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Australian Couple Quoted 1 Million to Connect to the NBN

posted by cmn32480 on Thursday June 14 2018, @01:06PM   
from the golden-rules-make-golden-fools dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Once again the flailing Australian National Broadband Network is in the news with a couple in Melbourne being quoted up to 1.2 million dollars to connect to the NBN. The primary reason for this is the the house in question is seven kilometres of fibre would be needed to connect the property. With the copper network being switched off around Australian, even in places where it is still viable, the only option is to switch to the NBN unless a competing network already exists. The NBN has stated that it can cost $30,000 to run fibre for a "few hundred metres". It is getting to the point where it can be cheaper just to move house if the internet is bad.

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Original Submission

• Hollywood Accounting Hollywood Accounting (Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday June 14 2018, @01:37PM (1 child)

  by VLM (445) on Thursday June 14 2018, @01:37PM (#692881)

  Having worked closely with that field (as in fiber) for decades, its typical monopoly / hollywood accounting in that you CAN spend like $1M/mile or whatever to install fiber IF and only IF its right thru the financial district in downtown Melbourne or whatever passes for a large city in AUS. However, hyper-rural aerial fiber on poles is actually cheaper to install than power lines, generally power line contractors installing single phase aerial like 200 amps or less they'll run a profit at $7/foot or more, installed w/ materials.

  So, what, say 7 km is wand wavy 23 kilofeet or so? Thats close to 25 kilofeet to make the multiplication in my head easy, figure $175K to install single phase 200 amp service per most electric company tariffs at a profit. Now it would seem installing 7 clicks of fiber would define rural living, thats one hell of a driveway to snowplow, eh mate? or whatever AUS really say to each other, and installation is staggeringly cheaper out on the farm along a farm road than thru the HOA subdivision or city center, yet of course copper isn't any cheaper just because you ship it out to the middle of nowhere, so a private installation contractor can probably install that fiber for a VERY hand wavy $100K US dollars.

  I actually bothered to look it up in case AUS dollars are worth less than pesos in which case 1.2M would be cheap, but an AUS buck is about one US buck (to one sig fig anyway) so its ridiculous ripoff.

  Now what I have seen on the job and at past jobs is nobody willing to risk their job on pencil whipping and duct taping some shit together that you know will work but doesn't meet an arbitrary corporate HQ standard. So yeah they need 7 KM of fiber but no one mentioned that the connection point to existing fiber is already 50 KM from the nearest repeater site so technically to meet some arbitrary standard they need to build an expensive repeater hut cookie cutter designed to be capable of serving multiple 1152 count fiber cables just to serve this one poor bastard but the only note in the press release will be the fiber. Kinda like electric power comes from copper wires in the air, not multi billion dollar plant complexes LOL. Oh and I forgot to mention there's already a chain of 3 fiber repeaters and corporate standard is no more than 3 so they actually need to build a full switching hut not just a simple repeater hut or an even simpler single line in line extender, so the charge includes 1 milllion dollars to build a complete station (insert evil genius twisting his mustache while sipping Aus Fosters Beer) and so on. Well sorry old chap but technically we need to assess you a significant fraction of the construction cost of the geosynchronous satellite launch pad AND a satellite ground station complete with radio telescope sized uplink antennas AND a fraction of a new nuclear power plant to run it all AND the previously mentioned repeater hut and switching station complete with vendor neutral carrier hotel facility and rentable rack space data center AND .... next thing you know its a billion bucks to install some "fiber" although its actually a billion bucks of buildings and infrastructure and like $500 worth of fiber. This is almost certainly whats going on here.

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• Re:Hollywood Accounting (Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Thursday June 14 2018, @02:26PM

  by pkrasimirov (3358) on Thursday June 14 2018, @02:26PM (#692923)

  Love to have such postings, thank you, VLM! Exactly what's probably going on.

  Parent