Re: [LINK] Peter Martin Economist (?) blames Labor for NBN!

[Frank O'Connor]

But, an interesting and very-much-to-the-point rant.

For the record, the same thing happens to me every time I comment on the LNP's 
farcical (and tragic for the country) NBN.

A waste of money, time, and effort and a compromise of the country's future for 
the next 20 to thirty years ... all sheeted home to people who glory in their 
own technological ignorance like Abbott, or seek power without purpose like his 
'Mr Broadband', or who are uninspired ignorant flunkies like Fifield, Ergas, 
Switkowski and Morrow.

The network designed for yesterday that Australia's building for tomorrow ...

Just my 2 cents worth ...

Give me a coffee, and no-one gets hurt


> On 17 Aug 2017, at 3:46 pm, Craig Sanders  wrote:
> 
>> 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 
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Re: [LINK] Peter Martin Economist (?) blames Labor for NBN!

[Craig Sanders]

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 
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Re: [LINK] Peter Martin Economist (?) blames Labor for NBN!

[Andy Farkas]

On 10/08/2017 09:50, Hamish Moffatt wrote:


Which bit of his argument do you disagree with?


"There's nothing inherent in the NBN that's strangling its speed and
giving customers grief; it's inherent in the pricing model it adopted
to make it look as if it could make money."

It's not clear which Martin said this, but it's blatantly wrong.

I've mentioned before that nbn(tm) have hobbled the nodes by only
providing 1Gbps download per 384 customers (with 1Gbps up).

Want 100Mbps? "I'll gladly pay for it!" Sorry, you're too far from the
node.

Want faster than 100Mbps? "I'll gladly pay for it!" Sorry, you're on a
node.

They also changed the initial built-in redundancy and fault tolerance.
(ring topology to star)

Oh, did I mention Malc's blatant lie about upgradability? I'm sure I
have.

As for why people are on 12/25Mbps plans? Telstra. Try and get a
faster plan using their web site.

-andyf

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Re: [LINK] Peter Martin Economist (?) blames Labor for NBN!

[David Boxall]

On 10/08/2017 10:38 AM, David Lochrin wrote:

On Thursday 10 August 2017 at 09:50 Hamish Moffatt wrote:
...
Right up front Peter Martin quotes "Australia's foremost telecommunications 
analyst" Ian Martin ...

Wasn't there an Ian Martin involved in the 2013 strategic review?

--
David Boxall|  Australia's problem isn't fake news,
|  it's fake government.
http://david.boxall.id.au   |--Ross Gittins
Sydney Morning Herald 27 March 2017
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Re: [LINK] Peter Martin Economist (?) blames Labor for NBN!

[Roger Clarke]

> On 10/08/17 09:10, Jan Whitaker wrote:
>>> I'm in a twitter argument with him. He doesn't understand technology. 
>>> Please come and help out, set him straight.   @1petermartin

At 2:06 PM +1000 10/8/17, Kim Holburn wrote:
>How many years now have the Libs been managing the NBN?  If the Labor plan was 
>so bad that it couldn't be fixed the government could have canned the whole 
>thing.  Surely the great economic managers could have fixed what was wrong in 
>the last x years that they have had *complete* responsibility for it, but no, 
>it's Labor's fault?  Peter Martin has gone full stupid on this.

Over the last year, I've felt Martin's material to be a mixed bag.  

He wrote a couple of things early on in the debate on the Census debacle that 
had me scratching my head a bit.  And later he wrote a couple of things that 
were very clear explanations of important arguments (which happened to align 
with my analysis, so I was of course inclined to applaud).

So it may be that he trips gaily into areas that are (for him) new ones, takes 
a little while to assimilate the potentially large large volume of potentially 
very confusing material that's gone before (including, in many cases, active 
disinformation), and meanwhile keeps churning out the wordage that his position 
and editor demand.

If he's still got his sense of humour and antennae intact after the current 
fracas, he may write some much better things over the coming months.


Meanwhile, another one of those memes has re-emerged in the Cloud Cuckoo Land 
that is contemporary US politics:

Maybe Americans don't need fast home Internet service, FCC suggests
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/maybe-americans-dont-need-fast-home-internet-service-fcc-suggests/
>Americans might not need a fast home Internet connection, the Federal 
>Communications Commission suggests in a new document. Instead, mobile Internet 
>via a smartphone might be all people need.

-- 
Roger Clarke http://www.rogerclarke.com/
 
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd  78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Tel: +61 2 6288 6916http://about.me/roger.clarke
mailto:roger.cla...@xamax.com.auhttp://www.xamax.com.au/ 

Visiting Professor in the Faculty of LawUniversity of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer ScienceAustralian National University
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Re: [LINK] Peter Martin Economist (?) blames Labor for NBN!

[David Lochrin]

On Thursday 10 August 2017 at 12:05 Jim Birch wrote:

> $50 billion for a national FTTN network is a lot of money.  This very close 
> to the Australia's annual expenditure on road infrastructure.  The value has 
> been estimated at $280 billion.  I don't have a split for maintenance v. 
> improvement.
> 
> A per premise cost of $4k for FTTN as 25 years loan at 4% (the sort of rate 
> the the government borrows at) is about $250 per year per premise. Or 
> $5/week.  The FTTN network won't be zero maintenance but it is stable 
> infrastructure.

Jim, I'm not clear where you're heading with this argument.

Given that many people in cities & regional areas report FTTN performance is 
little better than common-or-garden ADSL2+, the question is why bother with 
FTTN in the first place?

Apart from performance issues, we retain all the inherent disadvantages of the 
copper network while introducing a few more in relation to the FTTN nodes.  
Each node offers a single point of failure for ~1,000 users, and consumes 
energy costing in the vicinity of $1,489 p.a. according to a 2014 estimate at
https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/549704/nbn_fttn_power_bill_89m_year_/

In addition, _each FTTN user_ also has to fund a modem/router/VoIP ATA of 
unknown (probably poor) quality, and may need house rewiring.

The original motivation for the NBN stemmed from the privatised shambles 
Howard's "three amigos" made of what was once a world-class telephone network, 
and a desire to improve telecommunications in remote areas.  However we could 
have achieved that in a structured and more cost-effective way, spending money 
as necessary to fix actual problems.  FTTN doesn't fix any problem as far as I 
can see and is a complete waste.

David L.
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Re: [LINK] Peter Martin Economist (?) blames Labor for NBN!

[Kim Holburn]

> On 2017/Aug/10, at 9:50 AM, Hamish Moffatt  wrote:
> 
> On 10/08/17 09:10, Jan Whitaker wrote:
>> Did you all see this today: 
>> http://www.theage.com.au/comment/dodgy-from-the-start-dont-blame-turnbull-for-labors-flawed-nbn-20170809-gxsa5v.html
>> 
>> I'm in a twitter argument with him. He doesn't understand technology. Please 
>> come and help out, set him straight.
>> @1petermartin
>> 
> 
> Which bit of his argument do you disagree with?

How many years now have the Libs been managing the NBN?  If the Labor plan was 
so bad that it couldn't be fixed the government could have canned the whole 
thing.  Surely the great economic managers could have fixed what was wrong in 
the last x years that they have had *complete* responsibility for it, but no, 
it's Labor's fault?  Peter Martin has gone full stupid on this.

/rant
> 
> 
> Hamish
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-- 
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IT Network & Security Consultant
T: +61 2 61402408  M: +61 404072753
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skype://kholburn - PGP Public Key on request 




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Re: [LINK] Peter Martin Economist (?) blames Labor for NBN!

[Jim Birch]

$50 billion for a national FTTN network is a lot of money.  This very close
to the Australia's annual expenditure on road infrastructure.  The value
has been estimated at $280 billion.  I don't have a split for maintenance
v. improvement.

A per premise cost of $4k for FTTN as 25 years loan at 4% (the sort of rate
the the government borrows at) is about $250 per year per premise. Or
$5/week.  The FTTN network won't be zero maintenance but it is stable
infrastructure.

Obviously there is an opportunity cost question that would need to be
looked at, but given how much the Internet is used...  It would also be
interesting to have a figure on the annual maintenance cost of the copper
network.

This kind of long term cost v benefit investment consideration seems to be
lost to politics.

Jim

On 10 August 2017 at 10:38, David Lochrin  wrote:

> On Thursday 10 August 2017 at 09:50 Hamish Moffatt wrote:
>
> > Which bit of his argument do you disagree with?
>
> Right up front Peter Martin quotes "Australia's foremost
> telecommunications analyst" Ian Martin - any relation?
>
> "Let's be clear, technology is not the issue in slow speeds," he wrote in
> the Australian Financial Review this month. "Hybrid fibre coaxial and fibre
> to the node are well able to handle speeds of 50 megabits per second and
> 100Mbps or more. In some places the copper component is old and slow but
> this is not an issue across the board and can be dealt with other than by
> an expensive upgrade to fibre to the home nationally."
>
> How a technology performs under lab conditions is almost irrelevant to how
> it performs in the field, especially when it's implemented commercially.
> And neither HFC nor the copper network were engineered to be part of a
> broadband network in the first place.  The article is flawed from the
> beginning.
>
> We need more engineering and much less politics & economics.
>
> David L.
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Re: [LINK] Peter Martin Economist (?) blames Labor for NBN!

[David Lochrin]

On Thursday 10 August 2017 at 09:50 Hamish Moffatt wrote:

> Which bit of his argument do you disagree with?

Right up front Peter Martin quotes "Australia's foremost telecommunications 
analyst" Ian Martin - any relation?

"Let's be clear, technology is not the issue in slow speeds," he wrote in the 
Australian Financial Review this month. "Hybrid fibre coaxial and fibre to the 
node are well able to handle speeds of 50 megabits per second and 100Mbps or 
more. In some places the copper component is old and slow but this is not an 
issue across the board and can be dealt with other than by an expensive upgrade 
to fibre to the home nationally."

How a technology performs under lab conditions is almost irrelevant to how it 
performs in the field, especially when it's implemented commercially.  And 
neither HFC nor the copper network were engineered to be part of a broadband 
network in the first place.  The article is flawed from the beginning.

We need more engineering and much less politics & economics.

David L.
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