On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 10:38:42AM +1000, David Lochrin wrote: > And neither HFC nor the copper network were engineered to be part of a > broadband network in the first place
HFC is basically cable TV repurposed for internet use. Which might have made sense in the US where cable tv is almost ubiquitous. It never made much sense in Australia. It certainly doesn't make any sense at all as part of the NBN, which is (was?) an infrastructure project with the purpose of replacing old analog communications infrastructure with modern digital infrastructure suitable for the next 50-100 years. FFS! Optical fibre has almost no attentuation (effectively zero compared to copper or any other cable carrying electrical rather than light signals) so supports extremely long cable lengths with little or no signal loss or distortion, and can carry numerous multiplexed laser signals - allowing for in-place upgrades without having to dig up the fucking cable and replace it. What's so fucking difficult to understand about that being inherently superior to electrical cables? Putting copper cable in at any part of the infrastructure side of the link (i.e. outside the customer premises) is either fatuously stupid and ignorant or criminally corrupt. or both. Copper cables served us well in their day. that day has long past. and the cables in the ground have NOT been maintained at all well, especially not since the corporatisation of Telecom and later the privatisation of Telstra...T's managemement have known for many years that copper cable was dead or dying and had no desire to waste money on maintaining a dead-end technology. They must have laughed their fucking heads off when they forced the government to make the NBN buy their shitty copper network from them, along with all their un-remediated asbestos-lined pits (thus delaying the NBN's rollout until Abbott could come in and give it a new, exciting, kamikaze-oriented mission) So what makes actual sense (financial sense or any other kind of sense)? 1. Spending many tens of billions of dollars replacing the nation's communication network with something modern and usuable for many decades to come? or 2. spending roughly the same amount (or more) just doing a crappy patch job on it, knowing that it will have to be done properly anyway within a decade? Fuck the Liberals and their bullshit about "Cost-Benefit Analysis" and their bogus financial figures. That's just a stupid slogan they troll out whenever they object to something. They never want it applied to anything THEY want to do, like cutting taxes for the rich and multinationals, or legalising currently illegal forms of tax evasion, or marriage equality plebiscites or enormous adani coal mines or cashless welfare cards or drug-testing benefit recipients. craig ps: sorry. this grew from the original two-paragraph comment I intended to an extended rant. -- craig sanders <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
