Is Australia's Federal Government plan for a high-speed network up to scratch?

Saturday, April 12. 2008

Is Australia's Federal Government plan for a high-speed network up to scratch?

High speed Internet is not a luxury in the modern life anymore. It is becoming a mandatory requirement for business, education and the delivery of entertainment/information to households.

Only this week the Communications Minister Stephen Conroy announced a tender bid process to "enable world-class, high-speed broadband for all Australians". This $4.7 billion dollar deal is expected to deliver FFTN access across the country to some 98% of the population.

The week prior Conroy laid the boots into the ill-fated WiMax based OPEL deal that was setup under the Liberal regime. The dumping of the $958 million wireless deal is likely to see that money moved into the FTTN deal.

I don't disagree with the dumping of the WiMax deal, as questions about it's reported effectiveness have been raised globally.

The $4.7b National Broadband Network tender is expected to deliver minimum download speeds of 12Mbps (no talk of upstream data rates) to 98% of Australian homes and businesses and should be rolled out and made operational progressively over five years using FTTN or FTTP technology.

Is this FTTx deal going to cut it?

A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) thinks not.

The report looks at what is required for years 2010-2020 and have broken down the statistics of throughput rates the average modern household will require and have stated that they will require speeds of 50Mbps down, and 10Mbps up!

This is a far cry from the 12Mb/sec we're being told we'll have delivered across the country by 2012!

The report also raises some concerns about how Australia plan do undertake the roll out, with FTTN tipped to be the likely deployment strategy.

One of the findings from the report was that those that look at initially rolling out FTTN and then upgrade to FTTP at a later date will indeed find the process a lot more expensive.
The cost of laying copper matches that of Fibre.
Fibre didn't have the maintenance/interference issues that copper had.
The cost of deployment per household ranged from $500-$2500).

The question has to be asked - are the governments (former Liberal and now Labour) doing solid research in world's best practices?

Are we likely to see after a 5 year deployment we still lag behind the rest of the world?

Posted by Matt in Play, Work at 22:42 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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FTTN is a strategy for Telstra to lock out competitors. The speed promised through FTTN was lower than ADSL2 can offer.

FTTH is interesting as long as there is no lock-in.

Telstra should never have been allowed to own the local loop.

#1 Russell Coker (Homepage) on 2008-04-13 21:40 (Reply)

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