On Mon, 2015-10-05 at 11:08 +1100, Tom Worthington wrote: > Who is playing the NBN for political gain? There would not seem to be > anything to gain for the incumbent government, whoever they are, to > deliberately limit NBN service in remote areas. Or are you suggesting > someone else is deliberately exaggerating the problem?
By providing a substandard service to as much of the country as possible, they keep the embarrassing cost blowouts down, and/or save money to spend on areas with larger voting populations and/or marginal seats. This whole issue should have ripped the coalition apart two years ago, I can only assume the Nationals are a bit slow to catch on. The cynic in me also thinks that this could well be a deliberate exercise in lowering expectations. By giving people 12Mb/s, "shaping" (because "throttling" is such an ugly word), dismal quotas and distant deadlines, they hope we will all be pathetically grateful when they get access any time sooner, and get 20Mb/s or 40Mb/s and with luck will forget that with FTTP they could have had 100Mb/s just for an entree, and gigabits in a few years time. > I have a wireless modem with a 10GB a month allocation, which then gets > "shaped". This is fine for on-line banking, large photographs, podcasts > and low resolution video (as well as for tutoring and being a student of > on-line university courses). Your personal requirements are of very little relevance. I want to work on remote servers and enjoy the odd online game, so latency is critical to me and satellite access is useless, regardless of quotas and bandwidth. I have a colleague here who uploads about 350GB per month of original high resolution video; satellite worked fine for him, but he has just been forced to MOVE HOUSE because of this new limitation, or face the loss of his business. One of my clients in town is a real estate business with a database application running on a remote server. They can only get ADSL at the moment, so only three people can work on the application simultaneously. They upload photos all the time - and while that's happening, pretty much nothing else can, and it takes ages because ADSL is limited to about a megabit outbound. Moving the application in-house will cost them about 15K. They can't get more ADSL because providers won't put in any more capacity because "the NBN is coming" - this year? Next year? Sometime? Never. And so it goes. People's requirements are not geographically defined, so why do so many people think it makes sense to provide service quality based on geography? > > "The new half-a-billion-dollar satellite was launched this morning, but > > due to months of testing will not be commercially available until mid-2016. And REGARDLESS of its capacity, it can delivery NOTHING of value to people needing to use low-latency applications. And with the ludicrously low data quotas, it will also provide nothing of value to anyone who needs to transfer any significant quantity of data. 20GB is next to nothing in today's terms. That's two strikes... > Yes, commissioning a satellite really is "rocket science": it is > difficult and takes time. Indeed it is and does! So why bother doing it? Why not spend those millions on doing something useful, long-lived, and socially equitable? > Remote satellite users can never receive the same speed as city users. > This is not a matter of politics, but of physics and geography. Putting the word "satellite" in there begs the question. Take it out, and you have something that is *entirely* a matter of politics. Yes; poor service via satellite is a matter of physics (not geography), but why should remote users be limited to satellite service? > That said, 128 kbps should be sufficient for applications such > e-learning via Moodle. If not, there must be something seriously wrong > with the way the courses have been designed. Jeez, Tom, you are supposed to be the expert here! Wann to learn surgical techniques over a satellite link? Want to fly a super-computer-backed jet fighter simulation over a satellite link? Want to download a fluid dynamics dataset for local analysis over a 128kb/s link? Want to learn cinematography by studying "Casablanca" at 320x280 resolution? Want to videoconference a class of ten students and a teacher over a 128kb/s link? Or a satellite link? Hope, nope, nope, nope, and nope. "E-learning" doesn't begin OR end with Moodle. Why is it so hard for people to see that data networks are the new roads, the roads that lead to the future? And that by not building those roads (or building only goat tracks), we cut off parts of the country that could have been part of that future and now will not be. We can run fibre to every corner of this country. Yes, it will cost a bit - but the same people that cry poor on this then turn around and support highly dubious and ridiculously expensive escapades in the Middle East; think that American cast-off jet fighters are a great investment; think that chaplains in schools deserve funding more than the CSIRO. Physics and geography? Those are solved problems in terrestrial networking. We run cables linking continents through some of the most hostile territory on Earth, kilometres beneath the surface of the ocean. We have linked the east and west coasts of this continent - that's a loooong way, and that goes through some pretty tricky country as well. The problem is ALL politics. It doesn't matter whether you want to call it lack of will, lack of vision, or a venal preparedness to use any issue, no matter how important, for political gain. On this one we have been most grievously let down by our so-called leaders. And it has nothing at all to do with physics or geography. Regards, K. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer (ka...@biplane.com.au) http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer http://twitter.com/kauer389 GPG fingerprint: 3C41 82BE A9E7 99A1 B931 5AE7 7638 0147 2C3C 2AC4 Old fingerprint: EC67 61E2 C2F6 EB55 884B E129 072B 0AF0 72AA 9882 _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
