THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK
The announcement by the Government of a further $3bn investment in NBNCo to replace Fibre-to-the-Node (FTTN) with ‘fibre’ is causing me to scratch my head. There are so many unanswered questions that it is hard to understand what motivates this plan.
Besides the Prime Minister telling us that they are “finishing the job”[1] and the Minister for Communications saying that “nothing is faster than the speed of light” (this is really embarrassing: ?does she not realise that radio waves in air travel faster than light in fibre, not that this is relevant – she ought to get herself a better speech writer), there is no clarity on whether they are talking about fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC) or fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP). I sincerely hope for the sanity of property owners that it is the former.
However, the bigger question is which customers are crying out for this upgrade – which dog barked? I have a FTTN service, and it certainly wasn’t me or my neighbours. Sure, there are a few loud (and mostly ignorant) voices crying that we need higher data speeds, but would they actually notice if they got them? Does the owner of a car whose speedo goes up to 200kph find it noticeably better than one where the speedo tops out at 160kph if the speed limit is 100kph? My Internet Service Provider (ISP) actually offers me, for 5 days a month, a free ‘speed boost’ on my FTTN service from 50/20Mbps to 100/40Mbps and, frankly, I never use it because I have not noticed any difference. When my video streaming services stutter it is invariably due to the streaming servers or my Android TV, never my network even at the lower speed.
The government quotes an Accenture report claiming $10bn GDP uplift over the next decade but as I have not seen the report, I can’t tell how this comparison is being done. I hazard a guess that the same uplift in GDP would be achieved with and without the FTTN upgrade.
The more relevant statistics would be:
·?????? a histogram of peak speed and average throughput for all customers across all technologies so we could know how many people actually need more than 100Mbps;
·?????? a breakdown of the 622k FTTN customers by demographic, particularly business versus residential;
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·?????? a breakdown of the number of FTTN customers who have signed up for 100Mbps services;
·?????? an indication of the cost of maintaining the ‘unreliable’ FTTN service.
I pose that the FTTN upgrade could easily be deferred for 5 to 10 years without anyone being unduly disadvantaged. During that period, we are likely to see significant improvements in access technology including 2 or 3 new LEO satellite constellations, improved fixed wireless solutions and probably cheaper fibre technology. By doing the FTTN upgrade now, besides the government using money that is currently expensive, NBN Co is locking itself out of potential improved solutions over the next decade.
All in all, I find it hard to see this as anything other than an election year stunt.
Trusted International ICT Industry Leader
1 个月I've been barking but apparently up the wrong tree! Ironically for someone so involved in FTTx, we were amongst the last to be switched to NBN but then onto aerial HFC which is now approaching 30 years old. Again I can probably get all the speed I need but it is 5 years plus past its economic life and NBNCo seem to have no migration plan.
Fibre to the premises bypasses the copper and reduces the operational costs to almost nothing. And, of course, it pretty well future-proofs the access network against the day when even the Bradlow family requires more than their chickenfeed 50/25 broadband service.
The gas company has recently been digging holes in the roads in my suburb to install high-pressure mains. Who barked in that case? Certainly not any retail consumers. The gas company is doing it to reduce their costs. It may be with the NBN that NBN Co is the one who barked. In a traditional copper access network, almost all the faults occur in the distribution (the part nearest the customers). Replace the feeder with fibre, as in FTTN, and the fault rate remains essentially the same. If you drive around the suburbs, it won't take long to find a technician at a telecom pillar undertaking fault-finding, pair-hunting and rearrangement. It remains a significant operational cost. In addition, a well-organized telco rehabs the copper distribution and its supporting infrastructure every 8 to 10 years, a significant cost. Not that Telstra/Telecom did that consistently: the copper access maintenance in Telstra/Telecom was considered just another cost to be avoided or deferred where possible. Telstra only got its head around copper access when the government forced it to, by which time it was much too late.