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Do you support the Government's upgrade of Australia's broadband infrastructure (3 Viewers)

Do you support the upgrade of Australia's Broadband Internet Infrastructure


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jtyler

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Uh, the cost of transnational submarine bandwidth is definitely not negligible given a disproportionate amount of Australian traffic ends up going straight to the US, but it's definitely not the main reason for high costs in Australia. That comes down to lack of competition, poor local geography and ACCC enforced peering arrangements. The cost of bandwidth is always decreasing, and a lot faster than it's perceived to be.

PS: The token fiscally conservative young liberal outrage is a little tiring. With any luck you'll grow out of it soon.
 
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jtyler

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... to assume that the cost of bandwidth is effectively nil is myopic and altogether intellectually dishonest.
You're arguing with fictional characters now? Wanna let us know what they're saying? I never said the cost was anything near "effectively nil." I said assuming bandwidth cost is going to stay the same is fucking stupid; firstly because it's always reducing and secondly because brand-new 'equal footing' infrastructure can only have a positive effect, even if it's tempered by the cost of international data.

You've given plenty of explanations for increasing demand; demand is eternally increasing, no-one disputes that.

Maybe you should check your 'outrage,' if only in the interests of addressing the arguments that are put; not the ones you have swirling around in your head.

If it sounds like a young liberal and behaves like a young liberal ...
 
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jtyler

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Zzz. That was clearly an attack on you personally, not the validity of disagreement with government policy.

Clearly Sen. Conroy is a useless piece of shit; it's common knowledge.
 

writer'sblock

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I agree utterly, infrastructure, economic development, increases the productive capacity of society therefore it is economically benefitical.
The fine print is the funding and application. there isn't enough fine print for us to go over and secondly, we don't know of it's application entirely. the funding so fair has many question marks over it, so until time passes we're really bitching about nothing.
 

writer'sblock

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Rudd&squo;s broadband network could worthwhile -- if it works | Herald SunRudd's broadband network could worthwhile -- if it works
UNTIL this week, planning for a national broadband network was based on "fibre to the node".
This would have involved installing brand new optical fibre for part of the network, but used Telstra's existing copper wires to run the last few hundred metres into homes and businesses.
The cost would have been around $15 billion.
But the new plan announced by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd this week is for a "fibre to the home".
It will cost nearly three times as much because it means running fibre optic cables to more than eight million homes and businesses around Australia, at a cost of several thousand dollars per home.
It's a huge expense -- with a large part of it coming from the public purse. So what are we going to get for our money?
First, it will put almost all Australians on a level playing field. Ninety per cent of homes will now be able to receive a guaranteed broadband speed.
With today's DSL technology, by contrast, the network is a patchwork quilt. Many Australians can get decent download speeds -- between 10 and 20 megabits per second -- but many others cannot. Quite a few cannot receive DSL at all.
Second, the broadband speeds available on the new network will be much higher, offering a guaranteed 100Mbps. By contrast, in June 2008 more than half of all DSL subscribers took speeds of less than 1.5Mbps.
Third, because the government's new network will duplicate the existing Telstra network, there should be a tremendous boost to competition. Every home will now have a choice of at least two suppliers.
In fact, the choice will be even greater because the government's network will be wholesale only -- meaning that a wide range of retail telephone companies and internet service providers will use it to deliver services.
In turn, that will mean the lowest possible prices -- and the greatest possible rate of innovation.

By contrast, today's broadband competition is weak and Telstra dominates the market. That has allowed it to hold back Australian broadband. For example, until 2006 it capped consumer DSL speeds at 1.5Mbps -- even though its network was capable of much faster speeds.

So Australians can expect much higher speeds and much more vigorous competition than at present.

That will drive substantial economic and social benefits.

The economic benefits will come because of the productivity boost from low cost, high speed communications being available to almost every business and household.

In the 1950s the US Government invested in a national freeway system -- which let businesses distribute their goods much more cheaply. Economists estimate that this drove nearly a third of the annual productivity improvement in the US economy in the '50s.

We can expect similar productivity benefits from the broadband network. For example, you can download a two-hour high definition movie in a few minutes -- so video on demand services will quickly replace the neighbourhood video store.

The social benefits will be just as profound. With ubiquitous high speed broadband, we can expect the "telecommuting" trend to accelerate. More and more people will be able to enjoy a sea change or tree change -- while working and doing business online. That does already happen in Australia -- but much less widely than it could because in many areas the necessary broadband services are simply not available.

Widely available broadband will also mean cheap videoconferencing wherever you are -- in turn giving a huge boost to distance education.

If every student can readily participate in a lecture using a cheap computer and camera attachment, using high speed broadband to connect, then universities and TAFEs will be able to greatly expand their distance education offerings.

Telemedicine also promises great benefits. With every doctor's surgery, every specialist's rooms, every pharmacy and pathology lab able to connect to a widely available, high speed network, patient information such as scans and X-rays will be exchanged digitally in seconds.

That will mean cost savings -- and major benefits in patient convenience.

So if the government's ambitious plans are realised, Australia's broadband landscape will be transformed -- but more importantly, there will be major economic and social benefits as a result.

There is huge amount of work to be done before that can happen.

There are also some crucial questions for debate. Do we really need fibre to the home rather than fibre to the node? Should government be such a large stakeholder? Will the enormous investment in the network bring acceptable commercial returns?

If the network is built, we can be sure it will have profound consequences we can only begin to imagine.

* PAUL FLETCHER is the author of Wired Brown Land: Telstra's Battle for Broadband and the principal of telecom consulting company Fletchergroup. He was previously a director at Optus and before that chief of staff to Howard government communications minister Richard Alston.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=64593699935
 
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writer'sblock

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Posted 9 Apr 2009 4:47 PM
Rudd’s NBN – The Big Picture

The announcement by the Prime Minister of the new National Broadband Network and much of the reaction to it has demonstrated a lack of understanding of ‘The Big Picture’ by many parties and perhaps not even a full appreciation by the PM himself.
The Opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull, has been highly critical of the failure of the Government’s tender, the lack of evidence of the economic viability of the project and the risk to the taxpayers.
The broking and investment analysts have also questioned the ability of the project to earn a commercial return and the resultant difficulty in raising private equity which will probably result in the Government having to fund most if not all of the capital required.
As someone who has specialised for many years in building business models for media and communications businesses including creating Australian broadband models for overseas companies I cannot disagree with requiring detailed financial estimates from which to evaluate the assumptions, methodology and possible outcomes. However, we also need to look at ‘The Bigger Picture’.
Rudd describes the project as ‘nation building’ and in the official announcement to stimulate jobs in the short term and to drive productivity, improve education and health service delivery in the longer term.
The futurist Mark Pesce appreciates that we can’t even dream the possibilities today but speaks of the potential of lifestreaming, the sharing of our lives with friends on broadband, to me a highly popular but rather vacuous dream. However, he is right that the speed of the NBN FTTH should be well above if not multiples of the 100 Mbps the Government is promising.
Paul Budde, the leading communications consultant, has been advocating the merits of FTTH to Governments for many years and particularly his belief in the value of the applications for electricity smart grids, health, education and the environment.
With the scarcity of doctors, specialists and teachers in regional and rural Australia broadband is gong to be increasingly important to provide social equity and public services to all Australians.
Turnbull claims that no one else in the world has adopted a majority Government owned carrier where the taxpayers carry the financial and technological risk.
Yet the Government-owned Telstra built a telephone service where the highly profitable major markets cross subsidised people living in regional and remote areas providing a universal service to all Australians. Not only was Telstra one of the most profitable companies in Australia but the Howard Government ended up selling it for over $50 billion, a great return.
As a public company Telstra provided one of the slowest and most expensive internet services in the world and held back on providing ADSL2+ or throttled the speed unless its competitors offered a service in the same market.
As at September 2008 Telstra only enabled ADSL2+ in 1,403 exchanges out of 5,069 exchange service areas. ACCC analysis found that 48 per cent of the population lived within 1.5 km of an ADSL2+ enabled exchange where they could receive downloads greater than 12 Mbps.
Under public ownership less than half the population had broadband exceeding 12 Mbps leaving over 4 million people without a high speed broadband service. Again Telstra has refused to roll out its own NBN and is now proposing to upgrade its HFC network to speeds of between 70 Mbps to 100 Mbps but it only passes 2.4 million homes in the capital cities leaving out 70 per cent of the population.
Turnbull has criticised the Government for building a second Telstra but only Government ownership will provide social equity to all Australians, private ownership will just cherry pick the most profitable markets ignoring the remainder as repeatedly demonstrated by Telstra in recent years.
Japan and Korea have led the world in developing high speed broadband without proven demand or economic business models.
However, the factor missed by Turnbull and the analysts is not the direct returns but the applications it enables and productivity gains.
Broadband and the Economy
In 2008 the OECH published a background report “Broadband and the Economy” for the Seoul Ministerial Summit on the “Future of the Internet”.
It is an extremely interesting paper which argues that there have been in history a few general purpose technologies (GPTs) that have fundamentally changed how and where economic activity is organised. It gives the examples of printing with movable type, electricity, the internal combustion engine, steam engines and railways. In more recent times information and communication technologies (ICTs) including computers and the Internet, are considered GPTs which not only effect their own sector but lead to fundamental changes in production, invention and innovation.
The initial impacts of electricity and steam were fairly small with a considerable time lag that eventuated in a UK productivity growth of .26 per cent to .38 per cent per year by the late 1800s. The impact of electricity reached 3.3 per cent per year productivity by 1937 but most of the benefit came from the applications and the further productivity gained.
The impact of ICTs seems to be much higher and quicker than other GPTs with 0.68 per cent per year in the US in 1974-90 (Crafts, 2003). The estimates for Broadband are 0.4-2.7 per year by 2015 and 0.8-5.7 per cent by 2028.
The World Bank / infoDev is expected to publish a report which claims that an extra ten percentage points of broadband penetration by 2006 accounted for a 1.21 percentage point increase in per capita growth per year in developed countries and 1.38 percentage points among developing countries.
The reliability of these figures may be questioned but the overall situation is that ICTs seem clearly to be a GPT and that high speed broadband will increase productivity and hopefully lead to creation of new applications, industries and innovation.
Globalisation
Broadband and ICTs are facilitating the globalisation of services expanding markets, increasing efficiency and competition. We are all aware of the offshoring movement of lower skilled back office, administrative and call centres to lower cost countries. However, there is now globalisation of highly skilled and higher value added services off shoe including accounting, advertising, design, R&D, software programming, technical testing, marketing and advertising, management consulting and human resources. Indian companies are setting up near-shoring businesses in low cost countries in Eastern Europe to service Western Europe and Latin American countries to service the USA, Spain and Portugal.
The US has fallen from fourth in the OECD to 15th in broadband penetration. Barack Obama believes “that as a country the US ensured that every American has access to telephone service and electricity, regardless of economic status, and that he will do likewise for broadband internet access”.
In the UK the Prime Minister Gordon Brown writing in The Times claimed that the ICT and broadcast sectors account for 6 per cent of GDP, equivalent to the financial services industry, and that the UK is the world’s biggest exporter of ‘cultural goods’, greater even than the US. The UK Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting report ‘Digital Britain’ states that the digital economy is 8 per cent of UK GDP and advocates upgrading and modernising digital networks to not only be competitive with European, US and Asian economies but to provide fairness and access to all and the development of infrastructure and skills to enable effective online delivery of wider public services.
Australian political and business leaders need to be able to see the ‘Big Picture’ to be globally competitive with the combination of high speed broadband and a skilled and educated work force.
Otherwise the services sector with over a 60 per cent share of our economy will be outsourced as has happened to our manufacturing industry which is now less than 10 per cent of GDP and agriculture 2.3 per cent.
If we were to hypothesise a basic increase in productivity of only 1 per cent in non-farm GDP in Australia then this would equate to over $10 billion per year, a substantial increase in taxes and on international experience the productivity growth may be far greater. We certainly would not need to increase charges by two or three times as claimed by opponents.
Perhaps as a nation we could provide the broadband service for free and certainly subsidise the cost in regional and rural areas and for lower income households to provide public services and social equity to all Australians. There is far more at stake in the ‘Big Picture’ than petty squabbling over whether there is a traditional short term viable business model. The future of our economy and the standard of living of our children are at risk.

Business Spectator - Rudd’s NBN – The Big Picture - Blog - Peter Cox
 

writer'sblock

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pfft, just because you're lazy and prefer things out of context to thus create and propagate misconceptions.
the entire article is best for a fuller, mreo erudite picture.
 

MaNiElla

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pfft, just because you're lazy and prefer things out of context to thus create and propagate misconceptions.
the entire article is best for a fuller, mreo erudite picture.
The quote tags just make it look neater and easier to read.

that said, I still wont read the articles you posted even if they're in tags as they're too long and a little boring, and i have a 2500 word essay to write up, which I dont feel like and cbb doing! atm!!

/rant
 
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David Spade

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Be reasonable you guys.

We're talking about a government that wants to censor non government owned ISPs.

You're going to be lucky if you can Google "tits" without having ASIO on your doorstep with a government owned ISP.
 

writer'sblock

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I doubt they'll be able to get legislation through to censor the net, family first would push for it, but they'll have the issue of maintaining a block on the billion of pages out there.
they'll give up, or they'll give an option for a "clean" and normal feed.
I still think it is unethical to censor our internet - it's been like this since 1993, and there hasn't been too many issue in the country so, it would require a lot of political capital for them to do it. plus it wasn't what they were elected for, so they'll find it harder to retain all their votes.
 

writer'sblock

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under the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 (1999); ACMA can only view, and send nasty emails "take down notices" they can either put a rating - be 18+ - or take it down; this only applies to australian sites. they can only send nasty emails to foreign sites, but they can't do anything.
 

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