Hi all,
Now, I should start this by pointing out that it is looking like the Coalition is going to win this election, so this little excerpt is unlikely to change anything, but it’s always good to be informed. This is an excerpt from Peter Cochrane, ex-head of British Telecom, who essentially told the UK parliament how fibre to the node was one of the worst mistakes they’ve ever made. Just about every country that implemented fibre to the node now regrets that decision. As far as governments are concerned, he said "…just getting them to realise that they have been misinformed and need to start thinking about the needs of a nation rather than the easy life desires of companies with outmoded thinking." >From Peter: "The Problem With DUDES in Telco’s 1) They come infected with the limited thinking aligned with their business 2) And their business is founded on a 200 year legacy of copper and not future IT needs 3) They have been used to a monopoly past 4) Like the bankers they have lost all sight of their full responsibilities to the society in which they live 5) Their old technology choices and management systems mean they cannot respond fast to change 6) BUT their was a bit of a golden time when their networks were transformed by optical fibre linking cities 7) In BTs case this saw staffing fall from 242,000 to 110,000, and if they did FTTH it would fall to 30,000 or less 8) AND THEN they did really dumb things like MPLS which is a concatenation of decision errors 9) More equipment and interface types than necessary is really bad engineering 10 And so is over 6000 buildings when you need less than 100 – and this is copper v glass Here are things telco’s real don’t get: 11) The world is not asymmetric 12) The cost go getting bandwidth to any location is zip – 1 bit/s or 10Gbit/s it is the same – civil engineering dominates all cost – even when you already have ducts in place 13) The cost of fibre is much less than copper for long lines and the local loop – there is no difference…. 14) FTTH provides a future proofing, ease of operation, lowest cost and the ultimate flexibility 15) FTTC/K et all with electronics between switch and customer just adds unreliability operating costs 16) PONS – GPON AND BPON et al made sense when fibre was 25p/m but not any more! 17) Direct fibre is simple cheap and reliable and can be built with office grade EtherNet kit 18) Without FTTH we will never have effective 3G or 4G – we need these nodes in offices and homes 19) The UK will be frozen out of Cloud Computing without a bandwidth everywhere 20) Bandwidths like 1Gbit/s might look huge today but they will look puny tomorrow 21) In my lifetime fast was: 90, 110, 300, 600, 1200, 2400, 9600, 18,200, 56,000, 64,000, 365 bit/s…,1, 2, 10, 20, 100, 200, 1000Mbit/s……why would anyone think this progression would stop or even slow down ?? 22) No surprise then the leading industrial nations look upon the UK and its silly debates with pity and amusement whilst they get on with the job. 23) It is worth visiting China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Scandinavia, Jersey +++ to see the actuality and their plans to move up to 10Gbit/s to the home. 24) Over 35% of the UK population work on the move from home office/s, hotels. cars +++ and without bandwidth on the move they cannot achieve what is possible. 25) This country has its back to the financial wall and needs to focus on the GDP enabling technologies and those members of the population that can invoke +ve change to the benefit of all. The very saddest thing for me: 26) I realised that all this was possible in 1979 when I completed my PhD – and then I demonstrated that FTTH worked and was cheaper than copper in1986. By the early 90s BT had built the factories to build these systems and we had commence roll out when the Thatcher government stopped the programme in favour of getting in the USA cable companies – who by the way were not allowed to supply telephony service in the USA! Our collaborators at that time were the Japanese and Koreans….and they just kept going….looking at the UK in amazement as we were left in the dust of time! Now to my position – lest you think me some impractical academic. In my BT life I was employed as: 1) A digger of trenches 2) An installer of poles, cables, telephones PBXs, exchanges 3) A maintainer of PBXs, switches, repeater and radio stations 4) A network designer and planner 5) A research engineer 6) A software writer 7) A designer of test equipment 8) Systems and networks designer 9) Head of Group a then Head of Section and then Head of Division for Transmission Systems 10) Head of Research and then CTO And since leaving BT life and experience has been even faster and even broader… I do hope this helps, Peter Peter also has a couple of interesting articles on the future of the internet: FTTH The only solution, found here: http://www.nexstdigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NExsT-2012-02.pdf No broadband, no future, found here: http://techcitynews.com/2013/01/28/no-broadband-no-future/ His personal website is found here: http://www.cochrane.org.uk <http://www.cochrane.org.uk/> Finally, I have added a link to the New Zealand NBN cost/benefits study, titled “Building the benefits of broadband : How New Zealand can increase the social & economic impacts of high-speed broadband”. Extrapolating for Australia, it indicates that the NBN could bring in between A$105 billion dollars and A$237 billion dollars over 20 years, which means a boon in economic activity, new businesses, products and services, jobs and taxes paid. Interesting reading. Why the Labor Party had so much difficulty selling this we will probably never know. http://www.tmcnet.com/redir/?u=1006058
