It’s been a couple of weeks since our last NBN wrapup. Let’s have a look at what’s been happening this week.
• Telstra may have been dragging its feet on laying fibre around the country, but they’ve got the bug now. According to Computerworld, Telstra has plans to roll out fibre in capital cities should the Libs get into power at the next election and scrap the NBN. Country Australia would be stuck on copper.
• A few weeks ago I told you that it wasn’t a matter of LTE vs the NBN, but that the two were complimentary. Funnily enough, Telstra agrees with me. ARN tell us that Telstra’s executive director of network and access technologies, Mike Wright claimed: “If you talk about NBN and you talk about wireless, they’re absolutely complementary to each other.” Bingo!
• Labor has always planned on selling off the NBN down the track, much to the disappointment of the Greens, but now the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network has voiced its concerns about privatisation, believing the monopoly would be too powerful to compete against.
• Malcolm Turnbull’s had a whirlwind tour of Asia to look at their broadband infrastructure, and he’s come back with excited eyes that South Korea kept their HFC cable. Currently, the plan is to shift the entire country to fibre and decommission both Telstra’s and Optus’s HFC cable. While the HFC won’t be able to compete with fibre in terms of speed, it will in terms of cost, and Turnbull’s argument to keep it in play is actually a good one, so long as the NBN is there to compete with it…
agreed
Friday, March 11, 2011 at 7:39 PMI agree with Malcolm to keep the HFC. Many of those that said Australia doesnt need fiber are those that has HFC. Let them rot in their own words.
Ed
Sunday, March 13, 2011 at 3:37 PMHFC is a SHARED SPECTRUM transmission technology. HFC is a FIXED LOCATION transmission technology
IE: every one on the fixed cable gets a “channel slice” (basically a bunch of frequency’s) of which their IS a limit. If everyone uses HFC then it will degrade the end-users speed as it is split and the “channel slices” are reduced to a smaller frequency set. Requiring HCF infrastructure upgrades in both cable grade and drop equipment to facilitate mode people on it, so why not just build the NBN to start with!
Namarrgon
Monday, March 14, 2011 at 4:11 PMThe GPON fibre network being used for the NBN is also shared, and each user will only get a slice of what the fibre is capable of.
What’s important is a) how much bandwidth is there to be shared out, and b) how many users that bandwidth is split between. While user splits depend on the vendor, HFC bandwidth is 30-160Mbps (depending on the standard used), and the NBN’s GPON fibre is 2.5Gbps (extendible to 40Gbps). This gives fibre a massive advantage, even though it’s shared.
matt
Friday, March 11, 2011 at 8:55 PMI agree 100% that it should not be privatised.
otherwise you just repeat history… telstra anyone?
Ian Goss
Saturday, March 12, 2011 at 2:43 AMBIG difference between * complimentary* and * complementary*. If you were a journalist, you would know this.
Or you could use a dictionary; MacOSX has a good one built-in—you have to be careful about American vs British useage.
Cheers