Liberal Comunication Policy- Your thoughts?

[Joshuayu101]

Did anyone watch the live broadcast today when they were releasing the policy?
I had to go to uni half way through it, so does anyone have link to somewhere where i can stream it?

Also the debate was also on around lunch time between conroy and his shadow equalivant. I hope these will be avalible on iview.

It sure was amusing seeing the shadow coms minister sweating when asked questions by the press/media regarding the policy.

At this point in time, it looks pretty crap but i wont be able to see the full specifics until i get home tonight.

So what are your thoughts on it?


Coalition NBN to "optimise" and lease Telstra network - Telco/ISP - Technology - News - iTnews.com.au

[leonami]

After going over news stories regarding the policy I'm glad that the coalition made my vote easier this year...

[Kagetsu]

Maybe a dose of reality. I would have liked to see a little more 'future planning' involved, however it's a more realistic measure considering the economic situation of Australia.
We're not at a time when we can afford 45billion + dollars on Telecommunications.

[OverDrive]

FFS Kagetsu - you don't have to blindly support everything these pricks come out with. This is clearly not one of those times.

Libs lack vision for digital future: Coalition | The Australian

[Jay]

Maybe a dose of reality. I would have liked to see a little more 'future planning' involved, however it's a more realistic measure considering the economic situation of Australia.
We're not at a time when we can afford 45billion + dollars on Telecommunications.

McKinsey Study: NBN not good for private investors - Senator Stephen Conroy, Senator Scott Ludlam, National Broadband Network (NBN), Minister for Broadband, McKinsey Implementation study, Communications and the Digital Economy, Australian Greens - AR
The study said a worst-case scenario for the build would cost $42.8 billion. Taxpayers will pay at least $26bn within the first six years, of which $18.3bn will be forked out over the next four years.

That's a project that will last over a decade, it isn't that much when you consider we will spend $115B on social security and welfare in just one year.

National Broadband Network Implementation Study | Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy

• Post-construction, NBN Co will have strong free cash flows and margins, with a very high EBITDA margin estimated at 75 percent.
• Under most plausible scenarios, NBN Co will generate returns in excess of Govermment's cost of borrowing. If a lower-return scenario start to emerge, NBN Co can use the repetitive nature of the project to drive efficiencies, or Government can be more flexible on policy settings to improve the expected return.

[Aegis]

ugh - ignore the fact a chunk of that figure was spent already. continuing to hamstring businesses with shitful net connections is not fucking prudent - financially or otherwise. 1mbp/s upload speeds are utterly woeful for any business with more than one office space, and on the whole, the majority of them can't afford their own fibre runs to connect the locations. Australian web hosts can't compete with overseas hosts (hell, I can't even compete with a similar sized webhost business based in Sydney or Brissie because of the disparity in available solutions within the country).

Cloud computing is becoming really big, and rightly so - it's an excellent concept that can allow even small business to benefit from buckets of computing power for their internal applications without shelling out a fortune on hardware - BUT shite upload speeds make it painful to work with for most organisations - even those on ADSL2+. You can't deny better business systems generally = better productivity = growth.

by NOT getting this NBN up and running NOW we're really holding our own economic growth back - we will fast reach the point where, compared with overseas companies, local businesses may as well go back to pen and paper ledgers for their operations.

edit: and CONSPIRACY THEORY! higher bandwidth makes it harder for the Russian Mafia to racketeer the shit out of our online businesses ;P

[Jay]

Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2009-2014* [Visual Networking Index] - Cisco Systems

Annual global IP traffic will exceed three-quarters of a zettabyte (767 exabytes) in four years. Global IP traffic grew 45 percent during 2009 to reach an annual run rate of 176 exabytes per year or 15 exabytes per month. In 2014, global IP traffic will reach 767 exabytes per year or 64 exabytes per month. The average monthly traffic in 2014 will be equivalent to 32 million people streaming Avatar in 3D, continuously for the entire month.

[morge]

Once upon a time Australia was at or near the top in terms of communication infrastructure, what happened was the sector was 100% privatised, with no real competition in communication infrastructure our position relative to the rest of the world will continue to drop. Telstra competes to be the best in this country and government run enterprises like the NBN will endeavour to compete internationally.

[Kagetsu]

OD, I definantly do not support everything they stand for, I'm quiet happy to discuss policy with anybody.
I firmly believe the NBN IS a good idea... but now is not the time. Everybody wants faster Internet, but gung ho attitude right now is not what's on call.

In addition the mining industry super tax right now is just such a bad idea. They were key business holding up Australia through the crisis, and were feeling the pinch all through that time, with significant drops in public investment (shares) and dwindling interest from international coorporations. Yet the Rudd came along insisting now is the right time?
EDIT: I should also add, I do believe the mining companies need to have a higher tax, but 40% is just rediculous, and especially now as business is starting to ramp up.

Patience is a virtue, one which the Labor government lacks any kind of head for. It has to be now, and it has to be grand as well.

[Aegis]

the mining tax is not 40% anymore - it's 30%, isn't applied across the board, and it's applied on stupidly high profits. regarding the mining industry saving us, I've heard as much argument for that as I've heard against it - so I'll take that statement with a grain of salt 'til it's demonstrated either way.

also, the NBN DOES have to be now. if we wait any longer we might as well not bother doing it at all, ever. the time required to pull a job of this scale off is massively against us. as it stands we'll still be behind when it's completed, but we wont be anywhere near as far behind as we would be if we didn't do anything til Abbott was educated enough to understand that computer mice don't need computer cheese.

[Jay]

I firmly believe the NBN IS a good idea... but now is not the time.

The problem with infrastructure (any infrastructure) by the time you need it, it's already too late. It just won't magically appear out of thin air when we need it. And having it in 10 years will also make room for a lot of new possible applications.

You only need to look at previous trends to see we're very quickly reaching the limits of what copper can provide us with no real action taken to move our infrastructure up. Other countries like Andorra, Lithuania, Latvia are already working on their own projects. Lithuania already offering 200Mbps, and Latvia aiming for potentially 500Mbps. And the best that the opposition can come up with is 12Mbps?

Time matters, especially for long-term infrastructure projects.

[Lothar]

This is a comment re that article linked before...

Nice post Sean, but it seems you know something about debt that the greatest economic minds on the planet don’t.
First of all the expected spend of taxpayer dollars on the NBN sits at $26 billion with repayments to the gov commencing within 6 years.
Not all of the direct payments to NBN Co will come from borrowing funds so the “$2b servicing” you attribute to the NBN is misleading – any repayments are for across the entire budget and will change year on year. There will be a percentage that is attributable to the NBN and also to many other projects/policies. The likelihood is that some NBN funds will be borrowed, some come from gov revenues and some from bonds. $26b over a potential span of 20 to 50 years is highly manageable, especially considering we spend $4.5 billion annually on roads for no direct commercial return.
And Australia’s existing debt levels since the financial crisis hit are, according to the world bank, the IMF, the RBA, a nobel prize winning economist and the vast majority of Australia’s leading economists the “envy” of the developed world (to steal Glenn Stevens phrase – spelling?). In fact, on the contrary to your fears we are moving to quickly and should wait for Europe to settle down and everyone else get back on track, the World Bank says removing the NBN stimulus would “send the wrong signals” and would create more waste than help the economy. The same goes for Joseph Stiglitz, who noted very recently the stimulus package was vastly more preferable to having no stimulus and that not going ahead with plans like the NBN would have been pretty stupid (my phrase).
Here is a quote from a Computerworld Article*
“”We used the phrase ‘no regrets’ investment to capture the idea that, even if broadband does not immediately deliver the direct benefits expected, in terms of jobs and competitiveness, it will certainly benefit the economy as a whole and therefore the indirect benefits (for instance in terms of capacity-building, opportunity creation or speeding up the general flow of information) are substantial,” the World Bank’s lead ICT policy specialist, Dr Tim Kelly, told Computerworld Australia in a written response. “In other words, the broader, intangible benefits of investment in broadband mean that it is rarely, if ever, a bad investment.”
NBN 101: The Economic Argument - telecommunications, NBN 101 - Computerworld
Additionally, if you wait, what is the cost? Basically you lose out on the significant GDP growth that can happen in the meantime – which for a FTTN network Access economics found that the net present value of benefits of smart technologies on a fibre optic network to 2018 would be between $35 billion and $80 billion. They concluded a FTTP network would generate much higher returns to the economy – others such as the OECD, World Bank, Mckinsey, Booz and Allen, etc conclude similar returns.
The OECD has also shown you can justify the cost easily with just 1.5 per cent savings in transport, health, education and electricity. Energy Australia last week said smart meters backed by a fibre network would help save up to 30 per cent on costs… so it’s pretty clear many smart people are backing this.
So the question really should be what do we lose if we wait any longer?

[OverDrive]

Fibre v wireless: hosing down the hype on wireless internet technology | Crikey

There are two reasons the opposition is such a fan of wireless broadband. One is political: fibre equals National Broadband Network equals Labor equals something to destroy. The other is that the Liberals are being sucked in by the wireless vendors? glossy brochures.

A core part of the opposition?s anti-NBN propaganda continues to be that a fibre-to-the-premises network is somehow both risky new technology and old-fashioned. Wireless broadband, especially the stupidly-named ?next generation? technologies like LTE, is the safe bet that will soon surpass NBN capabilities. Their media cheer squad is only too eager to parrot this line. It even sounds like it makes sense ? provided you ignore the technical subtleties.

?Tied to cable yet future is wireless,? was the headline in The Australian yesterday on a typical anti-NBN rhetorical piece by analyst Ian Martin.

There?s an appeal to authority. Barack Obama announced a National Wireless Initiative. If America is doing wireless it must be right ? right?

There?s an argument from incredulity. Martin discounts a government-supported US fibre network because it would have cost up to $US100 billion. ?It?s unthinkable that Congress would have supported that kind of budget spending,? he asserts. Yet in 1956 Congress approved $25 billion for the Interstate Highway System. That?s $195 billion in today?s money. Even given the woeful US economy today, is $100 billion really that unthinkable?

Martin even lards it up with an emotive yet utterly irrelevant image: ?Obama?s firefighter is downloading the design of a burning building on to a handheld device, not knocking on a neighbour?s door to plug a laptop into the local fibre network. In fact, they would probably download it in the fire truck on the way to the building.?

Compelling? Sure. Providing you forget that this scenario is about a mobile wireless broadband, not the fixed wireless ? bolted to the side of your house ? that?d be used for a reliable broadband customer access network.

And, while I?m no firefighter, I reckon I?d download those building plans to my laptop well in advance, rather than hope I?d get a good data link from a moving truck.

Martin acknowledges that ?Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy and other NBN supporters argue mobile service isn?t comparable to the service potential of NBN because mobile capacity is shared among users in each cell site?. True. So why does he then ignores this, and laud the potential speeds of new wireless technologies without mentioning that these speeds are only achievable if you?re right next to the tower and no-one else is using it?

As Crikey has reported before, if you?re building a wireless network that?s used by everyone, and you want it to perform as well as fixed broadband, you need a wireless tower in every street.

In any event, as Martin says, LTE won?t be rolled out until ?mid-decade?. All we?ve seen so far is demonstrations. And it?s not as if the NBN?s speed won?t increase over time as well.

In short, Martin is arguing what the opposition is arguing. We shouldn?t build the nation?s telecommunications network using known-good fibre technology that we can buy off the shelf today to deliver a consistent, reliable experience. We should instead wait a few more years and then use wireless technology that we already know will suffer from interference and load-sharing problems.

I think part of the problem is that the opposition has been seduced by all the talk of ?growth? in wireless.

Growth there certainly is. In June 2010, the number of mobile wireless broadband connections in Australia rose to 3.5 million, a 21.7% increase in six months. They now represent 36% of all internet connections, compared with 32% in December 2009. As Crikey has reported before, though, fixed broadband still does the real work. That?s not likely to change, given the different characteristics of fixed and mobile connections.

Growth is where investment opportunities lie, particularly those that might deliver major short-term returns. That?s why vendors and investment bankers talk up wireless. The language of growth sounds good to a business-attuned Liberal Party ear. It?s far more exciting that the pedestrian incremental growth and maintenance of core infrastructure, replacing 20th-century copper with 21st-century fibre.

But should the nation?s broadband policy be about taxpayer subsidies for profitable short-term business investments? Or should it be about delivering a consistent, reliable communications network?

[insidious]

the mining tax is not 40% anymore - it's 30%, isn't applied across the board, and it's applied on stupidly high profits. regarding the mining industry saving us, I've heard as much argument for that as I've heard against it - so I'll take that statement with a grain of salt 'til it's demonstrated either way.

worth quoting

[jabsy]

"In any event, as Martin says, LTE won't be rolled out until "mid-decade". All we've seen so far is demonstrations. And it?s not as if the NBN's speed won't increase over time as well."

What people need to realise is that fibre is only held back by the speed of the optics at each end. As these devices evolve, increasing speed will only be a matter of upgrading the devices at each end. Once the fibre is in, it wont need to be coming back out for a speed upgrade.

Compare that to CAT5/6/7 that needs a wire and active equipment upgrade each time. Wireless will suffer the same fate.