Yesterday we had more comment both politically and from the industry on the NBN. Whilst none of us know what the outcome of this election is yet, Senator Stephen Conroy is right about at least one thing. Anthony Wong, President of the ACS followed me at the podium at Cebit in Sydney this year. He told the audience that Senator Stephen Conroy had said to him (paraphrasing) that, this election Australians will really care about technology. Well he was right. Maybe that is because the two issues that have most Australians interested about technology are ones that come from his portfolio. I don’t think it’s quite going the way he had hoped though.
Yesterday, John Linton a Director of Exetel, discussed in his blog, that wireless was very important as so many residences were moving away from fixed line.
This is one of the reasons I don’t understand why we aren’t talking more about freeing up the spectrum. With more and more of us being mobile, ask yourself where you need a fixed line? For me obviously at the office and at home because 3G doesn’t give me the speed I want. However I primarily work wirelessly. So whilst FTTH is great, the majority of the population don’t want a fixed line. They do not want a router they have to configure and reboot. They want “Apple” bandwidth. You switch it on and you’re connected.
The NBN is Infrastructure
The NBN is infrastructure right? Some are even saying it is a human right. Let’s consider how this would work then. Many have written that it is best the NBN stays in public hands and there seems to be a variety of opinions on the scope of the network. Obviously the major business centres need to have the best fixed bandwidth solution available. A scalable fibre solution from my understanding is the best bet. The major centres also need incredible wireless access. SMartphones, netbooks, ipads etc, not to mention future proofing for in car IP devices as well. If we’re serious about business we need to consider free wireless all over the city. That would attract business as well as making it easier to do business. My understanding is that we couldn’t do this with a Telstra because they were the wholesaler. As they controlled the network and the costing model it was always cost prohibitive to do something like that. I pay my taxes like I do to use the roads. I want to use the NBN. It’s forever loss making so access should be essentially free as long as I pay my taxes, water rates etc. That means no ISPs. Ever Again. It’s infrastructure right? I’m just passing through your town, I’ll need to use your roads, plumbing and wifi.
Get rid of the telcos & ISPs
Every business that let’s me use it’s electricity like lights etc should also let me use wifi. The business has already paid for the electricity so I can use it. Of course we’ll have to move away from our current costing model that suggests there is some inherent value in a megabyte and how many of them you have. That’s just traffic. Pricing should be based like highways. The more trucks you have the more registrations you pay. Bigger tubes = more $. When more capacity is needed we build bigger highways but because they are public they are not tollways. The ISP model is more comparable to a tollway where you pay for how much you use. A public NBN will allow us to be the most networked country in our region. Business will boom where there is free wireless access. I will come to your shopping mall because you give me free high speed bandwidth.
So everyone ok with scrapping the ISP industry?
Wimax for the last mile
Industrial areas would need good bandwidth from a fibre backbone and the surrounding residential estates could use the bandwidth in non-business hours, at night and weekends. Residential could connect with Wimax to the local industrial/commercial nodes. A few towers around the neighborhood should do. Maybe the odd repeater for black spots. This will cover the last mile to residential but Industry & commerce will be on the fibre backbone. We can put voice over this too. Compression is getting better and better. Do we really need telcos as well? Our major freeways we should have free wifi as well. For our satnav, gaming, mobile business applications like sales reps, transport etc. This would see an amazing increase in productivity. Online all the time and if you are wireless it’s free of course. Just like the street lights are free.
So no ISPs and no Telcos. I really cant see the need for these middle men. Maybe just some regional authorities administering access…. and let’s give everyone an Internet user license number too so we can make sure you’re allowed to use the bandwidth.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Wireless is definitely important – there is absolutely no doubt about that – however it cannot and will not be able to provide a quality of service that people will demand.
Even if you covered 100% of Australia with wireless, there will always be reception blackspots, and there will always be major contention issues.
Yes a fibre based network will suffer contention issues too, but the ability to increase bandwidth without ripping fibre out of the ground to achieve it leaves wireless for dead.
With wireless, everytime a significant speed increase is required, you’ve basically got to replace the tower. Even the 20Mbps service Telstra has just announced is a matter of using two aggregated wireless channels to get to that speed.
Want 40Mbps? Four aggregated channels, but by the time everyone is doing that, you’ve decreased the effective capacity (in terms of the number of users) of that tower to 25% of what it was previously.
Wireless is NOT the answer to a connected future. We’d be constantly upgrading towers, or building more of them.
Thanks for a great read on the issue, and I like your approach re the roads analogy.
The only thing is that in your last paragraph you mention towers – have you seen the uproar every time a telco wants to put up a tower in a residential area??
But you’re ok with getting rid of the ISPs?
I’m being tongue in cheek. Personally I’m not convinced on the infrastructure argument. The point I was trying to make if we take this to a logical conclusion, is that Government will control access.
The control of access is important – Telstra has the last mile sewn up right now with their copper monopoly.
As a corporate entity, their primary responsibility is always to their shareholders – that’s actually the way corporations law works. And they “gouge price” on the basis that they have their copper monopoly. There is ZERO incentive for them to have a level playing field for wholesale access.
Hand the monopoly to any other corporate entity, and you’ll get the same result. It is artificial market manipulation, and puts up barriers to competition.
So if the corporates aren’t running it, who’s left? Government.
With NBN Co as wholesale only, and legislated to provide the same price to all providers, regardless of location or access technology (fibre, wireless, or satellite), the retail market would have a level playing field, finally.
Right now, even the number two player in the marker (Optus) has no hope of competing with Telstra.
I think we still need retail. as Michael said, as long as the retailers have a level playing field, it’s all good. This is the same with electricity – I don’t rely on the public infrastructure to provide billing/provisioning etc. TRUenergy/origin/etc do this.
The same should go for NBN – the ISP’s will play a valuable roll in the retail arm. we just need to get those fibres in!
I would argue electricity supply is far more complex & dangerous than broadband. They have about 6 suppliers in Vic. We could easily just have 3 regional administrators. Billing doesn’t need to be that complex. It’s just one rego fee per year.
Nobody’s forcing you to use an ISP now, Jim. You could lease your own capacity to the USA on one of the submarine cable systems heading East and go your hardest.
If we continue the NBN-as-a-road meme from the last post, it seems to me that you’re proposing nationalizing the airlines and shipping companies so that you can make use of the road to your house for global communication without having to pay anyone else for service.
The NBN is targeted at the wholesale last-mile market, which is the one part of the telecommunications industry where competition has failed. There are already competitive submarine cable systems, competitive ISPs, competitive datacentres, competitive hosting companies, and so on; but they aren’t the problem that needs solving.
(if you want to “solve” those bits anyway, come out and say so: Put up a blog post outlining upsides and downsides of nationalizing end-to-end communications, add it to the debate so we can have at it)
Finally: In a comment on your last post I suggested that you read up on the Nyquist Limit and the Shannon Hartley Theorem. Happy to talk you through the concepts if you need it; An understanding of those ideas will probably change your mind about wireless. Suffice to say that the “lets put wimax everywhere” suggestion that keeps coming up is usually offered by people who don’t “get” the physics.
– mark
As it was a government[USA], indeed its military which first developed the internet the question is why does ‘the government’ not control everything, not, whether it should, more or less, ‘control’ it.
BTW the retail electricity market in Tasmania is a complete fucking joke. Hasn’t been extended to domestic residents here yet, but in the next tranche up I got a quote for our business from the old govvie retailer and then went to the competition (there was exactly one of these) who QUOTE “declined to quote” UNQUOTE and when I queried this in terms of ‘market competition’ they replied that I “didn’t have to tell them” the govvie retail competition..
Choice? Competition? Its all imaginary bollocks. I don’t believe it anymore. It wasted HOURS of my time.
IF algos can run stock market buy&sells with nary a human decision maker in sight then we might as well have Red Plenty http://www.redplenty.com/ With no human involvement then there is no difference between these automated decision except time wasting “Choice”.
Then we can all sit back and play darts instead of wasting our lives ‘choosing’ shit.
Easy tiger.
I’m not proposing “put up wimax everywhere”. I do however believe we don’t have enough wireless. Nor am I suggesting wireless is the only solution. If we base this NBN purely on physics and ignore human behaviour we’ll waste a lot of money. I’m a hack of a network engineer & don’t presume understand the issues as anywhere near as well as those who work in access/ISP space. I will speak up however when people start talking about bandwidth as a human right. Or in your case proposing the taxpayer should always foot the bill and the ISP profits. What infrastructure do we have that is funded solely by the federal purse and private industry retails it with a markup? Not roads, not rail, not water, not electricity. I respect you Mark and would always defer to your vastly superior knowledge when it comes to the technology. The roads / infrastructure argument is not mine. I don’t agree with it. Just because I can see cracks in the bridge doesn’t mean you want me fixing it.
My main concern is that we have a lot of people screaming for the ALP NBN, without a business case. We all know bandwidth is shit in AU. Mind you it’s a hell of a lot better than where it was 10 years ago. As you have pointed out, we’re in a unique situation because we’re an island. Comparing us to SK is a little sill given the geographic differences. When I spoke at CEDA with Rob Durie we were ranked 19 worldwide for bandwidth. I believe we’re still in the top 20? (depending on what metric you use). So we seem to have kept pace. I’ve got 13 employees sharing 8000/356 . It’s CRAP! So we’re looking at moving office. That’s what happens in the free market. Giving fibre to everyone distorts the market.
Wow and then there is this.http://www.itwire.com/it-industry-news/strategy/41532-telco-leaders-unite-to-pan-nbn-a-lobby-for-ubiquitous-wireless-nbn-30
Be wary of drinking too much of John Linton’s coolaid too..
Hhahaha never. We are entering into uncharted territory here though. Federally funded “infrastructure” that private companies will retail with a markup.