm pretty sure you've no idea what you're talking about since you clearly don't know that there are 8 bits in a byte and that internet bandwidth is measure in bits, not bytes.
Do you realise that there is a difference between need and want? I'd hazzard a guess that 99.95% of average NBN-connected households won't have any need for HD video – it's just a want.
Secondly, the NBN doesn't make caps go away – and caps are a function of our limited international bandwidth – about 8.3Tbps from memory (roughly 1Mbps/user if everyone was downloading stuff from international servers at the same time).
Now lets deal with "HD video" at 20Mbps… you do realise that existing ADSL2 technology is capable of 24Mbps if you're close to the exchange or a road-side RIM cabinet with a CMUX/DSLAM card?
Lets talk 100Mbps NBN fibre – iinet have a 90GB+90GB capped plan for $160. The NBN has caps because the NBN does not upgrade Australia's woefully inadequate 8.3Tbps aggregated links to the outside world – which means that if every Australian started downloading from a US server at the same time, we'd only get about 1Mbps each (125KB/s).
HD video is generally considered to be 1080p video – or Blu-ray quality. The 1x specification states that Blu-ray discs must be capable of 36Mbps transfer but realistically most of them require 72Mbps (2X). Lets do the maths: At 72Mbps you consume 9MB/s or 540MB/min. That means that to use up all your quota, you would watch 341 minutes of HD footage – or just over 5.5 hours.
Now, you can go and buy two Blu-ray movies that will give you the same length of HD video for a total of about $60. That will save you $100 on your Internet connection and it will save the country $43billion.
Hell, I'll shout you those Blu-rays. Cheaper for me in the long run as a taxpayer.
And what's more with Bigpond Movies, and similar services, you can go online, order the movies, get the Blurays or DVDs delivered to your home, you don't even need to go to the video store.
Being about to download a movie in 5 minutes is irrelevant, as it will still take me an hour and a half to watch it.
Your are right to say you don't fully understand.
Bandwidth is not for remote diagnosis, it is about remote access to information.
I work in IT and in Health… limited bandwidth is a major reason why clinical systems are not available in country areas of Australia. Most 1st tier clinical applications are not web based yet, so bandwidth to remote areas is a a real limitation to their use.
You have obviously not spoken to anyone in country areas to see how poor bandwidth affects their ability to deliver effective patient care. Probably time to get out of the city, mate.
I too, have worked in IT and Health. A while back, the "geeks" got excited because of hi-res xrays. Moving these around the radiology department requires Gigabit or more. Those sorts of trunks across the state are very expensive.
But, I have spoken with several personal friends who range from Orthopeadic Surgeons, Cardiologists, to GPs – who highlighted – when they call for an xray, they are not so much looking for the picture, but the expert opinion of the radiologist how reviews dozens of them, a day, as to his or her interpretation of the image. More often than not, looking at the Xray is just to make the patient feel warmer and fuzzier. Ergo, it is the 8-10 lines of text attached that are more important. It doesn't take superspeeds to deliver that.
The other two related issues are, that a) just because Hospitals MIGHT need it, doesn't mean that it should be delivered to every house in Australia. Providing a distributed medical information network as a discrete and separate project will not cost 43-55Bn it will cost more in the order of the $500M that Labor has wasted on Nehta – this transition agency has been around for a number of years, and has basically done two things – ratify an international standard proposal on naming of things medical (wow), and put forward a proposal on a unique identity (a new "Australia Card" if you will) system. The first look at this identity system showed it to be a farce – it proposed "Phantom ID's" for famous people (like politicians) because the public servants administering the system couldn't be trusted not to divulge personal information about them. SAY WHAT? Use the threat of law to stop people from breaking the law, not some lamebrained idea.
Being able to look at an Xray is going to mean squat, if you still can't get into a hospital, because they are being incompetently run by multiple tiers of state and federal bureaucracy.
Some good points, it is a little simplistic, though, to think that moving PACS data around is the only benefit. As you say, unless you have the specialist at the site, there is no point in sending it into the country. The major advantage I see is the orders and results, care planning… the use by nurses, midwives, doctors etc, not so much the specialists, separation summary distribution, the removal of duplication of patient record. All of this is being constrained by lack of bandwidth to rural and regional australia.
Instead of delivering high bandwidth apps not designed for web use across web links, publish a Citrix desktop.
Problem solved. LAN-speed access to apps, extra security and no requirement for extensive and expensive MPLS links.
It will also cost a lot less than $43billion.
Using the logic of "who'll ever need 100mbps or 1gbps" is the same as saying 10 years ago "let's stick with dialup and not use ADSL". Who'd give up their ADSL now for dialup? In 10 years, blog posts like this an Tony Abbott will look positively backwards.
15 years ago, when the market required services faster than dialup, the market delivered ADSL1 at a cost of $0 to the taxpayer
10 years ago, when the market required services faster than ADSL, the market delivered ADSL2 at a cost of $0 to the taxpayer
5 years ago, when the market demanded extra mobility, the market delivered 3G and 802.11x-based services at a cost of $0 to the taxpayer
Do you see a common thread? What the market wants, the market gets – without government intervention. Sure, ADSL1&2 penetration is not perfect. 3G has contention issues and wi-fi networks don't really exist much outside capital cities. Lets fix that up – it's all fixable. Hell, make government funds available for it.
But where is the market demand for Fibre from residences? Sure, I understand business can benefit from Fibre, but what does the majority facebook/email/SMH user need with 100Mbps?
What people are failing to realise is that the NBN isn't a technology project. All the proposed technology already exists and can be ordered off a vendor's price list.
The NBN is a large-scale civil works project. The challenge is the scale. Success or failure isn't down to whether they can deliver 10M, 100M or 1G – success depends upon them being able to roll a service to all users on time and on budget.
So far there are 70 homes connected to the NBN. 20% of the proposed schedule is behind them, with only 0.0007% of the customer base connected. Promising an extra 300,000 homes connected or a speed increase to 1G is just a distraction from the complete lack of traction in this project.
Now for what I think (based on rational **and** technical reality) :
a> Telstra is the only Comms company that would benefit from a Coalition win.
b> Abbott declared that a slow broadband using copper, or current Telstra/Optus **consumer grade** ADSL 2 offerings costing more than $100 a month is all you need. The fact that a cheap and nasty Copper service or WIFI wireless can't be used **today** for free Skype calls has not been considered in their policy.
c.> Every business person I deal with o'seas, including Australians based in HK and SE Asia places, use Skype as their primary communications tool. Most of them work from home, and I **need** to be able to do this at a reasonable cost (as I deal internationally, voice and video communications are mandatory all the time.)
d.> Many jobs available to Australians are similar to mine – reasonably highl paid, dealing with English Speaking overseas clients in technology, financial services, tourism, education, etc. My job, and many others like mine would have been exported to SE Asia by the failure to carry on with the NBN.
Go the greens!! Emilio
{ 2 trackbacks }