No, Minister: Telco expert fact-checks Conroy claims

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news A British telecommunications expert has issued a detailed statement highlighting a number of what he alleged were factual errors contained in a speech given by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy yesterday, including a rebuttal of the Labor Senator’s claim that Australia’s current copper network can’t support high-speed broadband based on fibre to the node.

In the speech at the National Press Club yesterday, Conroy systematically attacked the technologies at the heart of the Coalition’s telecommunications policy — describing technologies like HFC cable as leading to a “dead end” for Australia and being limited in able to provide for Australia’s broadband needs in future. Conroy attacked Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s claim that fibre to the node (FTTN) technology could provide speeds of up to 80Mbps, using portions of Telstra’s existing copper network to do so. Conroy alleged that such speeds could not be obtained using Telstra’s copper network because it did not use dual copper pairs, and the length of the copper loop was too long.

However, UK-based telco consultancy Communications Chambers overnight issued a paper “fact-checking” Conroy’s speech. A copy of it was provided to Delimiter by the Coalition this morning. Turnbull has previously used reports by the firm to aid him in policy debates relating to the communications sector. In the paper, CC co-founder Robert Kenny, who has previously worked with a number of international telcos and with US-based fibre company Level 3, wrote that Conroy’s claim yesterday that achieving speeds of 60 to 80Mbps over a fibre to the node network would require bonded copper pairs.

“This is simply untrue,” he wrote. “Alcatel recently announced that they were achieving VDSL2 speeds of 100Mbps at distances of 400m (using vectoring, not bonding). This was not a lab experiment, but based on field trials with a range of European carriers.”

Because FTTN was getting “massive investment” from carriers around the world, Kenny wrote, equipment manufacturers like Alcatel-Lucent were in turn investing in technology development, and as a result, “performance over copper is improving rapidly. As Turnbull did yesterday, Kenny cited the example of UK-based telco BT, which has announced that it plans to roughly double its FTTN speeds to up to 80MBps in 2012, again without the bonded pair requirement which Conroy had described.

FTTN upload speeds, which Conroy had also targeted, wouldn’t be a problem, Kenny said, noting BT’s FTTN rollout would have upload speeds of up to 20Mbps from 2012. “This is actually as fast or faster than all but the most expensive NBN plans, and is sufficient for a household to upload two HTV streams simultaneously,” wrote Kenny. “Unless someone is planning to run a datacentre from their garage, this is likely to be more than enough.

Kenny also took aim at a number of other claims by Conroy which he stated were also inaccurate.

For example, Conroy claimed yesterday that HFC cable was a “dead-end” solution technologically and also limited in terms of its upload speeds. In response, Kenny highlighted a passage from NBN Co’s corporate plan (PDF), which points out that Telstra is upgrading its HFC network to the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, supporting speeds of up to 100Mbps. The next “possible upgrade”, NBN Co noted, would be using node splitting technology, to reduce the number of end users sharing each segment of the network.

“Node splitting could be implemented as early as 2013-14,” NBN Co wrote, “and would result in an increase in typical downstream speeds to 240Mbps and upstream speeds to 12Mbps.” Comcast in the US was already offering speeds of 105Mbps down and 10Mbps up over HFC, Kenny added, and trials had shown HFC to be theoretically capable of speeds up to 1.5Gbps. Other problems Kenny claimed with Conroy’s speech were:

  • Conroy’s statement that download speed requirements had increased dramatically for more than two decades: Kenny stated that Conroy’s chart displayed yesterday (PDF) showed an increase in download speed capabilities, not requirements
  • Conroy’s statement that massive volumes in data growth would strain broadband infrastructure: Kenny acknowledged the growth but implied that although core network infrastructure would require upgrading, access networks might not
  • Conroy’s statement that an analysis by local comparison site WhistleOut (PDF) showed that entry level NBN prices were lower than comparable ADSL2+ plans: Kenny stated that NBN Co’s business plan was built on the premise that consumers would pay much more for higher speeds, but evidence internationally showed that they wouldn’t
  • Conroy’s statement that a report by Citigroup showed demand would exceed the capabilities delivered by the Coalition’s rival broadband plan: Kenny stated that Citigroup was using the same flawed chart relating to speed capabilities
  • Conroy’s statement linking the NBN to infrastructure such as water, roads, rail and electricity and economic growth: Kenny stated that although broadband did bring benefits to society, high-speed broadband didn’t necessarily bring greater benefits
  • Conroy’s statement citing a report by Deloitte Access Economics (PDF) which found the Internet contributed $50 billion to Australia’s economy: Kenny stated that the analysis had been “extraordinary generous” — included, for example, billions of dollars of public spending on ICT by government. “It is far from clear why a government office buying a printer or a telephone or a large software system should be treated as part of the Internet economy,” he said.

opinion/analysis
Well, yesterday we threw down the gauntlet to Turnbull, claiming his rebuttal following Conroy’s speech displayed a lack of evidence for his claims, and the Member for Wentworth has delivered in spades. Kudos.

The speech that Conroy delivered yesterday was received very well by Australia’s technology community, with Conroy finally discussing expertly the technical strengths of the NBN’s fibre compared to rival technologies. My feeling is that Conroy has been kind of circling this area for years but hadn’t quite nailed why fibre was a superior technology before. Yesterday he struck the nail firmly on the head, and it was satisfying for many to hear.

But Kenny’s analysis released today pulls the rug out from underneath Conroy’s feet, competently skewering many different aspects of the Labor Senator’s argument with a hard dose of technical reality sourced from international experience. The net effect of this is that it gives the Coalition the chance to once again swing the debate back to the finances of the NBN and competition outcomes which would result from its implementation. In short, if Turnbull plays his cards right, the debate can shift away from Conroy’s home ground and back to his own.

For the Coalition, this is great. For Conroy, not so much.

Of course, the Coalition still hasn’t made any ground by releasing this report. They’re just back to where they started before the Minister made his speech yesterday. All of the same questions around the Coalition’s own rival NBN policy still remain, and it needs to be fleshed out further. But at least, after what looked like a potential knockout blow from Conroy yesterday, Turnbull’s argument has recovered most of its poise and is now standing up straight in the ring again, waiting for the next round.

316 COMMENTS

  1. Nice work there Conroy, just as I stated, he had no clue what he was talking about!

  2. hmmm so HFC MAY get 10mpbs ( or 12mpbs ) upload speeds…

    or I can get the NBN with 50mbps uploads…

    as for the statement “HFC to be theoretically capable of speeds up to 1.5Gbps.” wow, that is like saying ADSL 2 is 20mbps… which in reality it isn’t.

    The NBN will be 1gpbs (as announced already) by the end of roll out. Not “theoretically capable”, but is capable. Big difference.

    • HFC can provide 1.5gbit shared bandwidth in the exact same way GPON (which NBN FTTH uses) can provide 2.4/1.2gbit bandwidth to everyone. That is a fact, and HFC is practically capable of it (as is shown in Britain)

      In any case, nice work in dodging the lie that Conroy spread where he claimed that VDSL2 wasn’t possible on our infrastructure (ROFLZORZ!)

        • Dear oh dear Michael, want to embarrass yourself again? Maybe you should do some homework (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_optical_network)

          You see this lovely diagram here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PON_vs_AON.png)?. That my friend, is what we call a shared network, it in fact is the exact same topology as HFC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HFC_Network_Diagram.svg)

          And hell, even if we quote wikipedia

          A PON is a shared network, in that the OLT sends a single stream of downstream traffic that is seen by all ONUs. Each ONU only reads the content of those packets that are addressed to it. Encryption is used to prevent eavesdropping on downstream traffic.

          The NON SHARED version of a FTTH network is called Direct Fibre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_x#Direct_fiber), which is essentially a single fibre cable from the exchange all the way to the premise (exact same as current copper network design)

          • So if 3 people sign up for 1000/400 service and they all burst at the same time on the GPON, whats going to happen

            Magikz?

            no please, fill me in not this one. Because I am pretty damn sure if that was to happen, then no one will actually get their so called “guaranteed AVC” of 1000/400

            The HFC will guarantee bandwidth in the exact same way that a GPON will guarantee bandwidth, they are both shared networks.

            You are just playing dodgeball, and covering up for Conroy. You should becomes his idol, you are starting to think a lot like him

          • I have already seen that, I don’t see anyone in the video claiming that GPON is not a shared network

            Please try again

          • Again, quoting from Wikipedia

            The ITU-T G.984 (GPON) standard represents a boost, compared to BPON, in both the total bandwidth and bandwidth efficiency through the use of larger, variable-length packets. Again, the standards permit several choices of bit rate, but the industry has converged on 2.488 gigabits per second (Gbit/s) of downstream bandwidth, and 1.244 Gbit/s of upstream bandwidth. GPON Encapsulation Method (GEM) allows very efficient packaging of user traffic with frame segmentation.

            What you have said does not change anything, yes multiple wavelengths are used to send data to the Passive Splitter, but that still doesn’t change the fact that the network is a GPON, so the 32 premises that are grouped up to a single ONT share 2.488/1.244 gbits between each other

            Again from wikipedia

            A PON takes advantage of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), using one wavelength for downstream traffic and another for upstream traffic on a single nondispersion-shifted fiber (ITU-T G.652). BPON, EPON, GEPON, and GPON have the same basic wavelength plan and use the 1,490 nanometer (nm) wavelength for downstream traffic and 1310 nm wavelength for upstream traffic. 1550 nm is reserved for optional overlay services, typically RF (analog) video.

          • It is not guaranteed, according to NBNCo’s technical documents, as long as they are using GPON for 32 user splits, the AVC is not guaranteed*

            *It can be guaranteed if the total bandwidth for all the users signed up for AVC is less than 2.4k/1.2k, like if you have 32 12/mbit AVC users on the same node, than the total bandwidth of that is 384/192

            So as I said earlier, the minute that the total number of speed tiers from the AVC exceeds 2.4k/1.2k, the AVC is no longer guaranteed unless NBNCo upgrade the PON (as in the example I used earlier of 3 people on 1000/400)

            I will repeat…over the NBN, the AVC has guaranteed bandwidth.
            Im sorry, the NBN is not practising black magic

          • And as another note, you were using a logical fallacy in that you changed your original claim.

            The original claim being

            GPON is NOT shared bandwidth.

            GPON is shared bandwidth

            If you would have originally said that NBN can guarantee AVC speeds over their FTTH, that is a completely different claim than saying that GPON is not shared bandwidth, because GPON is shared bandwidth

            In fact, the only guarantee that GPON can make is ~2400/32 download and ~1200/32 uplink, which is ~ 75/37.5 mbit. So if the highest AVC that NBn was offering is 75/35, then they can actual do a full guarantee that you will ALWAYS be able to get that speed.

            NBN is however offering 1000/400 and 100/40

          • I suggest you read the NBNCo Corporate Plan (http://www.nbnco.com.au/wps/wcm/connect/main/site-base/main-areas/publications-and-announcements/latest-announcements/nbn-co-corporate-plan-released).

            It contains these definitions in the glossary
            Committed Information Rate (CIR) The guaranteed amount of bandwidth that NBN Co will provide to End-Users.
            Peak Information Rate (PIR) The theoretical speed that an End-User could receive if there were no other End-Users using at the same time. PIR is limited by the speed of the physical port of connection.

            On page 101 it lists prices for AVC PIR, starting at $24 for 12/1Mbps up to $150 for 1000/400Mbps. On page 102 it lists prices for AVC CIR starting at $10 for 0.15/0.15Mbps up to $334 for 5/5Mbps. To purchase AVC CIR you need to already have purchased AVC PIR.

            Either NBNCo are expecting that businesses will hand over significant cash for nothing or the NBN is best effort for most people.

      • Conroy also never claimed that VDSL “wasn’t possible” on our copper network. He claimed that the SPEEDS Turnbull is claiming weren’t sustainable.

        Perhaps you should check your facts also?

        • No he claimed that speeds Turnbull was talking about were only able to be provided over bonded copper pairs.

          This is false.

          He does not know what he is talking about, and as shown above neither do you.

          Go back to work on something you know about

          • You said, and I quote: “the lie that Conroy spread where he claimed that VDSL2 wasn’t possible”.

            He never said it wasn’t possible – and I never said I agreed with everything Conroy said/says.

          • Yes he did, he said the speeds that Malcolm Turnbull was talking about is not possible because they apparently required bonded pairs (which is false, they require a twisted pair, which is whats installed in Australia)

            In any case, an actual telecommunications expert (i.e. not you), said he was either lying, or being deceitful, or being ignorant, or .

            So unless you claim that Conroy is a telecommunications expert and knows better, either suck it up and admit that he didnt know what he was talking about, or continue making a fool out of yourself

          • Can I query something here?

            A twisted pair?

            Does that mean 2 lines running to the house?

            Do houses have multiple lines?

            How does this work?

            I’ve been told the 2nd line isn’t viable for ADSL to my house.

            Does that me one of the lines in the twisted pair to my house is no good?

          • A ‘twisted-pair’ refers to two wires, twisted together as a functional pair.
            One of the pair is equivalent to +ve (signal), the other equivalent to -ve (return/gnd), similar to a battery.
            They are not 2 separate lines.
            Most houses in Australia are cabled with 2 twisted pairs, one usually active, the other a spare (because it’s easier to lay more cable once, than to dig it up later).
            ADSL shares the same line (twisted pair) as voice, using the frequency space above normal voice (we don’t here it, and it doesn’t hear us [with a filter])

            During the 90’s/00’s, Telstra went on the cheap, and installed ‘pair-gain’ lines, where you effectively share one cable back to the exchange (some wiring done in the node). One property uses the normal voice spectrum, the other is bumped up. in the ADSL frequency region, which is why ‘pair-gain’ isn’t compatible with ADSL.

            @PointZeroOne, You’ll find your main line is a deicated line back the exchange, where your second line is a pair-gain line that you’re sharing with your neighbour.

          • ok cool, thanks for the answer.

            So you’re screwed if you have a pair-gain only. I’d assume this would affect getting FTTN as well?

          • Unfortunately, it really depends where the line sharing begins/ends, and where the Copper/Fibre Node is between you and the exchange. If the sharing begins at your doorstep, FTTN probably won’t help much. However, if your the sharing is at the RIM/Mux (the cabinets and steel stumps you see in the suburbs, that are nodes), then you’ve got a better chance.

            Note, Telstra going on the cheap was due to the sudden boom in the housing market. When everyone wanted a phone line, and knew nothing about ADSL, pair-gain was a suitable technology. Building exchanges are an expensive exercise. It wasn’t until ADSL several years later did their decision turn into a frustrating mistake (for everyone. Telstra *want* to sell you ADSL).

            While Telstra aren’t building any more exchanges, they are pushing ‘nodes’ (as RIM/Muxes) closer to the homes (fibre back the exchange), so were effectively building an FTTN network.

            Also, long lengths of copper act as really good lightening rods. Telstra replaced many long copper lines in the bush with fibre, rather than copper each year after the storm season,

          • As a continuation of whats already been said, pair-gain is essentially CTTN (as a pose to FTTN) where C is copper. As has been stated, they were installed in 2000 when a housing boom happened, and with massive increase in demand for phone lines Telstra had to quickly put into place infrastructure for phone services

            Telstra is currently in the process of replacing all pair gain systems with Fibre (essentially making it an FTTN), which easily has support for VDSL2 type services (they are currently trailing top hats)

          • Truth be known, neither Conroy OR Turnbull know what they are talking about. They only spout out what their advisers write for them.

            And quite honestly, I’m not going to argue with you about who has or hasn’t got experience in the telecommunications industry – I don’t have even the slightest interest in what you think of me.

            I play the ball, not the man.

            Show some balls and put your name to your rantings Matthew – at least I don’t hide behind pseudonyms.

          • Turnbull definitely knows more than Conroy, as has just been showing

            I have yet to see any example of Turnbull making a lie at this scale

            And stop sidetracking, my identity does not improve the position of your stupid arguments/point

            Its clear you don’t know what you are talking about, you made a bold single claim that GPON Is not shared. It is shared, its the definition of the word. Its like claiming that a car is not a vehicle

          • “I have yet to see any example of Turnbull making a lie at this scale”

            So you admit he lies, but on a different scale?

            Gold.

            Now, as I said elsewhere – I’m not going to have the same old arguments for the eleventy billionth time, I have better things to do than argue about this again.

          • So you admit he lies, but on a different scale?

            No I don’t

            And go run away now, I would too if I was in your position

          • “And go run away now, I would too if I was in your position”

            As you have done many times already. While we are on the subject how about answering the question you keep dodging and that is what percentage of those connected to FTTN will be able to get 60/60 speeds using VDSL2?

          • “It depends on the topology of the FTTN that is built”

            So once again it all depends, you can give no guarantees at all, fibre can so you lose.

            btw earlier you were saying “VDSL2 (the technology typically used for FTTN) can provide 60/60 speeds easily” (40mbps drop from your original 100mbps claim btw) Implying most people would get 60/60. So the question still remains is how many will get that speed on this network using YOUR IDEAL TOPOLOGY that you would also assume the coalitions PatchworkCo would use to get the best value for money for more internet users.

          • There is no guarantee for fibre either

            If the ISP cannot provide the bandwidth (or even NBNCo, which is entirely possible since GPON is shared, like HFC), then you will not get your claimed fibre speeds

            You cannot just pick one portion out of the network layer and claim that because that one portion can give you guaranteed speed, that the user will always get that speed, that is simply false

            Case in point, try the fibre at TransACT. They are using Fibre in the same way NBNCo is using fibre, but their users don’t always get their “advertised fibre speeds”. Hell the exact same thing happened with NBNCo with internode that didn’t buy enough CVC

            At the end of the day, if you want a guarantee, you get a business grade fibre connection (which NBNCo does not offer), and you always transmit data from a place you know will not be bottlenecked

          • “There is no guarantee for fibre either
            If the ISP cannot provide the bandwidth (or even NBNCo, which is entirely possible since GPON is shared, like HFC), then you will not get your claimed fibre speed”

            Why not? Are you assuming I have a crap ISP and absolutely everyone else on my FAN will take up 100/40mbps plan from day one? Wow, so the NBN will be even more successful than predicted it seems…

            “Hell the exact same thing happened with NBNCo with internode that didn’t buy enough CVC”

            Then what happened?

            “At the end of the day, if you want a guarantee, you get a business grade fibre connection”

            I think what I would prefer is to take my chances with a NBN fibre plan rather than rely on the length of copper dictating what speed I get with FTTN.

          • Actually TransACT are closer to FTTN than FTTH. They use FTTC. Fibre to within 300m of the premisis then VDSL.

          • Why not? Are you assuming I have a crap ISP and absolutely everyone else on my FAN will take up 100/40mbps plan from day one? Wow, so the NBN will be even more successful than predicted it seems…

            Im claiming there is no such thing as a guarantee

            Then what happened?

            The school was stuck on 30mbit, and this was with your premium ISP (internode)

            I think what I would prefer is to take my chances with a NBN fibre plan rather than rely on the length of copper dictating what speed I get with FTTN.
            And as I explained before, since the NBN FTTH is GPON, which is shared, you have no guarantee of that either (or you have the same guarantee as a HFC network)

            Be very careful when talking about guaranteed speeds, as I said the thing only exists for direct commercial fibre products

          • Oops, they then rolled out some FTTH in 2009… Sorry, old data. My sister lives in the VDSL2 area.

          • “And as I explained before, since the NBN FTTH is GPON, which is shared, you have no guarantee of that either ”

            So once again you are basically assuming absolutely everyone else will take up 100/40mbps plans from day one.

            “(or you have the same guarantee as a HFC network)”

            Nope. You have a higher guarantee of sustaining the speed you signed up for using fibre.

            “The school was stuck on 30mbit, and this was with your premium ISP (internode)”

            That’s not what I’m asking, I’m asking you to finish the story.

            “Be very careful when talking about guaranteed speeds, as I said the thing only exists for direct commercial fibre products”

            That’s just super but we are not talking about direct commercial fibre products, we are talking about FTTN vs FTTH. You cannot guarantee everyone signing up for these 60/60 plans will ever achieve those speeds since the distant from the node will affect it (as well as other factors). Meanwhile in fibre land it’d be once in a blue moon when everyone on your FAN (assuming all are on 100/40mbps plans) is hammering it at EXACTLY the same time. Do you understand the difference yet?

          • So once again you are basically assuming absolutely everyone else will take up 100/40mbps plans from day one.
            This was a single school in Tasmania during a trial…

            I am not claiming anything, I am simply saying there is no guarantee on the NBN fibre that you will receive those speeds, and that is evident from what happen. The school ordered 100/40 and was getting something like 30/10.

            Nope. You have a higher guarantee of sustaining the speed you signed up for using fibre.

            Incorrect, it depends on the speed plans of the people that are in the shared bandwidth pool. If more people pick higher speeds on NBN fibre versus HFC, your “guarantee” is exactly the same

            That’s not what I’m asking, I’m asking you to finish the story.
            I’m not here to tell stories, go tell your mother to do that when you go to bed

            That’s just super but we are not talking about direct commercial fibre products, we are talking about FTTN vs FTTH.

            No thats what you are talking about, we are talking about what speeds the end consumer gets, they don’t give a rats ass if its FTTN or FTTH or HFC or SDFSDF or SUPER GIGANTIC LAZERZ. The consumer cares about one thing, that is, if they pay for a service of lets say 100/40, that they get 100/40 all the time.

            NBN’s FTTH is not able to provide such a guarantee, it would be able to if it was direct fibre and there were no CVC costs, but thats not the case

          • People on here and whirlpool want 100Mb is they pay for it. Joe public could be gettin 1Mb and probably not know it.

          • Oh yes, thats very much true

            But my point is there is no such thing as a guarantee on speed unless you get a direct fibre commercial connection, because even the premium ISP’s (as was shown in the past) have had issues in actually providing the advertised AVC speed.

            Even on NBNCo’s side, since GPON is a shared system, there is no guarantee of speed if they oversubscribe speed tiers past the bandwidth pool (and to be honest this wouldn’t be surprising, almost all companies do this because its cheaper)

          • “I am simply saying there is no guarantee on the NBN fibre that you will receive those speeds”

            Wow, it’s almost as if you are incapable of comprehending facts…

            “The school ordered 100/40 and was getting something like 30/10.”

            And now what are they getting? Finish the story dummy.

            “No thats what you are talking about,”

            A reminder:
            “It depends on the topology of the FTTN that is built”
            OK? FTTN vs FTTH. That is what we are talking about, you cannot guarantee 60/60 speeds for people signing up for those plans with FTTN due to copper conditions. With the NBN you can pretty much guarantee it and with possible future upgrades it can be guaranteed without question, can you say the same for FTTN? No. You lose, thanks for stopping by…

            “I’m not here to tell stories, go tell your mother to do that when you go to bed”

            You assume everyone still lives with their parents like you? How old are you?

            “The consumer cares about one thing, that is, if they pay for a service of lets say 100/40, that they get 100/40 all the time.

            Really? So on the one hand faster speeds are not needed but on the other they’ll care when their 100mbps connection dips to 75mbps occasionally?

          • This is the definition of guarantee

            :something that assures a particular outcome or condition:

            According to that definition, the school did not get 100/40 speeds. At one point they got lower than such speeds, that breaks the definition of what guarantee means

            END

            OF

            STORY

            You can claim whatever you want, but you can’t say that NBN will have more of a guarantee of speeds than any other network, because the internet is not just NBN

          • “but you can’t say that NBN will have more of a guarantee of speeds than any other network,”

            Actually I can and I have. There is more of a guarantee the speed you sign up for on the NBN will be the speed you get, you simply cannot do the same with a FTTN network as it still relies on the condition of the copper. Your problem here is simple, you are arguing a ridiculous pedantic point about speed guarantees on the NBN and who needs 100mbps down and 40mbps up right? You are basically saying “Well you’ll never get that speed on NBN let’s do FTTN yay!” Are you just one of those contrarians that likes to argue against something (The NBN) and tries as many different angles as possible even if it conflicts with a previous argument?

          • ‘Are you just one of those contrarians that likes to argue against something and tries as many different angles as possible even if it conflicts with a previous argument?’

            That coming from you of all posters on Delimiter is hilarious.

          • “That coming from you of all posters on Delimiter is hilarious.”

            You are just like deteebo, so no surprises here. You want to contribute something useful to this discussion or should we expect more pedantic drivel from you as well?

          • It’s a shame Australia doesn’t have twisted pair. They are run flat adjacent to one another. It sill rejects some noise but not near as much as as if twisted. Source, some google searching and talking to an ex Telstra technician of 30 years who went to Ericcson when Telstra started contracting out their repair work.

          • Any copper that’s on Telstra’s side of the network boundary that’s been touched in the last 30 odd years will be twisted pair. It’s only the old cabling in old houses generally that may be figure8 and some tails from pits to those houses that haven’t needed to be touched in decades.

          • Ahh yes. Sorry, the stuff I was reading about was just certain areas. I checked mine and my gfs lead ins, they weren’t twisted. But then again that is outside the bundle and shouldn’t do much.

            I was wondering? Do you know if Telstra made a start on the fixing of pair gain? I know it’s still about but they did predict it needed to be corrected for a million homes and back in 2003 would cost 2 million. The arguement that it may not need to be fixed is that it would only be needed if other broad band wasn’t provided. With FTTN it would need to be fixed.

            http://www.zdnet.com.au/au2-billion-to-replace-pair-gain-unnecessary-telstra-120274861.htm

  3. There is no doubt that either technology will be able to deliver the requirements to the majority of Australian households, and that either side of politics will argue which is the best solution FTTP or FTTN.

    At the end of the day from, my perspective, as long as it is recognised that market forces will not achieve either goal and some level of Government Investment is required. The actual solution is secondary.

  4. Won’t someone please just ask Telstra about the status and capability of the copper network to support FTTN on a mass scale, for what speeds and for what investment?

  5. and then the left hook to the Mal jaw:

    Communications Chambers, the owner of a US – CABLE – TV and internet network.

  6. please, is the CC report available for download? i would like to read it for myself.

  7. and then the rebuttal, Google may have confused this thinktank with Chambers Comms…sorry Mal…and CC…well…whatever…

  8. “VDSL2 speeds of 100Mbps at distances of 400m ”

    that sounds to me like hey would need an awful lot of nodes.

  9. The last paragraph of the short version of kennys report says it all and harkens back to the ‘leave it to the market to get the job done’ stance. CC smells like tory spirit to me…

  10. “This is simply untrue,” he wrote. “Alcatel recently announced that they were achieving VDSL2 speeds of 100Mbps at distances of 400m (using vectoring, not bonding). This was a lab experiment, but based on field trials with a range of European carriers.”

    While they’re running *trials* and achieving 100Mbps at 400m, Optic Fibre technology is achieving multiple Gbps, today, out of the box. Imagine what they’ll be able to achieve in the future.

    Oh, and how many people live 400m from the exchange? This can only be achieve through a FTTN style network. So, rather than build a half-fibre, half-copper network (that requires media converters at each node), why not just skip to a full-fibre network and save the rework?

    I’d rather see the government build the right infrastructure once, than build it, and then rebuild it later.

    It’s not about today, or tomorrow, but the years/decades that follow.

    • Copper also requires the lines to be kept dry (or face decomposition), typically done by keeping the cable conduits at positive air pressure (you’ll find air compressors hidden around the suburbs).

      Optic Fibre just needs not be bent/kinked.

      • no compressed air for my copper.
        in fact, no conduit for my copper.
        it just runs straight in the dirt.

        i know because i saw it (and took photos of it) when it was dug up.

          • well there’s a lot of PMG pits in my area so that places it at least 35 years old. possibly more.
            before it was ripped up (accidentally by a contractor i might add) i was getting about 6mb on my adsl2 connection and constant dropouts (sometimes as much as 100 per day).

            after they replaced the bit they ripped up my speed rocketed up to 6.5mb and now i might only get 1 or 2 dropouts every couple of months.

            pics or it didn’t happen….

            http://ocau.com/pix/60uk4

  11. We are happily firing away about this, wonder if it will attract as many mainstream media grabs as the REALLY important IT matter at hand…big Steves f-drop…sigh…

  12. The copper network doesnt work, Im only getting about 20% of the speeds Im supposed to be getting, just because of line deterioration and how far I am from the exchange.

    It was even worse before I moved, where ADSL2 still isnt available.

    Copper cant deliver its quoted speeds over great distance like fibre can.

    Roll on with the NBN, its vital infrastructure that will support the nation for decades to come.

      • Well add mine and my mothers as well. Used to get 8Mbps (Max) on ADSL1, now get 1.4 MBps and drops out every time it rains. This is even after multiple “fixes” by Telstra. (Sol’s shopping bag solution?)

        Used to get 6Mbps at my mothers, now get between 2.5->3.5 and 0.15 uploads (ADSL2). This is after a Telstra “fixes” as well). The 2nd pair in her house doesn’t work at well (age? deterioration?) and Telstra say that’s our problem, we have to pay for it. (it’s their copper isn’t it?)

        So yes, FTTN will be great! *cough* *splutter*

  13. For a ‘telco expert’ he sure seems to have trouble differentiating between THEORETICAL MAXIMUMS and speeds people will actually get. Theoretically my ADSL2+ connection is 24Mbps, or even 28Mbps using the non-Australian definition.

    In reality it’s 15Mbps, and for many, in reality it is far less.

    This for example:
    ““This is simply untrue,” he wrote. “Alcatel recently announced that they were achieving VDSL2 speeds of 100Mbps at distances of 400m (using vectoring, not bonding). This was a lab experiment, but based on field trials with a range of European carriers.””

    In a perfect world everyone would live 400 metres from the exchange, this is simply untrue – Conroy was referring to bonding to achieve these speeds are ‘reasonable’ distances.

    “”As Turnbull did yesterday, Kenny cited the example of UK-based telco BT, which has announced that it plans to roughly double its FTTN speeds to up to 80MBps in 2012, again without the bonded pair requirement which Conroy had described.””

    This is once again a theoretical maximum, go and take a look at Thinkbroadband (UK version of Whirlpool) – look in the BT section for people on this service. As is, many people can’t get the 40Mbps speeds – some can’t even hit 20Mbps.

    What will increasing the theoretical maximum to 80Mbps do for these people? Nothing at all. It will only help people close to the exchange.

    Also note the report incorrectly capatalized the B suggesting that somehow FTTN is going to provide 640Mbps! I’m totally nitpicking here, but he is supposed to be the expert….

    “FTTN upload speeds, which Conroy had also targeted, wouldn’t be a problem, Kenny said, noting BT’s FTTN rollout would have upload speeds of up to 20Mbps from 2012”

    Once again, THEORETICAL MAXIMUMS.

    “Conroy’s statement that an analysis by local comparison site WhistleOut (PDF) showed that entry level NBN prices were lower than comparable ADSL2+ plans: Kenny stated that NBN Co’s business plan was built on the premise that consumers would pay much more for higher speeds, but evidence internationally showed that they wouldn’t ”

    NBNco is also going to be providing connections to business, you can’t take the ARPU and say this is what every RESIDENT will pay.

    • You should probably read the report that ToshP300 linked earlier, (here it is again http://www.commcham.com/publications/fact-checking-the-case-for-nbn)

      So reading the report, and quoting Stephen Conroy directly, he claimed (important sections in bold)

      “To achieve [60-80 Mbps] over FTTN requires bonded copper pairs

      And as rightfully said in the pd

      This is simply untrue. Alcatel recently announced that they were achieving VDSL2 speeds of 100 Mbps at distances of 400m (using vectoring, not bonding). This was not a lab experiment, but based on field trials with a range of European carriers.1

      Conroy literally said that you have to have bonded copper wires to obtain anything more then 60-80. This is FALSE

      Furthermore, VDSL2 (or ADLS2 or any other *DSL) speeds are not *theoritical*, they drop down as you go further from the exchange (this is well known)

      And regarding HFC, as shown in the document (again)

      “Telstra has upgraded its Melbourne HFC network to DOCSIS 3.0, announcing speeds of up to 100Mbps. The next possible upgrade would be node splitting, to reduce the number of End-Users who share the same segments of 750MHz coaxial network. Node splitting could be implemented as early as 2013-14, and would result in an increase in typical downstream speeds to 240Mbps, and upstream speeds to 12Mbps.”

      This is called node splitting, exactly what I mentioned earlier, where they are reducing the number of premises per node. It is even entirely possible to exactly match the current NBN’s GPON bandwidth if they make the premises per node small enough

      I know you are trying your hardest to defend your idol, but sorry to say, Conroy really shot himself in the foot with this one, and to anyone with a slight sense of objectivity, its incredibly obvious.

      • “So reading the report, and quoting Stephen Conroy directly, he claimed (important sections in bold)”

        This is one line out of many, and I feel is taken out of context.

        This is the whole quote:
        —————————————
        The centrepiece of Mr Turnbull’s plan seems to be fibre-to-thenode.
        But Mr Turnbull is misleading or ill-informed when he talks about FTTN.
        Mr Turnbull has suggested download speeds of 60 or 80 Mbps are feasible over copper.
        However, the speeds you can achieve over copper depend on how the copper network was built.
        The diameter of the copper and the length of the copper lines severely restricts the speeds achievable in Australia.
        That’s the first limitation of broadband over copper.
        To achieve the speeds Mr Turnbull speaks of over FTTN requires bonded copper pairs – which means using at least two copper lines per connection.
        Australia’s network has not been designed or built with two copper lines available to every premise.
        We simply do not have the copper availability and quality to deliver the speeds and performance Mr Turnbull describes.
        —————————————

        Before mentioning it needs bonded lines he talks about distances and copper quality, maybe Conroy was stupid to assume that people could put 1 and 1 together and understand he was talking about these speeds over decent distances.

        “Furthermore, VDSL2 (or ADLS2 or any other *DSL) speeds are not *theoritical*, they drop down as you go further from the exchange (this is well known)”

        I consider this theoretical.

        “This is called node splitting, exactly what I mentioned earlier, where they are reducing the number of premises per node. It is even entirely possible to exactly match the current NBN’s GPON bandwidth if they make the premises per node small enough”

        THEORETICALLY it is, but in reality it would be so insane – Cable requires all sorts of termination gear and you are proposing setting it up in every street, multiple on big streets o.O

        “I know you are trying your hardest to defend your idol”

        Conroy is NOT my idol, I will call him a moron when I think he is acting up – but when it comes to the NBN whilst his terminology might not be 100% correct, I feel he is on the money.

        Turnbull isn’t a saint when it comes to terminology either, he is still suggesting that Korea Telecom’s FTTB network is really FTTN since ethernet runs to each of the rooms…

        • Before mentioning it needs bonded lines he talks about distances and copper quality, maybe Conroy was stupid to assume that people could put 1 and 1 together and understand he was talking about these speeds over decent distances.

          No Conroy is just stupid, what he said is just as idiotic in context as it is out of context

          I consider this theoretical.

          Get your definitions correct, there is nothing theoretical about it, this is what happens in the real world

          THEORETICALLY it is, but in reality it would be so insane – Cable requires all sorts of termination gear and you are proposing setting it up in every street, multiple on big streets o.O

          Uh no, you clearly do not know what you are talking about. Node splitting has nothing to do with end of the cable where the premises is, its on the other end, and what it involves is installing extra fibre cores. There is nothing theoretical about it, its been plenty of times around the world. The cable companies in America (including Verizon) have just recently done node splitting

          Are you going to go around and claim everything that you don’t agree with theoretical?

          Conroy is NOT my idol, I will call him a moron when I think he is acting up – but when it comes to the NBN whilst his terminology might not be 100% correct, I feel he is on the money.

          Nope, he is about as correct as claiming that pigs can fly

          • How can Verizon be experimenting with node splitting when they don’t even have a cable network? They only sell FTTH (FiOS) or DSL.

          • Eh sorry, I meant Comcat (and in general the other cable companies)

            You can check the NPP (national broadband plan), in America which details America using techniques such as DOCSIS upgrades and node splitting for HFC to provide their target of 100mbit

            http://download.broadband.gov/plan/national-broadband-plan.pdf

            If you flick to page 20, you will the various techniques the cable companies/FTTN will use. You can also see the huge difference in FTTP penetration and Cable/FTTN/FTTC penetration in America

          • Conroy is only as good as his advisors and you well know that. While you deetego may be an engineer he is not. I noticed that you didnt call him out but some overseas expert. You just jumped on the bandwagon. Regardless of his accuracy the NBN is on the money. Growth in this industry is well recognised and i’m sorry but for all your VDSL technologies that work well within 400m, in the real world we live further than that. Oh hang on you want FTTP nodes every 400m…

          • There is a difference between him not commenting on something because he didn’t know about it, and him making an obvious false claim to try and bolster his cause

            Conroy did the latter, and that was his choice. It was obvious he did some research (or talked to some advisers), since he did mention “technical” terms (he was talking about bonded copper pairs, and the speeds of FTTN, and shared networks), he just got the details all wrong

      • Regarding Vectoring: “The only requirement is that all lines are under full control of a single operator, meaning that there can be no sub-local loop unbundling.”

        In other words, You can’t have infrastructure competition if you use vectoring.. So why would we use this technology to increase infrastructure competition (like the coalition wants to) again deteego?

        • Don’t hold out too much hope on that one. He dosn’t even know what vectoring is. He thinks does but obviously is thinking of DMT or QAM or some other portion of VDSL2. It not only requires all connections to come from the one provider but that the user has a VDSL2 modem that implements the G.993.5 standard that came out last year. I could not find any that did this this apart from business systems from Broadcom and one other company that also did high end equipment. Once they start using the system in the UK, India and Pakistan consumer products should be available. We have a couple of years so no problem there.

        • I wasn’t even suggesting using the new “vectoring” VDSL2 standard, we may not even have to use it (it really depends on whether, as I have said before, the cabling is bundled or there is excessive interference)

          As far as I know, most of Australia’s copper is still standard twisted pair

          • The cabling is without question bundled.
            And the interference that needs cancelling comes from other VDSL / ADSL / telephone connections running in the bundle.

          • The reason to use Vectoring is because that is what is the basis of all those claims of 100Mb/s at 400m.
            They all show the Acatel Lucent realworld tests. I have posted it for you a few times now and I don’t know if you think it’s going to set of a nuke or something…

            http://www2.alcatel-lucent.com/blogs/techzine/2011/boosting-vdsl2-bit-rates-with-vectoring/

            Click it! Click the clicky thing!

            Actually read the paper that is the basis for all those 100Mb as 400m in the real world. Because in the real world without vectoring they were getting around 40Mb at 400m

          • Yeah, and read this

            In most deployments, telephone lines that carry VDSL2 signals are part of cables (sometimes partitioned in smaller cable bundles) that contain 10 to a few hundred lines positioned very closely together. This close proximity results in crosstalk, and the higher the number of lines in a cable (bundle), the more crosstalk is generated. Crosstalk is the main reason why lines in the field perform significantly lower than their theoretical maximum. Vectoring enables each line to perform as if it is alone, that is, without crosstalk.

            Which is exactly what I have been saying

            It all depends on how bundled Australia’s copper is, and how much interference we have. Obviously they did real world trials, in a country that can have a completely different network topology to how Australia has it

  14. Copper speeds fall over distance meaning that while you could get your 100MB/s over 400 meters for someone like myself who lives 2k away from the exchange we would only get about 40MB, someone who lives even further it would fall even more.

    Virtually no one even lives within 1k of our exchange it’s all businesses & shops so with the UKs technology virtually no one would get the 100MB/s & most people would still get compairable to DSL2 speeds as they live more then 4km from the exchange.

  15. Also

    “Comcast in the US was already offering speeds of 105Mbps down and 10Mbps up over HFC”

    I’ll just leave this here, Comcast enforce a strict quota (only shown in the TOS) to keep this sustainable:

    http://xfinity.comcast.net/terms/network/amendment/
    It’s no secret we’ve been evaluating a specific monthly data usage or bandwidth threshold for our Comcast High-Speed Internet residential customers for some time. Rumors circulated online last year and they popped up again in May.

    In January, we added new frequently asked questions about what we consider acceptable use of our service to our online Help site http://www.comcast.net/help and Security Channel page http://www.comcast.net/security.

    We’ve listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive. Today, we’re announcing that beginning on October 1, 2008, we will amend our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) available at http://www.comcast.com/policies and establish a specific monthly data usage threshold of 250 GB/month per account for all residential customers.

  16. Wow. A UK firm analyzes an Australian Senators speech and publishes a report and then sends out a media release which just happens to be picked up by some industry commentators here and given a high profile in rushing out their latest blog post.

    Bloody turkeys. Yes Renai, I’m looking at you.

    Perhaps if you asked yourself exactly why a UK consultancy would engage in such an exercise, how much it would cost them, what they hope to get in return, and exactly how it managed to find it’s onto your news feed, then you might gain just an inkling of what’s at work here.

    No no. Don’t worry. Publish and be damned – turkey. Sorry but your credibility just fell more than a few % points.

    • While I do agree that the impartiality of this report might be somewhat suspect, to be fair to Renai, he is simply giving Turnbull right of reply after yesterday’s happenings. Whatever the “source” of the report, it has been supplied by Turnbull’s office and therefore it is reasonable for Renai to publish this article in the interests of balance on the subject.

      • Ah ha. Most magnanimous of you. But then again how do you know that it is Turnbull’s ‘right of reply’ and that it came from Turnbull’s media team ??

        Oh, yes. Renai states that “Turnbull delivered in spades”. So are we to assume that Turnbull or the Liberal Party requested or even paid for an external overseas consultancy to prepare a critique of Senator Conroy’s speech. Without a doubt.

        Mind you it’s a shame that Turnbull feels free to use the same in the cynical hope that it will boost the credibility of such criticism. And perhaps if Renai was aware that it was a release instigated (and paid for ?) by Turnbull he could have given said fact more prominence. It would assist readers put the credibility of such a report in context.

        • @Paul H

          ‘So are we to assume that Turnbull or the Liberal Party requested or even paid for an external overseas consultancy to prepare a critique of Senator Conroy’s speech. Without a doubt. ‘

          So how do you think the content of Conroy’s speech was done, without any paid expert opinion?

          • If they can pay an external consultancy to rebutt Conroy’s speech, they could pay an external consultancy to do some costings on their own policy.

          • Obviosuly Conroy didn’t hire David Havyatt for nothing, but that was made clear.

            The question is about this article referring to the rebuttal?

          • Missed it did you? Here is the answer to the question you asked once again –

            Obviosuly Conroy didn’t hire David Havyatt for nothing, but that was made clear.

            Ok?

            But you said you knew this. So why did you ask?

            Don’t you trust your own judgement, need a bit of encouragement?

      • @Micheal Wyres

        ‘While I do agree that the impartiality of this report might be somewhat suspect,’

        Well I think the impartiality of Conroy’s National Press Club address is somewhat suspect .

          • No it’s spot on, a politician whose multi billion dollar political baby is the Labor Party NBN rollout gives a speech criticising the Coalition Plan and that is totally impartial is it?

            lol

          • of course it isn’t.
            wtf would it be impartial?

            politicians are not expected to be impartial about the policies for which they are supporting or opposing.

    • Kenny is eyeing a nice plump consultancy fee from a future Coalition government. Of course he’s showing his utility to them – making himself indispensable.

  17. Ahhh … the dreaded “up to”

    This *IS* the problem with FTTN, with copper you just cant guarantee download and upload capability to every household/business.

    Ask NZ what their guaranteed capability of FTTN is ?
    – it is only 10Mbps download and no guaranteed upload.

    It is not surprising that NZ is now going FTTH.

  18. Four Hundred Metres… Jeez, it’s a 100m to the pit from my point… and the bus stop is further than 300m down the road… the exchange is almost 4k… that’d mean at least 10 nodes between here and the exchange… or maybe the bleeding pom can’t fathom that not everybody lives in a 4×4 council estate box (even though we’re technologically treated that way).

    Local problems in local conditions require local experts… the poor bugger probably doesn’t even know how to drink a cold beer.

  19. “This was a lab experiment” – Kenny
    “it plans to roughly double its”- Kenny
    “trials had shown HFC to be theoretically capable”- Kenny

    So Kenny saying his crystal balls are bigger than Conroys… such juvenile behavior, cant they just duke it out like real men and shake hands afterward.

    • VDSL2 is already deployed in various places around the world, and it was standardised in 2005. There is nothing theoretical about its capabilities

      Its a technology that uses Vector bonding, on a twisted pair, to active the speeds as defined in the standard, and thats how it works in real life

      • Vectoring won’t work with infrastructure competition that the coalition talks about.

        If we use Vectoring in VDSL2 we are basically going to have to have a whole-sale competition FTTN network. There will be no competitor “(v)Dslams”. It will be exactly like the NBNco wholesaling system, except it will be a split-up Telstra as the wholesaler.

        We will end up with what we have now, but with less competition. I would prefer we end up with less competition and a completely unbiased monopolist if we were going to pick.

        (obviously the “best” case scenario would be 3+ full infrastructure competitors that were making enough money to maintain their network without government subsidies, make an acceptable ROI and able to provide the same service to 70%+ of the population all at the same time, but we can’t, there isn’t enough money for 3 national networks, there’s only enough for 1 and that is with heavy government investment.)

  20. Well, well, well. Seems Alcatel Lucents VDSL2 does achieve 100MB/s at 400m with vectoring. 100MB/s peak, 50MB/s sustained.

    • I notice that Acatel Lucent left this part out of the html report he was quoting. It is however in their pdf version and in various presentations they gave to Pakistan and India where they say that it is 100Mb peak 50Mb sustained. That 100Mb is peak and they can only do 50Mb sustained. Don’t shoot the messanger. I was not looking for this. I was simply interested in the technology.

      “Because the purpose of introducing VDSL2 Vectoring is to deliver bit rates that can
      reach 100 Mb/s, the access platform should be able to absorb these higher speeds
      on the backplane with sufficient uplink capacity (reference 4 in Figure 5).
      The Alcatel-Lucent installed base of ISAM platforms is based on a market-leading,
      high-capacity VDSL2 line card that provides 50 Mb/s sustained and 100 Mb/s peak per
      subscriber. It also provides network connectivity for multiple Gigabit Ethernet (GE) and
      10 GE uplinks.”

      http%3a//www.alcatel-lucent.com/wps/DocumentStreamerServlet%3fLMSG_CABINET=Docs_and_Resource_Ctr%26LMSG_CONTENT_FILE=White_Papers/Get_to_Fast_Faster_EN_StraWhitePaper.pdf

      • Note that peak and sustain would vary wildly if the copper is in bad condition, which is very likely the case in places like India in Pakistan. Australia also has much better standards for installing infrastructure, since we are a developed country (and not developing)

        Hell in mexico you have people ripping out copper and selling it (copper is worth quite a $$$$ in such countries)

        If the copper is in good condition, which in Australia most of (note, most != all) it is, than there will be neglibable difference between peak and average speed.

        Also note that distance from exchange has nothing to do with condition of copper, if you are very far from the exchange (>3km) you will get quite low speeds, regardless of how good quality the copper is

        • I have been reading more and more papers. Very hard to find data. It’s all pretty new stuff. Broadcom have a chipset that supports the new vectoring in an integrated VDSL2/vectoring package. G.993.5 spec. But I can’t find any modems that support it yet other than high end office stuff from broadcom and some other company that I have never heard of. I guess it will filter down over the next year or so. The vectoring requires a modem that supports it or else things fall back to standard VDSL2 and the speed drops by nearly to half.
          Still trying to find the sustained info. The 50Mb comes from their trials, it is also mentioned in other documents a feature of current VDSL2. But their is no rational as to why they put that figure as a sustained limit. It shouldn’t be the vectoring being effected by the transmitted signal as it should be able to take that into account. I maybe because of recieved data, once it is recieved it’s too late to compensate for it.

          • Uh VDSL2 does vectoring by default, thats how it works. Do some research into South Korea, because they actually don’t have FTTP/FTTH, they have FTTB (fibre to the basement), and their 100/100 mbit broadband is delivered by VDSL2 in their MDU’s view the existing copper in the building

            Doing research on VDSL2 implementing vectoring is pointless because VDSL2 is vectoring. Thats how it manages to get so much symmetrical bandwidth out of a single twisted pair (and the same reason why it requires the whole copper bundle)

            Most newer VDSL2 modems will support 100mbit (I am pretty sure the one I listed earlier does)

          • Have a look at this article by Alcatel Lucent. Vectoring is something they just added to VDSL2 (this year I think) to extend the distance by cancelling noise in cable bundles. It is G.993.5 (G.vector). The modem I could find all seem to stop at G.993.2 or G.993.3 It’s what makes the 100Mb out to 400m possible. Exisiting VDSL2 will do the same, just shorter distances/ The problem wouldn’t accur if the cables were run seperately. Apparently it’s all about cancelling line crosstalk in bundles.

            http://www2.alcatel-lucent.com/blogs/techzine/2011/boosting-vdsl2-bit-rates-with-vectoring/

            Boosting VDSL2 Bit Rates with Vectoring

            By providing cutting-edge noise-cancellation, vectoring enables VDSL2 lines to approximate their theoretical maximum speed in real-world conditions — offering cost-effective high bandwidth and very fast build-out

            Vectoring is not a method for raising the theoretical maximum transport speeds. Instead, this noise-cancellation technology addresses the gap between the theoretical maximum rate and the speeds that service providers can deliver in typical field conditions.

          • Actually no, let me fix that

            It’s what makes the 100Mb out to 400m possible if you are dealing with interference

            If you don’t have interference on the copper, VDSL2 providing 100mb on 400mb is the standard norm.

            Check the wiki article here

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_high_speed_digital_subscriber_line_2

            As I said, have a look in South Korea, the majority of the internet is provided by either VDSL2 or HFC, and they have been having 100mbit on VDSL2 for years (along with active ethernet)

          • Yes, for sure. But the interference they are mainly cancelling is line crosstalk. And last I saw the telstra copper ran in bundles until it went from nature strip to the premises.

          • In South Korea you are refering to the VDSL2 from the basement to the flats in multidwelling units I guess? Short distances and they may not be bundled for as far. In newer buildings they probably deliberately don’t bundle or run shielded cables.

          • Indeed I am, but the point is in South Korea they clearly have VDSL2 modems that are capable of 100mbit, and they clearly do not use Alcatal’s Vectoring VDSL2

          • Yes, and they can achieve the speeds here. But if the VDSL2 in the cabinet has vectoring and that vectoring is what is needed to extend the 100Mb to 400m because the telephone lines are bundled you need a modem capable of G.993.5 to take advantage of that. Also mixing VDSL2 and VDSL2 with vectoring on the same cable bundle reduces the effectiveness of the vectoring to cancel noise. So holpefully everyone gets the right modem supplied to them and doesn’t use a non G.993.5 capable modem (or the ISP whoever can tell they are doing so and slap their wrist)

          • Look the vectoring thing (which is honestly a marketing term, because VDSL2 does vectoring anyways, but thats besides the point), is for when the twisted pairs of the copper are receiving so much interference (for whatever reason) that you require the newest standard

            This is the same reason its being promoted in countries like pakistan and india which have subnormal copper installations

            This is not the general case for australia, and so we do not need the latest VDSL2 ratification to get such last mile speeds in general

          • I suggest you do some study before making claims like that, as I have been doing. Obviously you haven’t even read the links I provided to alcatel lucent bell labratories research.
            I am trying to find real information in a swamp of political misinformation. Is there any point in discussing anything if you don’t even look at the research of the technology you claim does a certain thing. Is it that inconvenient that until the last year or so runs in bundles of cables as Telstra has have been badly limited to crosstalk? There is a solution but for whatever reason you want to claim it’s always been there rather than it being a recent development. I was enjoying the chat. But now it seems to have gotten to the point you just want to close your eyes and not attempt to further whatever knowledge you have on VDSL2 which seems to mainly derived from press releases and sales data, with no attempt to look at how it actually works. Nice to see you have enough knowledge of electronics to know about the skin effect and crosstalk. I don’t then what is so hard about reading some white papers on the trials that resulted in those 100Mb, 400m realworld claims.

          • Here’s a nice fat wad of data, I’ll have to read some over the weekend. The ITU papers for virtually every communication that is being looked at. GPON, ADSL, VDSL, VDSL2, VDSL2 with vectoring for crosstalk cancelation (04/10 the standard was added, the realworld testing was 2011).

            http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-G/en

          • Look Noddy, I have glimpsed over the research, and as I have said previously, and correctly, the latest standard for VDSL2 vectoring is only required in the circumstances where you are dealing with excessive crosstalk (cables are bundled together or something else)

            If that is the case for the copper in Australia, then yes we will most likely need this standard, if its not the case then we won’t need it

          • No, you kept saying things like “Telstra cable isn’t bundled”, “Vectoring has always been in VDSL2” and many other things that tell me you really have no clue what you are talking about. What sort of engineer do you claim to be?

          • No the issue is that Vectoring and Bundled are overly generic terms.

            Cable bundling is not a binary thing, its not yes/no thing. Obviously you have to bundle the cables to some degree, its physically impossible not to do so

            The point is the degree to which cables are bundled, if the 80% of the copper run to your premise is bundled (with copper runes that go to other houses), than that is “more” bundled than copper 20% of a copper run being bundled, and there will be more interference

            The point is that, with an FTTN, a lot of unbundling is done, and a lot of the bundled copper runs are replaced with fibre. So yes, there will still be bundling, but it will be a lot lower then what the bundling is now (if done properly).

            There is a reason why all the figures being put forward regarding the new VDSL2 standard are naive approximations, it really depends on how bundled the copper is in general (the whole point of this new vectoring thing is to counteract the interference caused by cross talk due to bundling). It also completely depends on how the FTTN is built

            The question is, its going to be worth it implementing the new VDSL2 standard if it will only bring an extra 5-10mbps because the crosstalk is already minimal? The results done by the VDSL2 standard where done in countries such as Europe/India and Pakistan, which have completely different copper topologies than what Australia has

            Hence more of a reason why such an analysis needs to be done

          • Actually, I will clip the bit from the article, there is a nice graph below it.

            “Vectoring enables these gains by canceling interference between copper lines, which is one of the most significant factors limiting the achievable bit rate. In a dynamic process, vectoring continually measures and cancels this “crosstalk,” so that all lines can operate at much higher capacity”

          • I have never actually heard Fiber to the Basement used as a term, but even if it correct terminology how is that not FTTP? FTTP is Fiber to the Premise.

            Pretty sure a basement is considered part of a premise… even the front lawn or a shed out the back is part of a premise.

            This is just nitpicking bullshit started by Malcolm Turnbull, the fact is in South Korea most people live in high rise buildings, so running Fiber to the building to a central switch and then Gigabit Ethernet or VDSL over copper makes alot of sense.

            If Australians all lived in high rise we could do it too, and if you even take a look at the NBNco documentation in high rise buildings they plan on doing just this!

            Unfortunately for FTTN we have the largest houses on the planet sprawled across massive areas, so it’s not a large scale option.

            In South Korea the areas where low density housing exists it is certainly direct FTTH.

          • Fiber to the premise in context of MDU’s, means the fbre cabling actually going all the way inside the individual apartments, which is what Japan’s NTT did (and why you have ONT’s in Japan)

            In South Korea, you either have VDSL2, active ethernet or HFC. The point is, that FTTB is not FTTP. FTTB cannot provide gigabit speeds (or at least to not every person in the apartment), considering most apartments just have a single twisted pair going inside the actual room

            And it isn’t nitpicking ,especially not in this context with people claiming that copper is shit and unreliable. Its a massive difference, because the speeds that FTTP proponents are touting (>gigabit) are not possible over VDSL2 or active ethernet in those MDU’s

        • Ahh, forgot to mention a big point in favour of Australian copper. Most of it is in the ground and the biggest weakness of the vectoring is RF interferance cancellation, it’s better with lower frequencies. We have some nice shielding soil between the cable and the RF.

          • Yup exactly, the difference in peak/sustained speeds all comes down to physics and interference/condition of copper

          • I’m not sure what you mean by documentation, but its basic physics

            You can have a look up on skin effect, but basically bandwidth over copper is delivered by electricity (electrons), and like any type of signal, SNR gets effected by both defects in the copper (irregularities) and by interference from things like radio waves or other cables (referred to as crosstalk)

          • Thank your for giving revision in basic early high school physics. But they reply is just condecending fluff.

          • The biggest point against Australian copper is that it has been in the ground longer than most other countries and is becoming decrepit and massively degraded in many many cases. This UK report talks about lab teststs doen on shiny new copper in ideal situations. The reality is that out on the street, using our existing copper, all the vectoring and voodo magic you try and do isn’t going to reliably deliver 60-80Mbits to every house in Australia, even if you rollout a node to every street corner in every town. You’ll end up spending similar to the fibre solution and end up with a big bag of shit at the end.

          • No actually, if you read the report, they actually did field trials on copper that has already been in the ground for zones (these were not lab trials)

            Furthermore if you think the copper in Australia is old, you haven’t seen the copper in Europe….

          • please enlighten us with details of this geriatric european copper.

            i’ve shown you mine, now show me yours.

  21. Are those touted FTTN speeds on brand new copper in the lab, or fifty year old copper in the ground? Hmmm.

      • Good lord you are an idiot… Your comment here and those above just scream it. Go back to your cave keyboard warrior. Come out again when you are ready to face the real world.

        • In the real world there is a thing called Statue of Liberty

          It is built entirely out of copper

          It was build in 1886

          It has no insulation whatsoever, and is still standing fine

          If you have done any form of materials science (or hell elementary science), you would realise that copper is almost completely inert

          • I’m sorry, what? The Statue of Liberty hasn’t crumbled into a pile of dust, so…?

            Your use of the word “inert” smacks of the Yes Minister definition: inert = wouldn’t ‘ert a fly (!)

            The problem with copper is not that most of the insulated length is protected under ideal or well-maintained conditions. There are a number of problems that occur, including interruption of the insulation or wire itself at a section where the insulation is compromised, and most particularly corrosion and other defects at joins, soldered junctions or terminations. These do not enjoy the same degree of protection that well-maintained and protected copper normally does.

            So what? That’s just a few bits here and there? Ah yes, but the copper is like a classic chain – only as strong as its weakest link. A corroded join or compromised section at any point in the wiring between house and exchange is enough to impede the signal-carrying capacity. And since water is most likely to get in at the points where junctions and terminals are found in pits, the problem is not trivial.

            An experienced Telstra linesman explained this to me (sorry about my paraphrasing) – along with his assessment that Telstra was allowing the whole system to decay, without programming proper ongoing maintenance, since it knew the lifespan was limited, and to do a proper job would just cost too much money. And if the copper network is forceably or otherwise separated from Telstra, what obligation does Telstra have to spend a lot of money doing preventative maintenance, which is largely invisible (though necessary) and won’t yield a greater return on an asset that Telstra expects to give up soon enough anyway?

          • The problem with copper is not that most of the insulated length is protected under ideal or well-maintained conditions. There are a number of problems that occur, including interruption of the insulation or wire itself at a section where the insulation is compromised, and most particularly corrosion and other defects at joins, soldered junctions or terminations. These do not enjoy the same degree of protection that well-maintained and protected copper normally does.

            False, and I have actually provided substance of my claim (http://thebernoullitrial.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/median-adsl2-broadband-speed-in-australia/)

            So what? That’s just a few bits here and there? Ah yes, but the copper is like a classic chain – only as strong as its weakest link. A corroded join or compromised section at any point in the wiring between house and exchange is enough to impede the signal-carrying capacity. And since water is most likely to get in at the points where junctions and terminals are found in pits, the problem is not trivial.

            Thanks for me giving me an unnecessary lecture on what cables are, (even though Fibre has this exact same problem as well)

            An experienced Telstra linesman explained this to me (sorry about my paraphrasing) – along with his assessment that Telstra was allowing the whole system to decay, without programming proper ongoing maintenance, since it knew the lifespan was limited, and to do a proper job would just cost too much money. And if the copper network is forceably or otherwise separated from Telstra, what obligation does Telstra have to spend a lot of money doing preventative maintenance, which is largely invisible (though necessary) and won’t yield a greater return on an asset that Telstra expects to give up soon enough anyway?

            I can come up with unsubstantiated but plausible claims to prove my point as well!!!

            People really need to get their head out of the whole “since I have an issue with my copper, everyone else has” attitude

          • I’m glad that you agree my account is plausible! I’ll take that as a concession, since it is also true (and also widespread knowledge – which is why you know it is plausible).

            Neither that link, nor any of the arguments in this post actually address anything I have said about the ways in which the copper network becomes compromised.

          • Yeah I happened to be thinking about some other post while replying to yours

            In any case, my point is that the circumstances that you have put forward are not “common”, but I am not denying that they don’t occur

      • “Copper lasts hundreds of years if taken care of properly”

        That says absolutely nothing about the speeds achievable on such a network… but yes anything but fibre right? It’s absolutely imperative that we milk the copper as much as we can with minuscule upgrades every ten years. oh noes fibre and the future is scary. Must. Keep. Copper!

        • No that says everything about the speeds achievable on the network

          If you have copper in good condition, that is properly insulated (including the joints) against things like water, you will get the theoretical maximum speeds (with a negligible margin of error) depending distance from the exchange for the last mile

          All of the properties I live on have a copper in good condition, I have done tests (even when it rains), and its a stable 15/1 for one property, and 5/1 for the other, 24/7

          • “No that says everything about the speeds achievable on the network”

            Actually it doesn’t. Just because “Copper lasts hundreds of years if taken care of properly” it does in no way say anything about the speeds achievable on such a network even in ideal conditions. You’d just be making assumptions. So great a length of copper can last hundreds of years if taken if taken care of properly and??? Big whoop & the lengths of copper that haven’t been taken care of properly what do we do with them? They should be replaced with copper that will be taken care of properly so people can get the best speed possible using VDSL2?

            “All of the properties I live on have a copper in good condition, I have done tests (even when it rains), and its a stable 15/1 for one property, and 5/1 for the other, 24/7”

            I didn’t realise the entire copper network was situated in your house.

          • Actually it doesn’t. Just because “Copper lasts hundreds of years if taken care of properly” it does in no way say anything about the speeds achievable on such a network even in ideal conditions. You’d just be making assumptions. So great a length of copper can last hundreds of years if taken if taken care of properly and??? Big whoop & the lengths of copper that haven’t been taken care of properly what do we do with them? They should be replaced with copper that will be taken care of properly so people can get the best speed possible using VDSL2?

            And there are tools and instruments for testing that (it involves sending electromagnetic waves down the copper line and calculating where the issue is, the Fiber equivalent is sending photons of all different wavelengths)

            Then if the issue is with the copper line, then they will replace it or solder it (or do whatever it needs to be done)

            I am really not sure what your point is, yes there is some copper in the group that people have issues with, but because there is no mandated minimum speed as an Australian regulation, Telstra is not forced to replace (or fix it), and so in a lot of cases they don’t. By law, Telstra is just required to provide enough bandwidth on copper for a phone service

          • “And there are tools and instruments for testing that (it involves sending electromagnetic waves down the copper line and calculating where the issue is, the Fiber equivalent is sending photons of all different wavelengths)”

            Fault testing methods of copper and fibre? And???

            “I am really not sure what your point is”

            My point was asking you what was the point of your “Copper lasts hundreds of years if taken care of properly” comment. Seems after all that you didn’t actually have one and were just babbling again which seems to be the case here too…

          • Unlike you, I was responding to Francis original claim about copper condition. If you are going to butt in, at least try to make a coherent point, because I have no idea wtf you are trying to argue, apart from the fact that not everyone has perfect copper, which I never claimed (Francis claimed that 50 year old copper severely degrades the quality, which is not correct)

          • “If you are going to butt in”

            This is an open and public forum if you don’t want your comments to be questioned then don’t post them.

            “I have no idea”

            Possibly the only sensible thing you’ve ever said.

          • This is an open and public forum if you don’t want your comments to be questioned then don’t post them.

            Yeah but it doesn’t stop you from making an idiot out of yourself when entering a conversation. It was suggestion, or a hint, not a statement

            “I have no idea”

            Gee whiz, resorting to twisting my words or making straw man. Never would have thought. At least if you are going to pull a Conroy/Michael Wyres, be more original, this is starting to get boring/stale

          • “Yeah but it doesn’t stop you from making an idiot out of yourself when entering a conversation”

            Apparently you make an idiot of idiot out of yourself regardless. I’ll try to refrain form pointing it out in the future from now on, happy now?

            “Gee whiz, boo hoo hoo”

            Sorry you make it far too easy, but you have to admit you were asking for that one considering your earlier comment.

          • Apparently you make an idiot of idiot out of yourself regardless. I’ll try to refrain form pointing it out in the future from now on, happy now?

            Whatever makes you sleep at night

            Sorry you make it far too easy, but you have to admit you were asking for that one considering your earlier comment.

            I guess asking for maturity out of someone who copies their name out of a flash comic is a bit much to ask for….(might as well go one step further and name yourself after some final fantasy character)

          • “Whatever makes you sleep at night”

            I was trying to make you feel better so you could sleep at night, sorry I’ll try to be more considerate next time :-(

            “I guess asking for maturity out of someone who copies their name out of a flash comic is a bit much to ask for…”

            Don’t feel too bad, for what it worth I was never expecting any maturity from you with your user name.

            “(might as well go one step further and name yourself after some final fantasy character)”

            Sorry, but I don’t play video games.

          • Yes, they have gone down hill a little over the years. I’d say since they got rid of most of their techs and contracted out repairs. My GF is the unfortunate victim of things not being fixed. She is near the beach and where the cables go under the road floods all the time. Every 3 or 4 months the internet just won’t stay connected. She has to get it put on a 1.5Mb profile to have any chance to use it. Telstra won’t do a thing. Then finally the phone will give out, after a few weeks of it not ringing when people call it will get to the point she can’t dial out. Then after a few weeks they will come and pump out the pits. One tech was at least honest telling her to get a petition together as Telstra will never fix it as it would require digging up the road and it would cost a lot. (She is in a court so not much traffic disruption). There has been one bright point, she moved to Telstra as an ISP about 6 months ago. Since then Telstra has been preemptively coming out every few months and pumping the water out before she looses her net or phone.

      • But it hasn’t been. There’s no point arguing about copper in a perfect theoretical world, we need to talk about the copper that’s actually in the ground, because that’s what we’re using.

        I experienced difference between ‘new’ and ‘old’ copper myself this year, after power lines were brought down onto the phone lines in my street, turning the entire 2km bundle from street to exchange into a mass of molten copper and plastic that left us without a phone or broadband for 2 weeks.

        The ‘old’ copper was actually relatively young, having been laid in the early 1970s. Yet the best speed I could get over ADSL2+ was about 8Mbps.

        Then the tree came down, and Telstra replaced the entire run from homes to exchange. Magically, my internet speed increased to 13Mbps as soon as the new cable was switched on.

        The bottom line is that the existing copper lines are far from pristine, and there are plenty of them around which are far older than mine.

        • Yes but the thing is, you are not a representative of the general condition of copper in Australia. A lot of people get the false impression that just because a few vocal people that happen to have issues with their copper condition complain on sites like WP, that everyones copper is like that

          • I am pretty sure you are wrong here. The current copper phone system is broken. Most of the copper has been water damaged. Also, the termination standards of copper line are damn dreadful. Go look in your MDF and see how messed up it is. If we wanted faster speeds, regulations need to change.

          • I am pretty sure you are wrong here. The current copper phone system is broken. Most of the copper has been water damaged. Also, the termination standards of copper line are damn dreadful. Go look in your MDF and see how messed up it is. If we wanted faster speeds, regulations need to change.

            I am pretty sure I am right here

            Go check the average sync speeds on sites like TPG/Internode and iinet. You will see they all fall in around the 8-9mbit range. The sync speed, btw, represents how much your line is capable of downloading (which is completely separate to how fast you might download a file, since that depends on backhaul and the server, none of which has anything to do with last mile)

            Read this for more info (http://thebernoullitrial.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/median-adsl2-broadband-speed-in-australia/)

            You have to be very careful when pulling generic claims like that out of your ass

          • you’re shooting yourself in the foot with that argument.

            8-9mbit average sync speed. i assume this is on adsl2 connections?
            in which case the average isn’t even half of what adsl2 is supposed to be able to provide.

            if they can’t even get the copper to connect at 20mbit, how will they get it to connect at 60mbit?

          • Use your brain for once

            That is because not every property happens to sit right next to the exchange

            Regardless of how good your copper is, you will still not get the theoretical maximum ADSL2+ speed if you happen to be 1km (or 2km or 3km) from the exchange

          • I believe that was his point entirely and you just made it for him.

            Which makes your unnecessary personal gibe, all the more embarrassing.

          • I was talking about the condition of the copper, which has nothing to do with how far your premise happens to be from the exchange

          • No, you said, “regardless of how good your copper is”, clearly dismissing the copper condition and then you clearly went on to talk about distance.

            “That is because not every property happens to sit right next to the exchange” . “You will still not get the theoretical maximum ADSL2+ speed if you happen to be 1km (or 2km or 3km) from the exchange

            Why do you say things in a demeaning way towards people and when those people question you, then claim you said something completely different.

            I’d suggest the easiest way to avoid basic scrutiny, do not talk nonsense.

          • How do you decide to reply as Ross vs replying as RS or Rob?, why don’t just have a conversation with yourself and support each pretending there are two/three viewpoints – oh hang on you just did.

          • FYI alain.

            http://delimiter.com.au/comments-policy/

            “Specifically, it is important to debate other people’s ideas — not perceived aspects of their personality or their background. We will not tolerate comments which are nothing more than insults, for the simple reason that they impede the free flow of ideas”.

          • Sorry I agree with alain, he was not insulting anybody, no matter how desperate you try.

  22. In 2007 we were going to need 20,000 FTTN cabinets to achieve modest speeds to premises. So the cost of building FTTN is still in the tens of billions, plus $15 billion to Telstra as compensation for access to the ten million copper segments from street to premises, which it owns.

    So, $25 billion to build FTTN, then Telstra takes its $15 billion compo and builds a private FTTP network, so no-one will use the FTTN we just built!

    How many more times will this FTTN chestnut be rephrased by Turnbull(sh*t) before the limitless speeds available via a one-off, $12 billion fibre-laying exercise are agreed by both political parties as being in the national interest?

    • This was for FTTN to 98% of Australia (which is actually even higher than NBN’s 93%)

      Turnbull never stated he wanted to cover the entire country in FTTN, his policy is to have a mix of FTTN/FTTH/Wireless/Satellite

      If you are going to try diss someone, at least know their position properly, because you sure as hell don’t

      Also the compensation to Telstra was because Telstra was unspoilt, and it was government intervening on Telstra’s private property, neither of which would happen under what Turnbull envisages (if he actually manages to split Telstra and make the wholesale arm a utility, as he has been claiming)

  23. You have to be joking. The argument is that a vdsl solution, in the late stages of 2011, years after the NBNCO plan and their own testing locked in fibre, it’s somehow proof that fibre is flawed is hilarious. The argument is pure liberal misdirection. That vdsl would not substantially improve our internet infrastructure is a well understood fact. Renai, you should have been able to recognise and report the obvious deception in this response release

  24. while conroys claim of requiring bonding for faster speeds for FTTN is technically incorrect, it is true in the context of the coalitions FTTN plan – as that does not deploy nodes at sub 400m distances. last i heard node radius was set at somewhere >2.5km

    • Node radius can be whatever the hell you want it to be, the coalition have not released an official policy (let alone plan) of what the node radius’s will be, apart from the fact that it will have to be a small enough to provided the minimum of 12/1 which is the figure that Turnbull is trying to mandate as a minimum speed

      • To achieve that they would need a cabinet within 2km, so each cabinet would service 4 square km. Eek I hope I am not at the edge of that. I’d recieve a downgrade, I currently get just over 14Mb

        • Well actually they can still leave you connected to the exchange in such a scenario, but yes it would be 2km within radius of each cabinet

          If they did 1km, you could safely provide universal 40/40 mbit over VDSL2 (or twiddle with higher downloads/lower uploads), or you could just do the 2km option and upgrade to FTTH when demand rises

      • the point is that you cant go around saying that fttn can do 100mbit (with 400m nodes) and then forget to mention that your planning on installing nodes at 2km. so only those within 400m of a node would get 100mbit and vdsl has a very sharp dropoff.

        if youre happy with that then im happy with people saying you can get 100tbps (yes terrabits) out of ftth. which has been shown in lab tests.

        • If you want to quote turrnbull directly (as you should) he was talking about 60/20, and not 100/100

    • But geotypes 1 and 2 are the most advantageous for FTTN, aren’t they? Major urban centres and large towns? Doesn’t that undermine your case?

      In any event, trying to map very heterogeneous data from a dozen different countries onto a non-linear series based on UK experiences… what was it this was supposed to prove again? And that’s assuming the integrity of the data as presented. I have doubts about any apples-to-apples comparison here.

      Sorry tosh, I don’t think this proves anything of advantage, at all.

      • I think you are missing the point, which is that we would install FTTN in the areas that have the genotypes that fit FTTN

        Im not sure why its so difficult for people to understand this

    • Nice graph. Bit of Germany in the city areas going more to Poland in the country. I wish there was a non cumulative version as you need to compare slopes in each area rather that graph height.

  25. ok Renai,

    Lets deal with the substance of the claims made shall we? (so far as there is any substance at all)

    “Alcatel recently announced that they were achieving VDSL2 speeds of 100Mbps at distances of 400m (using vectoring, not bonding). This was not a lab experiment..”

    Yes they did, but what they don’t tell you is whilst bonding forms a wider channel, vectoring forms a larger but shared channel.

    In any case Renai, 400m is simply not a credible distance. Realistic node to customer distances in Australia would be anything from 800m (but only possible in some urban areas) to 1500m.

    Over these distances 30+ Mbps and lower are about what we’d get in Australia. Why you can’t be bothered to note this I don’t know.

    “UK-based telco BT, which has announced that it plans to roughly double its FTTN speeds to up to 80MBps in 2012..”

    And when you dig into the fine detail what you discover is this is only possible with relatively short node to customer distances and this is made possible by the very dense nature of a lot of UK cities.

    “Kenny said, noting BT’s FTTN rollout would have upload speeds of up to 20Mbps from 2012..”

    Again, the basic physics of this is that the sum of upload and download bandwidth must fit the physically available bandwidth. So if you’ve got relatively short node to customer distances and you can get 60+ Mbps then you can afford to allocate a 20Mbps upstream. However, in Australia, where FTTN will not yield anything like this, you cannot afford to allocate such a large chunk of upload.

    “Kenny highlighted a passage from NBN Co’s corporate plan (PDF), which points out that Telstra is upgrading its HFC network to the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, supporting speeds of up to 100Mbps.”

    Which totally ignores the number of users actually sharing that bandwidth. This point was also made by Conroy and doesn’t get a mention here.

    “Conroy’s statement that download speed requirements had increased dramatically for more than two decades: Kenny stated that Conroy’s chart displayed yesterday (PDF) showed an increase in download speed capabilities, not requirements ..”

    Kenny is simply engaging in wishful thinking here. The graphs show actual usage. He should pay attention to the detail. But then again this is what you’d expect when Turnbull’s staffers rush off to a pet expert to desperately find some FUD to toss at the mental giants in the media.

    “Kenny acknowledged the growth but implied that although core network infrastructure would require upgrading, access networks might not ..”

    This is simply Kenny’s opinion.

    “Conroy’s statement that a report by Citigroup showed demand would exceed the capabilities delivered by the Coalition’s rival broadband plan: Kenny stated that Citigroup was using the same flawed chart relating to speed capabilities ..”

    There are many many published sources of exponential growth in real usage.

    “Kenny stated that although broadband did bring benefits to society, high-speed broadband didn’t necessarily bring greater benefits..”

    Now he gets even more hand-waving. Yes true, you only get benefits to the extent people actually use the speed. But this ignores the future which is the whole point of the NBN.

    And that’s as far as I need go because I’m only going to deal with this rubbish so far as there is any substance to it at all.

    Renai,

    Once again you’re not doing any analysis. What you see here is intellectual dishonesty of the highest order. Conroy goes into great detail absolutely, totally ripping to shreds Turnbull’s alternative. What do the opposition do? Trot out some more FUD. The key piece of dishonesty is in claiming copper can go faster under some circumstances but neglecting to mention that these circumstances will never exist in Australia. By now, surely, Renai, you must get suspicious of this “go fetch some plausible numbers form overseas” tactic?

    Now its just possible that Turnbull, his advisors and those connected with him are simply fooling themsleves. But more likely they’re doing this deliberately. And I call that dishonest. Trying to fool people into believing its ok to vote for them because they supposedly have a policy.

    And you Renai, participate in that.

    • No, he happens to be publish something that you don’t agree with

      Once again you’re not doing any analysis. What you see here is intellectual dishonesty of the highest order.

      Thats a bit rich coming from you, especially since you totally ignore the fact that NBNCo’s FTTH is also shared, just like HFC

      Which makes the rest of your post pointless and inaccurate (or lets use your team, intellectual dishonest) dribble

      • deteego, you really think you’re on to something with this “shared” hackery about GPON, don’t you?

        Warning: reality check ahead.

        To the extent that GPON represents “shared” use of a single fibre, the context you leave out is that the carrying capacity of fibre is several orders of magnitude greater than HFC.

        It’s like comparing a house which has to share water gathered from a well in the same bucket, with another house that has to share water that flows from the same megalitre dam. They’re both “sharing”; but it’s not a meaningful or relevant point in any way.

        • deteego, you really think you’re on to something with this “shared” hackery about GPON, don’t you?

          Sorry for being accurate, I might join the Conroy and Co Club and start spewing crap

          To the extent that GPON represents “shared” use of a single fibre, the context you leave out is that the carrying capacity of fibre is several orders of magnitude greater than HFC.

          Uh, I think I have am saying this for the 3rd time already

          GPON is 2.4k/1,2k, HFC is 1.5k/1.5k

          I have used sources to back up both claims, so its not orders of magnitude, in fact its barely twice as much. I have also said that PON can be upgraded, many times

          If you are going to have such a massive cry over that amount of bandwidth difference, then go ahead (but also remember that HFC will most likely not be offering the top tier NBN 1000/400 speeds)

          • GPON is 2.4k/1,2k, HFC is 1.5k/1.5k

            GPON is a 2.5gbit link, HFC is a 100mbit link – put 32 users on each and thats 78mbit vs 3mbit continual burst (worse case scenario), thats a pretty hefty difference, and GPON is limited to 32 users per link, HFC is not.

            which one would most people prefer to be on?

            but also remember that HFC will most likely not be offering the top tier NBN 1000/400 speeds

            because it cant support them. neither will the GPON links, anyone asking for a 1000/400 service would most likely end up on one of the point-to-point links instead. and if those are all used up then i doubt theyd be allowed to have that speed either (it would probably kill the gpon link if they did)

          • HFC is a 100mbit link – put 32 users on each and thats 78mbit vs 3mbit continual burst (worse case scenario), thats a pretty hefty difference, and GPON is limited to 32 users per link, HFC is not.

            Im sorry, but are you essentially saying that when my friend downloads something at 100mbit, that his neighbour (who is also on cable, on the same node, with the same company) suddenly has his net cut off, because apparently HFC’s shared speeds is 100mbit

            Im sorry, but this really does not add up……

            In fact, it would be god damn stupid if any company offered speeds on a shared speed that is the actual maximum of that whole shared node, that would be like NBN offering 2.4/1.2 gbit speeds on their NBN GPON (even doing 1000/400 is stretching it, Japan uses the same GPON topology with 32 user split and they offer only 100/40, if you want gigabit speeds you get a direct link)

          • When I said that the carrying capacity of fibre is several orders of magnitude greater than HFC, I was not referring to the capacity of GPON in its current implementation.

            As you are well aware, the carrying capacity of fibre has enormous headroom provided by the physical properties of the medium, which are not matched by HFC. This was the point I was making.

            10GPON and other still more advanced implementations offer plenty of potential growth – and these have been directly or indirectly alluded to by Mike Quigley and other NBN Co spokespersons. They haven’t spelled out the precise details of the upgrade pathway they will carry out, or an exact timeframe – but the pathway itself is so obvious and clear precisely BECAUSE of the future capacity of fibre.

          • In the exact same way that networks around the world are upgrading their HFC for future demand, and in the case of Virgin in UK, upgrading their HFC to FTTH in some areas

            What you have said is no reason, whatsoever, to decommission the HFC networks for general broadband use. As it stands, for residential connections, 100mbit is a premium. Its only available (to residential areas), in significant accounts, in either intensely populated countries (such as Japan or South Korea), or trivial countries which are closer to islands (such as Singapore) or a bit of the both. Anything above 50 is considered a premium product, especially considering that HFC can deliver speeds of even above 100mbit

            And its all nice and good that GPON can be upgraded to other *PON systems, but its a question of them actually doing it, and NBN has no more impetus to upgrade their network than any other telecommunications company in the history of worldwide telecommunication, for an obvious variety of reasons

    • ungulate, you read my mind.

      No literally; we both used the expression “hand-waving” to describe the same behaviour within minutes of each other!

      But seriously, excellent post – this gets back to what the debate is really about, not about who gets off the best pot-shots the fastest.

  26. The arguments made in Kenny’s report are mostly tendentious and almost entirely beside the point.

    Kenny would much rather quibble with a hand-picked set of statistics used by Conroy than actually engage with the underlying issues. It’s a classic debater’s ruse: assert that the battleground is one where you enjoy an advantage; point out the weakness in your opponent’s argument at that point; and declare victory. It’s a variant of the straw man fallacy – attack something which is not the opposition’s main argument, assert that it IS the opposition’s main argument, and (again) declare victory.

    Going right back to basics: the NBN is a plan that tackles three key things:
    (1) the limited capacity of current last-mile physical network assets in Australia, especially in regional areas
    (2) the regulatory failures of the past 15 years which have created massive distortions and inequities between the vertically integrated Telstra and the rest of the industry
    (3) the proven failure of the free market to invest in upgraded network assets in a fair and equitable manner for Australians

    Quibbles over the theoretical/trial capacity of copper over 400m, arguing that a table depicts “increase in download speed capabilities, not requirements” when NBN Co has already issued better graphs that address this exact point, and moans about the methodology behind one particular price placed on the value of the Internet economy – these are utterly beside the point when viewed in light of these three points. Turnbull and Kerry have no response to these other than hand-waving and changing the subject.

    • (2) the regulatory failures of the past 15 years which have created massive distortions and inequities between the vertically integrated Telstra and the rest of the industry

      Yup, and we are repeating this by creating another monopoly, which is actually worse than Telstra because it has protectionist laws around it. I’m not sure about you, but you don’t solve problems by recreating the exact same things that caused those problems

      And vertical integration is a misnomer nowadays, the ACCC always steps in when this happens, and its only an issue in some very regional areas (for those that don’t already know, the reason why a lot of ISP’s are forced to wholesale through Telstra, rather than go through ULL/LLS is not because ULL/LLS is not available in those areas, its because there is no backhaul provider connected to those exchanges).

      In a lot of regional areas in Australia, Telstra has the only fibre backhaul available, which means you are forced to go through Telstra wholesale. Both parties (Liberal and Labor) have/had plans to build a fibre backhaul in these regional areas, and currently its being built as NextGen

  27. Why is so much credence given to whether an inferior technology theoretically can or can not do ~80-100MBps when there is a proven technology that can do 100MBps –> 1GBps –> 10GBps. :/

    • Because you are deciding to ignore every other variable which dictates whether a certain policy is a good idea

      Its like me claiming that wireless is superior to fibre because with fibre connections, I can’t even move further than 10 metres from the wall!!!

      The point is, all of these hard nosed NBN fanatics think the NBN is the best idea because they only concern themselves with one metric, and thats speed. The ignore the other metrics (such as cost, or mobility, timeframe, or even legal and economic metrics).

      The best policy is one that takes into accounts all metrics, not just ones that you happen to like or value

  28. Now I am relatively new to the Broadband discussion and while I am fairly knowledgeable compared to the average Australian I do not pretend to hold a candle to many people commenting here. But I do have several questions.

    1. It is claimed that VDSL technology can reach up to 80 Mbps maximum throughput. However to do this the premise must be within 400m otherwise its starts the drastically drop off. What would the cost be to reasonably maintain this kind of maximum speed seeing as you would need to drastically increase the amount cabinets required. I would presume the increase amount of cabinets required would massively increase the cost of such a roll-out.

    2. While VDSL currently proposes that it can reach speeds close to the initial maximum offering of the NBN FTTH system is it not true that the FTTH has great potential to be upgraded to 1Gpbs capacity? Does VDSL technology has the same potential?

    3. Deteego seems to infer that most of Australia’s copper network is in fine condition to support this kind of technology, Furthermore other posters claim the opposite, my question is how can anybody really know? Any data that can be accessed by consumers will likely be extremely limited and the only way to get true figures would be through Telstra.

    4. While FTTN technology may be suitable in the short term (say maybe the next 20 years, I am not sure if this is an accurate prediction or not) would this not most likely eventually need to be upgraded to FTTH standards. Would not such a delay and doing it in stages increases the likelihood of problems occurring and costs skyrocketing rather than performing a well planned out FTTH roll-out from the beginning?

    These are all questions, While I am a NBN supporter I am open to seeing the limitations of the NBN and the positives on the Coalitions plan since I am a swing voter and need to be informed :D.

    • Tim, in relation to point 3, here’s an interesting insight, from 6 years ago, in the Sol era when Telstra were pushing for FTTN.

      http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/telstra-tragedy/2005/11/11/1131578235566.html

      “Telstra’s copper network will remain useful for a time yet, but it is ageing, faulty and costly to maintain. Soon it will not be able to provide the levels of service Australians will need to survive and prosper in this region, let alone the world”.

      Regardless, I believe even if the copper was tip top, it is incapable of fulfilling our ADSL needs now, let alone FTTN well into the future. Why is it incapable of fulfilling our requirements now? How many people actually achieve near maximum speed or even half maximum speed? Copeer was not neant for internet, although it has been a wonderfully convenient medium in the interim.

      Thing is Tim, as you would have noticed, there are a few people here who are on a mission for whatever their reasons and they will refute any and all postive NBN data while refusing to accept even well know negatives in relation to copper, wireless, FTTN or whatever, simply because it’s suits the mission for them to do so.

      • *Telstra’s copper network will remain useful for a time yet, but it is ageing, faulty and costly to maintain.*

        LOL

        that’s why you replace parts of the access network and push the core closer to the premises by doing affordable FTTN. of course, in the eyes of NBN zealots, it’s either 100% fibre all the way to the home or nothing.

          • LOL

            nowhere in the article does it mention building FTTP. instead, the article solely focuses on the challenges of coming to an agreement on the regulatory framework that provides sufficient incentives for Telstra to build FTTN.

            you really should spend less time casting aspersions on people’s motives and actually read articles that you quote. i read the entire article, thanks for the link. :)

          • LOL indeed. because the article is from 2006 way before FTTP was even being considered.

            So of course it wasn’t mentioned.

            However, our nation has moved way ahead since then and is now constructing FTTP and no longer depending upon Telstra. Of course we can all vote in 2013 and magically return to 2006 and refuel the gorilla, if the Coalition win.

            You really should spend less time being Mr Defensive and actually ‘comprehend’ articles, especially pertaining to wehn they were written and the context thereof.

          • so, you agree the author isn’t anti-FTTN like you tried to imply.

            thanks for stopping by.

          • My are you casting aspersions, after asking others not to?

            Where did I say he was anti-FTTN, I simply copied and pasted his words about the state of the copper network in 2005, in response to Tim’s question.

            Is that really that hard to comprehend or are you just being playfully mischievous?

            But do you know what? Somethimng tells me the copper wouldn’t have improved, over the last 6 years, what do you reckon?

            So again with adendums – you really should spend less time being Mr Defensive, inventing motives which are non existent, stop casting aspersions and actually ‘comprehend’ articles/comments, especially pertaining to when they were written and the context thereof.

          • Keep digging? Now it’s my turn to LOL.

            Seriously no wonder these correspondence bog down when we have some who simply continually twsit and turn their own warped BS, into everyone else comments.

            Look again, this time open your eyes.

            Tim wanted to know about the copper’s condition. I had a URL to an article from 2005 stating back then they thought the copper was far from perfect.

            End of story.

            But for some reason you felt the need to get all huffy and defensive about the copper and as usual, as those on the dark side do, spin your own special brand of BS.

            Carry on and don’t forget to refer to me with the new buzzword zealot, as the clincher.

            *rolls eyes*

          • Oh, thank you Tosh.

            In the spirit of Xmas, let me also wish you a merry Xmas and say that I hope Santa brings you a stocking full of what you, of all people, need the most… impartiality.

  29. So for 100mbs, we’ll have brand new FTTN boxes every 400 metres over the continent – and people are worried about overhead wires?

    Also, they argue that there charts are better than everyone elses charts…that’s like saying “our opinion is better than yours because we used a pie chart and not a bar graph”.

    There’s no knockout blow here. It also wouldn’t surprise me that the CC opinion was funded by Malcolm Turnball :P

  30. Hey everyone, just a quick note: I have been told by Robert Kenny that the Coalition did not pay him to produce the report; it was something he did off his own bat.

    • Stand-by for the multitude of apologies from those in this discussion who alluded otherwise – yeah right.

      • Renai, can you change the wording on that question and repose? I would be interested to know has he been paid by anyone associated with the Liberal party more generally? He may not have been paid for this specific article, but they might have an arrangement in some other form.

        • No. He was pretty clear on it. [Update: Sorry, this ‘no’ means ‘no, I’m not going to hassle the guy again about it. I already asked once.’]

      • no. it was a fair question (did he have incentive to get involved?) and worth asking. glad to see the update and clarification though. Thanks Renai!

      • Why would anyone apologise, for simply using the same rules used by those who oppose the NBN.

        You know, those who suggest every report so far presented which shows the NBN in a positive light, is bought and paid for by the government and every report which has it in a negative light is beyond reproach, factual and certainly not from the oppositions bank roll!

          • Of course it was, exactly my point. I think you will find most people do not work for nothing, ‘do you’?

            There is normally remuneration or an incentive of some kind for people to work for or present information that will benefits others.

            So any documentation supplied which is contrary to people’s opinions, can simply be dismissed, ‘by those who are close minded’, as a paid for out come. Or a paid for outcome can be regarded as tainted, no matter how authentic it may be.

            I agree entirely with ToshP300 here, even though I continued my friendly banter –

            http://delimiter.com.au/2011/12/14/no-minister-telco-expert-fact-checks-conroy-claims/#comment-244031

            However it’s the 2nd paragraph of his comment, which is of current interest. Because while there certainly can possibly be unscrupulous hired guns, it can also simply come down to people’s own perceptions. Perceptions which at times casts analysts as hacks, simply because the information they supply, again regardless of authenticity, is contrary to people’s own thoughts.

            Therefore if we all form a consensus about analysts reports and say ok the neg NBN people may be right but so may we be, then every doc is tainted either politically or financially.

            So really what is the point of conducting any analysis, plan or CBA, when only one side will agree with the outcome and the others nit pick over the scraps?

          • You are oversimplifying the whole thing

            McKinsey is not a bipartisan organisation, the Labor party actively asked them to provide a business plan for what Labor already envisioned would be a good idea (FTTH everywhere) without even doing an analysis about whether that is the best solution

            On the other hand, the PC is an independent and bipartisan organisation, and one that that you don’t pay to do a report for you (some people may claim that the reason McKinsey provided a report which claimed that NBN’s plan was economically feasible because they got paid 30 million dollars for the report, they are a private organisation and it can easily be claimed they got paid extra to produce a report that Labor ‘liked’)

            Such things cannot be done with the productivity commission, in fact it is highly illegal to do so

        • @Ross

          ‘and every report which has it in a negative light is beyond reproach, factual and certainly not from the oppositions bank roll!’

          Well in this case which what all of this discussion is all about it was not:

          ‘Hey everyone, just a quick note: I have been told by Robert Kenny that the Coalition did not pay him to produce the report; it was something he did off his own bat.’

          You don’t have a point Ross.

  31. with the FTTN and HFC being reused, will they be offered for wholesale access? If so, how will anyone get telstra and optus to wholesale their HFC? with FTTN, how much compensation will be paid to Telstra to wholesale or lease their copper for FTTN purposes?

    I think these are the core issues why Govt decided to build FTTH. it is cheaper to build a network that is future proof and to maintain, than to pay so much compendation to reuse the existing infrastructure. all other technical arguments are just a fluff.

    If telstra and optus show their good heart and open up their infrastructure for competition without compensation, Turnbull’s policy seems reasonable. otherwise, go wtih Conroy’s. don’t waste time in technical merits of either of the policies.

    • I find it unlikely in the extreme that HFC would be declared for wholesale.

      The coalition would like to promote the building of more infrastructure by competitors, nothing worse than investing in your own network to have it’s benefits pulled out from under you and handed to your competitors. (A good reason why any full-replacement network should be built with full-knowledge that it will be a wholesale network – note full replacement in this sentence – ie removing alternative networks, any “additional” network should not necessarily be covered by my statement – government funding should muddy this however).

      The theory with FTTN is that you seperate Telstra (somehow) into 2 entities. One called TBNco and the other “Telstra Retail”. Get TBNCo to build the FTTN (since they own the copper already) and force TBNCo to wholesale.

      Some people start talking about infrastructure competition in the same way we have ADSL Dslams now, however you can’t have infrastructure competition (where you install competitor equipment in each FTTN cabinet) and use this whizz-bang “Vectoring” technology to get 100megabits upto 400 meters away.

      In fact, in an Ideal (from a customer speed point of view) situation would be TBNCo to be the only infrastructure provider over the copper to ensure the maximum bandwidth per user.

      Finally, the speeds stated are all pointless. Quoting “100 megabits VDSL2” requires each FTTN cabinet at maximum 400 meters from every FTTN cabinet. The cost to do so would be largely similar to the current fibre rollout, with maintenance costs much higher from the beginning. (you would be re-using old wires. Old wires cost more to maintain than new wires).

      Anyone quoting these numbers is untrustworthy, because they never intend to roll out FTTN cabinets at the density required to achieve these speeds. If they do intend to roll out cabinets at this density, they can quote the savings over an NBN roll out at the same time please..

      For comparison, the kinds of speeds available over different cable lengths (according to the Alcatel Lucent document this article is referring to)
      Distance, VDSL2(normal), VDSL2(30a), VDSL2 Bonded, VDSL2 Vectored(no competition)
      200, ~68mb/s, ~95mb/s, ~90mb/s, ~96mb/s
      400, ~58mb/s, ~75mb/s, ~80mb/s, ~96mb/s
      1000, ~32mb/s,~32mb/s,~60mb/s, ~45mb/s
      1500,~20mb/s, ~20mb/s, ~40mb/s, ~27mb/s
      2000, ~15mb/s, n/a, ~30mb/s, ~17mb/s

      Notes:
      1) Yes bonded was shown slower than alternatives at very short distances, not a typo.
      2) 30a is a profile listed on the graph for “FTTB” deployments. I assume it is only useful for extremely short cable runs. (it wasn’t fair to bother listing speeds for it at longer than 1500 meters)

      • as you stated, the problem is in geting telstra to seperate without any incentive or a big stick. incentive will have to be north of $11 billion (inclduing leasing last mile copper etc) and big stick – not sure if liberals dare to upset the corporate world. they even supported big tobaccos…

        if HFC is not up for wholesale, then it defeats the argument about open infrastructure theory.

        so, its not technology the politicians are worried about, but the compensation matter.

        in that sense, Conroy did a great job splitting telstra – which no one thought was possible. Does Turnbull have that courage, that too working under Tony?

      • Love the post. At last someone who has bothered to read up on the FTTN technology being put foward. I wouldn’t against a 400m FTTN with vectoring (available commercially next year from what I have seen) but it won’t happen and will be too expensive. The other problem is thst if they start in two years time (or 4 as they were talking about 2 years to get started if they win the election) that leaves about 5 years before it’s obsolete. Even now they need about 50Mb/s just to supply Bluray quailty video and that leave nothing for other people in the household to use.

        • I love how all the reasons for promoting such speeds always fall back down to entertainment

          I have nothing against entertainment, but its definitely not an area which the government should be spending so much government funds (or risk) on

          Countries such as South Korea and Japan have had access to those speeds, to a majority of the population, for quite a while now (in japan its over half a decade), and I have yet to see any applications, on a national level, actually develop from giving people access to such speeds

          The whole “build it and they will come approach” is flawed, people will start seeing building on some platform when they see use for it, or when its successful, and not when its prematurely shoved in their faces

          • Labor has a unique approach in the world to the ‘build it and they will come’ strategy.

            They shut down existing working infrastructure by paying taxpayer billions to the infrastructure owners so the residents have to use the NBN.

            It’s called ‘build it and force them to come’, then you can brag and political grandstand how ‘popular’ it is.

  32. Check this comment from previous telstra exec re FTTN:

    ‘But there is a regulatory issue here, too. Telstra’s Rosemary Howard, among several recently outspoken executives, says that if Telstra had to give its competitors access to such a new network at prices regulated below its costs, “why would we build it?”

    http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/telstra-tragedy/2005/11/11/1131578235566.html?page=4

    compensation is the key issue not technical merits of what network to build. even if the govt is paying all the money to build FTTN, telstra would need compensation to open it for competition.

  33. “Alcatel recently announced that they were achieving VDSL2 speeds of 100Mbps at distances of 400m (using vectoring, not bonding). This was not a lab experiment, but based on field trials with a range of European carriers.”

    Sounds like a done deal to me, I’m pretty sure that 99.9% of Australians live within 300m of an exchange so why are we waisting our money on the NBN FTTH?

    • I hope like hell they run a test suburb first. There are still unanswered questions in my mind. ones I am trying to hunt down. Peak 100Mb and what is sustained:? They rate sustained as 50Mb. i have tried to be fobbed of with sustained has to do with line quality. Sustained has a specific meaning in specs and it isn’t to do with line conditions. It’s what is possible with a continual stream, like streaming video. With HD you get announcements of new SATA 6G will read at up to 600GB/s, well yes and with a hard drive it will immediately drop to about 100MB/s when you start reading any large amount of data.
      How does it perform on Australian phone cable? Those tests where on twisted pairs, Australia has parallel cable pairs, less noise resistance. How far from the node are they planning to service? Just huge numbers of questions. I’d like more than a rah rah press release.

    • “I’m pretty sure that 99.9% of Australians live within 300m of an exchange ”

      I live 2km from the exchange via cable length, and I am considered close. There are quite a lot of people at double that length or more. And I live in a standard suburb around 10km from the CBD in the third largest city in Australia.

    • “I’m pretty sure that 99.9% of Australians live within 300m of an exchange so why are we waisting our money on the NBN FTTH.”

      I suspect this comment was meant as satire. If that’s so, Sam, then you didn’t quite hit the mark – there are somany loopy-loos making similarly unsupportable statements that’s it’s often hard to tell the difference [unless your byline is “The Onion” etc.]

  34. “I’m pretty sure that 99.9% of Australians live within 300m of an exchange ”

    Not really – I live around 4.7 km from the exchange and most in my suburb and neighbouring suburbs are around the same distance.

    that aside, core issue is not technology but compensation to infrastructure owners.

  35. Thankyou Rob for linking me to that article very informative. Their seems to be a lot of contradicting information around. Although this is politics and that is not unexpected.

    I personally have never gotten faster than 4.0 – 4.5 Mbps on any copper service although admittedly my experience is limited and may not be representative of Australia as a whole.

    From what I can tell the impracticability of using FTTN technology in conjunction with VDSL technology it would be virtually impossible to not limit some peoples access based on distance to the exchange due to how copper work. It is my understanding that fiber optics does not suffer from this problem or at least it is severely less problematic.

    Also I keep coming back to the point that a FTTH roll-out seems inevitable, from what I can see the Coalition government wants to start with FTTN then possibly allow for future upgrades to FTTH. Firstly from what I have read upgrade from FTTN to FTTH is much less simpler that immediately rolling out FTTH. Furthermore this seems likes it is only delaying half the bill for the next generation to pay later. I see no reason for it, it would seem that even though the economy is weak in other countries Australia seems to have been largely resistant (much better off than Europe). Also I have absolutely no doubt that better broadband reliability in Australia will allow for increased economic growth as-well. I am certainly not saying something stupid like the economy will grow by 10% a year because of this or anything but any growth is still important.

    • The reason for the delay is that if you believe the requirement for FTTP is sufficiently far enough away, and the cost to implement FTTN represents a big enough savings that the value you could reap from the spending of the difference (savings from FTTN) would be higher than the value gained by going straight to FTTP.

      Fundamentally, this is the main thing that seperates NBN supporters and non-supporters.

      No one argues that Fibre isn’t the best fixed-line technology. Most anti-NBNers argue that if we want it, we should get it later, because there are more cost effective solutions for the bandwidth we need *now*.

      The problem with pretty much any debate on the topic, is the Pro NBNers have a cost (50 billion dollars over 10 years) and the anti NBNers don’t. The debate pretty quickly devolves into a lot of estimates and hand waving, and while most agree that FTTN has a lower price tag, debate rages about just how much lower (is it 5 billion, is it 20 billion etc). Detractors do conveniently get to both complain about the cost of the known plan, but always get to wave their hands at: “There is no fixed coalition policy” which lets them avoid all talk of *actual* comparisons, be it cost or performance. The debate is largely useless as a result.

      The second major point of difference between NBN supporters and detractors, is one of competition.

      Which comes down to: Is the infrastructure for fixed line communications a natural monopoly in Australia (ie one where investment in competing infrastructures is less efficient – long term – than infrastructure competition).
      It is a question that isn’t as obvious as something like Water infrastructure. It is almost an ideological divide here, and it depends on which side of economic theory you believe wired telecommunications infrastructure falls.

      Almost everything else is whitenoise, or boils down to arguments supporting either side of the 2 points above. Sadly, as both points have arguments that are either un-provable (without more information – information which isn’t going to come for another 12 months at best – re comms policy), or relies on faith (faith in Economics theory A or B) and can ultimately satisfy neither side.

      Finally, the paper linked to by Tosh above is by the same Telecomms expert as was referenced by this article. He is one that believes in lower cost now, for higher total gain in the future, and the economic theory that in general wired telecomms is not a natural monopoly.

      He is the definition of the kind of person that is against the NBN policy. (Thus his arguments are made from that position).

      Also note, I hold basically polar opposite views to him. I also haven’t got as good a grasp of writing or debating, additionally I don’t make a living by providing my views as an “analyst”. (Though sometimes I think I should give it a try).

      • *He is one that believes ….and the economic theory that in general wired telecomms is not a natural monopoly.*

        er, i don’t think that’s true.

        read his submission to Ofcom on behalf of Vodafone. he argues that with the increasing importance of edge infrastructure and applications, the benefits from infrastructure duplication are minimal. he advocates active access over deep passive access for future NGN builds along with pricing mechanisms that allow access-seekers to share in the capital risk of building new infrastructure.

        *I don’t make a living by providing my views as an “analyst”. (Though sometimes I think I should give it a try).*

        don’t give up your day job. “analysts” have to be capable of objectivity and research facts instead of pulling unsubstantiated claims out of thin air.

        :)

          • i meant “analysts should be……” in a normative sense. just like “doctors should maintain ethical relationships with patients….”, but not all do.

            obviously, some working analysts are less than objective and publish a lot of rubbish.

          • So we’ll have to contact you when analysts published their findings in the future. That way you can inform us as to which ones you agree with, then we’ll know they are the credible ones.

            Funny the things people say when their own comment one and comment two collide head on.

          • well that’s just stupid.

            how can he leave a reply with your secretary when you’ve given him your fax number?

            surely you meant +61 2 9231 3822 ?

  36. Renai,
    Can we have a follow-up article: “No, Telco expert: Arm-chair googlers fact-checks experts claims”, which points out the flaws in the basic principle of Vectoring for VDSL2 that myself and Noddy among others have found,

    Perhaps it can also point out while we are in theory land that the theoretical capacity of fibre is in the Terabit range – which is slightly higher than the theoretical capacity of HFC’s 1.5 gigabits.

    Ultimately, I am glad the coalition didn’t pay for this report. Not really worth the money they have paid for it so far.

    • *flaws in the basic principle of Vectoring for VDSL2*

      this Kenny dude never asserted that VDSL2+vectoring faciliates deep passive access into the incumbent’s network. he also never asserted that the speeds that VDSL2+ delivers do not fall as the distance from the node increases.

      he merely refuted several specific claims made by Conroy which are clearly incorrect. there’re indeed “limitations” to VDSL2+ technology. no-one’s ever denied that. labelling these “limitations” as “flaws” doesn’t change that fact.

    • Uh, there are no flaws in VDSL2 vectoring, and its not something that is even required unless most of Australia’s copper is bundled (which it isn’t)

      • Australia’s copper is not bundled? Does Telstra lay copper cables one pair at the time each in its own conduit?

        No wonder their share prices tanked.

        • I think I just worked out why he thinks Telstra cable is not bundled. ULL, unbundled local loop. The unbundled in that case has nothing to do with how the wires are run. More correctly it’s unconditioned local loop. It’s a copper pair not connected to anything at the exchange that the ISP or whoever can connect to their own equipment.

          • sounds plausible that he may have confused the physical network infrastructure with the product name of a declared service. If he had thought of the absurdity of the situation where each exchange has thousands of lines buried separate from one another, he would have discovered his mistake sooner. Hopefully he doesn’t think that each loop is made of multiple sub-loops if sub-loop unbundling is introduced.

            PS: I knew that the pairs were bundled together. I’ve visited Telstra facilities, and can see a bundle hanging from a power pole in front of my house, as well as a Telstra mushrooms at the end of my street. I was just being facetious at deteego’s expense. I was hoping that the absurdity of my second line made that obvious.

          • I think I need to be more clear

            The reason why the Telstra’s copper is bundled now is because most copper has to travel from a ridiculous distance from the exchange all down to the premises, so they would obviously bundle the copper together. We don’t have an FTTN right now

            If an FTTN is built, that copper to the node would be replaced by Fibre. So unless Telstra would redo copper bundling (when they build FTTN) from the node, it shouldn’t be that much of an issue (there is always going to be bundling, it just depends on how much).

          • So when they rebuild all the nodes in your FTTN network, they are also going to physically unbundle each line and ensure that each line from each node runs in its own conduit seperate of each other line in the neighborhood?

            Heres a tip. The wires go from the exchange together into the pillars in the street, and then they go out of the pillar in a pretty similar direction for a while before they end up in a house.

            Houses closest to the pillar will experience the least amount of interference, as their cable is alongside others for less distance. It gets progressively worse every time a wire leaves the bundle.

            Obviously; a node every 400 meters will have much less interference. But, we aren’t doing that because it would be rediculous.

            Though, when we talk about “alternatives to the NBN” we claim the benefits of each individual method.

            Coalition NBN:
            Costs as much as a node every 4km.
            Performs as well as a node every 400meters (without copper competition)
            Competes as well as (infact better!) than the current ADSL Dslam competition.
            Encourages companies to build Fibre where it makes sense! (??)
            Earns as much as .. well, we hand out a couple billion in subsidies and those companies are left to earn ROI on our subsidies, that counts right?

          • Its not that a lot of unbundling will be done, its just that a lot of the bundled copper will get replaced with fiber, thats how a FTTN works (it places nodes around the place with fibre runs to the nodes)

            There will always be some bundling, its just a question of the magnitude of it.

  37. Would it make the FTTN supporters happier if we were to build a FTTN network with 20 million small and cheap nodes housed within buildings for better protection against the elements? The connection from the nodes to the end user can be copper or wireless.

  38. These posts are hilarious, you are all arguing about the last mile. Speed throttling will come when your ISP wants to save money on back haul, a content provider’s server cannot cope, then your high speed NBN will be an expensive waste of time!

    • Not everyone uses Dodo as their ISP. Some have a good chance of maxing out their connection.

        • Internode during initial rollouts where takeup of the most expensive plans massively exceeded expectations…Since resolved (and easily resolved since the network uses fibre which, when adequately provisioned in line with demand is easily capable of filling that demand)

          • i wish you guys would stop trotting out those “speed hits you in the face” rubbish charts.

            if i recall correctly, trial NBN pricing was the same for different speeds but the price increased with quotas.

            the ISPs deliberately encouraged people to take-up the 100Mbit plans in the trial phase in order to test how to manage bandwidth under fibre networks.

            those early adopter/trial NBN take-up rates don’t mean anything.

            it’s like a new Italian restaurant distributing free vouchers for a tiramisu dessert and then claiming tiramisu is their most popular dessert option amongst clientele during the opening fortnight of trade!

            how silly! yet people are gullible enough to gobble up this rubbish by NBNco.

          • The old discredit at all costs approach.

            No figures available – discredit for having no figures
            Figures available but not so glowing, obviously discredit and say told you
            Figures available and good – discredit them anyway you can

            This way which ever way you look there is never a win, the sky is always falling. It’s a surreptitious approach practiced by a few soundalikes here and frankly, it’s blatancy is risible.

          • I think you entirely missed his point

            Tosph300 was just saying the the take-up rate of the NBN trial is no indication whatsoever of actual demand of the service, since it was basically being offered for free to ISP’s. If you give someone something that is essentially for “free” (or artificially lower value than it should be), you are not going to get an accurate reading of demand

          • Nice try RS, you can only keep the ‘struggle to be polite’ under multiple name changes facade for so long eh?

          • No i didn’t, I outlined it clearly above and ironically, even mentioned a couple of ‘others’ who comment always using the same sky is falling technique.

  39. What keeny is pointing out is exactly what rubbish is being posted by Deteego and others, it’s called a very minimal CRAP.

    This site is actively supporting Coalition Broadband Policy, considering the fact there has been very little focus on not just the technical side of things, including from this same so called Telco Expert (perhaps thats why Tony Abbott was in the UK the other week), but also the Start date, regulatory issues and so on.

    This so called Telco Expert is focusing one argument alone, the technical.

    The use of FTTN or HFC in a wholesale or regulated situations causes ALOT of drama’s.

    Here is my full analysis:

    Point 1 in the article:

    Kenny claimed that Conroy mixed up the requirement with capabilities.

    This is incorrect, and I don’t know what drugs he was using at the time of print.

    But for example. low res form, youtube was launched in 2005, if you look at the thats’ about what time graph showed for ADSL1 (1.5Mbit).

    Point 2 in the article:

    Kenny claimed that Access Networks “may” not require upgrading, what a crap load of crap, obviously he is incorrect on that since that Coalition’s plan uses a number of upgrades for Access.

    Point 3 in the article:

    Is very weak point to make, for example he suggests that consumers should pay MORE money to make it inline with the Business plan that was originally released.

    Point 4 in the article:

    Also another weak point, huh?

    Point 5 in the article:

    Another weak point, suggest Kenny do more research.

    Point 6 in the article:

    Another weak point in the article, how could $50 billion of Investments be mostly ICT related in the Goverment departments? Silly Silly Kenny.

    And to continue through this stupid article:

    “This is simply untrue,” he wrote. “Alcatel recently announced that they were achieving VDSL2 speeds of 100Mbps at distances of 400m (using vectoring, not bonding). This was not a lab experiment, but based on field trials with a range of European carriers.”

    Yes, but what insane company is going to put cabinets @ 400m on economical terms?

    This article is nothing but a shameless plug for the Coalition Broadband Policy, the fact that the article is openly confirmed that Malcom Turnbull has used Kenny’s reports from earlier shows how bias this so called Telco Expert this is.

    Experts should never align with any body in government or company, expert’s are their to provide advise, not to play with the big boys, or small boys in this matter.

    Most of Kenny’s points in is very weak, and has no credibility in the LONG term in investments like this.

    • ‘Experts should never align with any body in government or company, expert’s are their to provide advise, not to play with the big boys, or small boys in this matter.’

      So Conroy should get rid of this guy?

      http://delimiter.com.au/2011/12/12/havyatt-appointed-conroy-special-adviser/

      ‘Most of Kenny’s points in is very weak, and has no credibility in the LONG term in investments like this.’

      Except the NBN FTTH is not a long term investment, the word ‘investment’ insinuates some sort of return, the sucker taxpayers will be propping up this Labor multi billion dollar sinkhole for decades.

      • It is a investment in that the government investing the money expects to see a return. Whether you think they will or not is besides the point. Although if Telstra is anything to go by a infrastructure monopoly will see a profit.

        • Yes but that was in the good old days when there was PSTN and the alternative was PSTN, the fastest growing revenue growth areas today is wireless data ARPU’s, if you don’t believe me look at the Telstra and SingTel Financial reports for the last 5 or so years, take out mobiles and wireless data revenue and they might as well both be selling T-shirts and mangoes.

          The other fast growth area for Telstra is fixed line disconnections.

          The NBN growth areas is their OPEX and CAPEX figures, with revenue coming a sad last as it struggles to even find the break even point that meets the first two as the taxpayer coughs up even more $$$ into the bottomless pit to prop up the Christmas turkey called the Labor NBN.

          • “Yes but that was in the good old days when there was PSTN and the alternative was PSTN”;

            A clear admission that the current NBN is much fairer, with more competition, than the Telstra years.

  40. I’ll have NBN’s optic fibre please! That still works when the nodes between me and the exchange are under water don’t they? I mean provided I have power to the house light still travels down the optic fibre doesn’t it? The last time it rained, the pits filled with water and the phone stopped working.

  41. Hi

    As a technical expert and network engineer myself, I can tell you that the Conroy is quite on the money, and the rebuttal is mostly BS

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