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pokerspiv said:
Which poses the secondary question, which is: Is it really worth our while to spend $100 billion so that people in Telfer can have fibre optic broadband?

There are reasons why land in cities is worth more than land in remote country towns. A big one is that people accept that living in cities means more access to infrastructure like this.

Private ISPs were already doing a decent job of rolling out fibre in cities before the NBN came along and took that market away from them.
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utterly false.

No, it's about upgraded services in the capital and major cities - where 80% of the population live. Remote places were never going to get optic fibre.

Private ISPs were never rolling out fibre. Every major initiative in private investment in upgrading from copper, even to fibre to the node failed. All of them failed, because of Government policy. Any new network or network upgrade had to be made available on a wholesale basis to all the players in the market, even the competition. They all failed on the policy of no exclusive access to your own network. It's simple fantasy to say that the private ISPs were meeting market demand. Sorry, but your whole post is pure ideological fantasy. What this situation requires is pragmatism. That means ripping and scrapping copper, installing a completely new network and starting again, and then getting the wholesale access model right.
 
Every other country in the world seems to get on just fine without a government-constructed optic fibre network. I've yet to see a convincing argument why Australia is the exception. And there needs to be a quite convincing argument to justify spending $50-100 billion on it. Conroy expressly refused to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the NBN for good reason, he knew it wouldn't pass it.
 

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Apologies everyone. I provoked Dry Rot by suggesting he used to post purely out of vindictiveness about the ALP, and it seems he has used that as a reason to start spraying the old arguments around again.

Self-fulfilling, but unintentional.
 
pokerspiv said:
Every other country in the world seems to get on just fine without a government-constructed optic fibre network. I've yet to see a convincing argument why Australia is the exception. And there needs to be a quite convincing argument to justify spending $50-100 billion on it. Conroy expressly refused to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the NBN for good reason, he knew it wouldn't pass it.
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But FTTN at 45 billion is okay????

And Malcolm also shirking a CBA is also okay?

Most other countries in the world are either not as sparse as us, or they have a far greater population to justify an economic return.
Should Australians miss out on the best that this has to offer because we have a small population and therefore don't get the IRR required for private enterprise to consider it?

My father in law I am sure was pleased the other day when he asked me what his internet options were. I had to tell him, sadly, that ADSL at 3.4mb/s was not an option and Cable with Optus (which he currently has) is his ONLY option. Great competition this private enterprise marketplace has done for the Australian people....
 
TheMase said:
But FTTN at 45 billion is okay????

And Malcolm also shirking a CBA is also okay?
.
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No, there should not be any kind of NBN. Using taxpayer funding to create infrastructure that would have been built by private business at their own expense is *ed whether it costs $30 billion or $100 billion.
 
pokerspiv said:
No, there should not be any kind of NBN. Using taxpayer funding to create infrastructure that would have been built by private business at their own expense is ******ed whether it costs $30 billion or $100 billion.
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Except the private sector has shown no desire to provide a true open market and do this themselves....
 
pokerspiv said:
No, there should not be any kind of NBN. Using taxpayer funding to create infrastructure that would have been built by private business at their own expense is ******ed whether it costs $30 billion or $100 billion.
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You can't imagine it could have any positive flow-on effects on the economy?
 
pokerspiv said:
No, there should not be any kind of NBN. Using taxpayer funding to create infrastructure that would have been built by private business at their own expense is ******ed whether it costs $30 billion or $100 billion.
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Having Telstra in a 'comfortable' near monopoly position gave them no real reason to invest into such a large scheme. Unfortunately being a big country with a small population & spread out meant that it almost certainly needed Government involvement.
 
pokerspiv said:
No, there should not be any kind of NBN. Using taxpayer funding to create infrastructure that would have been built by private business at their own expense is ******ed whether it costs $30 billion or $100 billion.
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This industry is an exception to the market rule, because it involves having a physical connection to every premises over which to provide the service. The cheapest and most efficient way to provide this connection is to have one standardised universal network. Having competing networks is inefficient because it means duplication. So no matter how efficiently any private business is run it is going to be more expensive because they have fewer customers over which to spread the fixed cost. A private business will only be most efficient if it becomes a monopoly and can snare all of the customers and spread the cost over the greatest number. But then you have a monopoly which defeats the purpose of competition in the first place.

This isn't new. Countries worked this out decades ago. Read up on the electricity market in the UK before they introduced the national grid. Without direct government investment we probably wouldn't have had the Telecom copper network in the first place.
 
Ratts of Tobruk said:
Apologies everyone. I provoked Dry Rot by suggesting he used to post purely out of vindictiveness about the ALP, and it seems he has used that as a reason to start spraying the old arguments around again.

Self-fulfilling, but unintentional.
Click to expand...

don't take it so personally unless of course you are a stooge
 

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madmug said:
Having Telstra in a 'comfortable' near monopoly position gave them no real reason to invest into such a large scheme. Unfortunately being a big country with a small population & spread out meant that it almost certainly needed Government involvement.
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That's complete rubbish. Most ISPs were already experimenting with laying their own fibre at the time the NBN was announced. Obviously nothing has happened since the government announced its intention to muscle in.
 
pokerspiv said:
That's complete rubbish. Most ISPs were already experimenting with laying their own fibre at the time the NBN was announced. Obviously nothing has happened since the government announced its intention to muscle in.
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This is simply not true.

During the Howard era both Telstra and and a big consortium lead by Optus came up with a broadband plan. Both plans relied on them having exclusive control over the new network they wanted to build. Both plans were knocked on the head by the competition authorities unless there was open access for all players to the new network. They lobbied Howard to overturn the ruling but his government knocked it back too. Both plans were called off by the respective parties. They failed to get up because of the open access policy, basically they had to let the competition use their network to compete with them. It was a complete policy stalemate, no self-respecting ISP or telecoms business was seriously looking at laying their own cable. That's why the Rudd election campaign committed to the government building the network on an open access basis, to get around the stalemate.
 
Both iinet and austar that I know of were both rolling out FTTH in trial stages at new housing estates well before the NBN was ever announced. EG The HFC network now owned by Telstra in the Perth suburb of Ellenbrook was originally laid and owned by iiNet over 10 years before the NBN.

Please don't try to rewrite history.

Here is proof: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/442960/iinet_we_more_fibre_customers_than_nbn/

iiNet has boasted it now has more customers connected to its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network than NBN Co has connected to the National Broadband Network (NBN).

The ISP has 8000 customers on its FTTH TransAct network, Internode network and wholesale services, with its FTTH network capable of the NBN speeds of 12/1Mbps, 25/5Mbps, 50/20Mbps and 100/40Mbps.

It also has 2700 customers on the NBN.
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http://services.eng.uts.edu.au/~kumbes/ra/Access-Networks/hfc/cnethfc.htm

Currently, Telstra and Optus are the main suppliers of HFC technology in the capital cities of Australia. There are also a few regional operators: Neighbourhood Cable and Austar (Windytide), who are building their networks in regional Australia, leaving Telstra and Optus to compete in the State Capitals. West Coast Radio (iiNet) is the only cable provider to Perth (Ellenbrook). Below is a table from the ACCC outlining the HFC operators in Australia and their Coverage.
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New greenfield housing subdivisions is piffle compared to what the NBN is really about, that is retro-fitting and upgrading existing copper connections to millions of homes around the country. New housing sub-divisions is an exemption category, but of negligible importance to the overall picture.
 
scon said:
I get it!!
You write English but don't read it??
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Yeah, nah. Bying claimed that no private providers at all were laying fibre prior to NBN. I provided evidence otherwise, now he's adjusted his claims to the fibre they laid being "piffle compared to the NBN".

Goalposts moved.

Why not just be honest and admit you don't know as much about the subject as you claimed?
 
pokerspiv said:
Yeah, nah. Bying claimed that no private providers at all were laying fibre prior to NBN. I provided evidence otherwise, now he's adjusted his claims to the fibre they laid being "piffle compared to the NBN".

Goalposts moved.

Why not just be honest and admit you don't know as much about the subject as you claimed?
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HFC is not optical fibre.
 
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