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from the they-don't-make-em-like-they-used-to dept.
It's a day for Australia as Telstra, one of the main ISPs providing internet access with the newly built NBN network, declares 100Mbps plans will no longer be sold as they cannot be used. This change has been made due to the determination that the NBN cannot deliver the speeds promised. With the original plan in tatters after the Liberal government downgraded the network components to use "Multi Technology Mix" many customers lack the physical components to connect to the NBN to be able to receive the full speeds available. While some of the initial rollout delivered fibre to the premises the Liberal government switched the rollout to use copper and existing cable systems with many customers connect via FTTN leaving a lot to be desired in terms of speed. Farewell 100Mbps, we hardly knew you.
No large scale infrastructure plan survives contact with an incoming government.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2020, @10:15AM (11 children)
...that it was the Liberal Government that made a mistake here?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2020, @10:36AM (5 children)
... yes they probably did. Instead of doing the job probably (as originally intended) and running fibre-optic cable from end-to-end, the decision was taken to run fibre most of the way - and then run the last hundred metres using whatever crap was already hanging around in the street. Penny-wise and pound-foolish.
The system isn't fully rolled out either. Australians will still be paying the bill for the unused infrastructure long after most of us have moved on to 5G or whatever comes next.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday March 03 2020, @12:13PM (4 children)
Yeah, Fibre over Copper was definitely going to be a long-term win.
Having said that, it was set up to fail before it even began. A vast amount of Australia is concrete-like soil with large rocks embedded in it that's impossible to lay anything in without significant digging/jackhammering/blasting/whatever. The reason to do the last mile with whatever was already present was because you can't compress more than a hundred years of continuuosly rolling out infrastructure into a few years without enlisting about four times the complete population of Australia for several years to do the work.
(Score: 1) by Sabriel on Wednesday March 04 2020, @02:52AM (3 children)
As an Aussie and a licensed cabler, I get to say "fucking bullshit mate".
The initial NBN idea was to replace all the _existing_ copper runs with fibre. Because they're fucking ancient. You don't need to blast new paths when you've already got an existing path.
And just in case you're going to say "future expansion" - a trench is still a trench whether it's got fibre or copper in it, fibre doesn't rust when it inevitably floods, and poles/microwave/mobile/satellite was always the go where we couldn't run trenches anyway, long before the NBN was a twinkle in the government's eye.
Instead we got fed FUD by pollies who got their orders in the same brown bag as their campaign funds, the electorate bought into it since most Aussies aren't tech-savvy, and we ended up with the dog's breakfast that is today's NBN.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday March 04 2020, @03:44AM (2 children)
"It goes in here and it comes out waaaaaay over there" isn't an existing path, it's two endpoints with a high level of uncertainty in between. Yeah, I've seen how the installs were done, make a scratch just deep enough to throw fibre in, hook it up, and leave quickly. I've also helped a neighbour dig up their install and re-bury it slightly deeper, but only slightly because that rock-hard clay was a total bitch to hack through. No idea where their copper line went, but it where nowhere near where the fibre went in.
(Score: 1) by Sabriel on Wednesday March 04 2020, @04:36AM (1 child)
Yeah, and too often all dial before you dig gets you is "fucked if we know". What I'd give for comic book x-ray vision.
But that kind of "scratch just deep enough" mindset is exactly why we ended up with what we got instead of the original NBN goal of "do it properly". Weird how doing the right thing tends to cost more - initially. You'd think we'd learn, but no, it's future someone's problem until it's suddenly not. I'd rather it have taken an order of magnitude longer but done right the first time instead of this farce.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday March 04 2020, @08:20AM
That was one thing that monopoly telcos were good at, when cost didn't matter they could spend the money and do it right. Of course you then got a level of service that you'd be quite used to if you lived in Yugoslavia or East Germany - how many months was it to get a basic thing done like a phone line moved? - but when they were run as taxpayer charities they had the leeway to get it done properly. Not that I'd want to go back to that, but a good halfway point would be nice rather than the current quick, cheap, and nasty.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Pav on Monday March 02 2020, @10:42AM (2 children)
The NBN was initially planned to be an all-fibre network, but the Liberal government (actually the conservative party) downgraded the network to "make it cheaper"... although it became more expensive. This hat the fortunate side effect of protecting Rupert Murdochs cable interests... a media mogul quite helpful to conservative politics of course. Telstra (the telco that is complaining) actually got to sell several billion dollars worth of old poorly maintained copper that would otherwise have been obsolete to the NBN... and coincidentally its share price got quite a boost.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday March 03 2020, @12:15PM (1 child)
See this post [soylentnews.org], technically it was an attempt to save money, but what really drove it was the realisation that Australia's entire GDP for the next twenty years wouldn't have been enough to enable a rollout of the original plan. It was doomed to fail as soon as it was proposed.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Wednesday March 04 2020, @01:40AM
Hmmm... there's plenty of pre-existing channel, and the population centres are generally on coastal flood plains with better soils, but while it is true that the inland has pretty hard rocky soils these aren't that big of a problem and there is local equipment even right down to the smallest scale operations to make it much easier. I grew up in a place called Charters Towers (inland from Townsville/Queensland), and I had to dig postholes in some pretty horrilbe ground by hand with a crowbar on my fathers hobby farm - compacted rock-hard clay, and deconposed granite a little way down until the solid bedrock. (We basically created a new soil with gypsum, organic matter etc... but that's another story). My father wouldn't spare me the labour and hire/buy a cheap little "dingo" [dingo.com.au] ie. a little trenching, post hole digging, earth moving etc... machine the size of a ride-on mower. Relatively fast trench digging is a solved problem even for the smallest scale guys who don't do much of this kind of thing - my brother and uncle used them on small building sites all the time. Even solid rock is just a question of a jackhammer attachment... much more effective than hand-held because of the extra inertia of the machine, and not much more expensive. It just gets easier for larger operations with more professional gear.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @11:46AM (1 child)
Yet they will stay in power because they are the only major party who are at least trying to keep illegal migrants who come by boat out of the country
(Score: 2) by Pav on Wednesday March 04 2020, @04:50AM
When there's full youth employment, and everyone is doing great boat people aren't an issue eg. the Vietnamese and Tamils in the 1970's. Today there's an inequality blowout, and the population are a lot less chill. Crime goes up as the real economy gets worse on a sliding scale... that's the nature of the human animal - we're ALL mere weeks away from criminality and even cannibalism if the deprevation gets bad enough. A nice brown faced safety valve works for the party that enjoys shifting cash to most wealthy (for instance by wasting taxpayer money to boost a couple of corrupt telcos).