Aussie National Broadband Network Will Be Gigabit 258
schmidty-au writes "NBN Co, the Australian Government company established to build Australia's national fibre-optic broadband network, announced today that, instead of the previously announced 100 Mbps network, it will provide 1 Gbps, within the existing AU$43 billion budget. Meanwhile, the Australian opposition, which has announced that it will scrap the network if it wins the 21 August election, and instead provide incentives to the private sector to improve the existing copper network, and to install wireless broadband (with promised peak speeds of 12 Mbps), does not understand or believe that this would be possible. The man who wants to be Australia's next Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, said today 'This idea that "hey presto" we are suddenly going to get 10 times the speed from something that isn't even built yet I find utterly implausible.'"
I think fibre to the home is insane (Score:5, Interesting)
Reorganise your spectrum so that you can deliver a gigabit per second over cellular protocols. Roll displaced services into cellular data. By all means pull fibre into the street, but then deploy microcells in high demand areas. The last step is always wireless anyway. In the future people won't install their own wifi if they can get a good service from a telco.
Sex Party (Score:5, Interesting)
my Agency built a 200 user LAN segment for $40.000 (Score:3, Interesting)
-
I built in our Lab a 200 user multisegment LAN for $ 10.000, but for 600 nodes
as we have more computers than staff!
-
It was called Ethernet! -
Bob Metcalf - one of my heroes along with R.P. Stalman, R.Knuth, L. Thorvald and many many others including Richard P. Feynman.
For keeping Ethernet free I forgive you many design errors at 3COM ;-)
Re:implausible? it's magic! (Score:2, Interesting)
You know, just one network engineer's opinion :
While I agree that the price difference between 100 mbit and gigabit (both require a fiber network) is small, there is no way to build a nationwide network for a small US state for that budget. This network is not going to get built, no matter who gets elected. A national fiber network for australia with connections to even 10% of houses ... I seriously doubt it could be done with hundred times that budget.
This is ignoring the obvious fact that the current international internet infrastructure most certainly cannot take a network with even a few million australians connected at 100 mbit, even if they only use 1% of their connection. Total international bandwidth available in Australia is about 1 terabit (theoretical peak capacity for currently deployed infrastructure - not actually operational connectivity, and brining the full capacity online won't be cheap at all). About 8 million Australians have internet service (and that this bill claims to double that), so that's 1 terabit / 16 million = 32 kbit per australian. You're just not going to get above that level. Consider that due to the previous round of government interference, there's barely anything hosted in Australia so to get at anything interesting they're going to need international bandwidth.
It's just a false campaign promise. Money thrown at a black hole.
And frankly people who let their votes be decided by "we'll give you more free stuff" deserve exactly what they'll get.
Stars and Stripes? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not sure why we have a picture of the US flag, in an article about Australian politics.
Also I wonder why we aren't talking about Oracle taking google to court over patents in Java. Are the slashdot editors waiting to see if the topic goes away?