As US Still Argues Over Semantics, Australia Expands Its Ambitious Broadband Plan
from the you-get-fiber-to-the-home!-you-get-fiber-to-the-home!-everybody-gets-fiber-to-th dept
About a year ago, long before the FCC came out with its incredibly weak broadband plan that is full of non-specific nothingness, we had suggested that if the new FCC really wanted to be bold, it should look at what Australia was doing, building on an idea that we first started talking about back in 2003: building out a single super high end fiber infrastructure, and letting service providers compete on top of it. The idea, then was to offer 100 Mbps fiber to 90% of all homes, and provide the remaining 10% with 12 Mbps wireless). The thinking, of course, is that broadband is a natural monopoly, and you don't want multiple infrastructure providers having to dig up the entire country to lay fiber, but you do want competition. So you build a single top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art infrastructure, and let the competition happen at the service level. Now, there are reasonable concerns about the government being involved, but there are ways to structure such things so that it minimizes the problems. If you think of it like the national highway system, and the massive economic benefit that created, it begins to make sense.So, as the US continues to muddle along at much slower speeds with little likelihood of much change, Broadband Reports points us to a new report out of Australia, noting that they can actually go even bigger, increasing the fiber coverage to 93% of the Australian homes.
This comes out of a feasibility report on the original plan, done by McKinsey and KPMG, which noted that it wasn't just feasible, but that the original plan wasn't as ambitious as it easily could be, and came up with some recommendations to make it even better. Australia's plans do have some problems, but the plan seems a lot more ambitious than anything coming out of the US lately.
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If you did it all at once it'd be a problem, but if you start in the most populated areas first and then to the less populated ones it'd be more feasible.
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plus, if all else fails, if the government builds the thing they can have... oh, wait, the US doesn't have publicly owned utilities in most places does it? heh. i was about to suggest simply adding it to the rates. (local government taxes that cover things such as the water supply, maintenance of roads other than state highways, public libraries, public swimming pools, and all manner of other such things)
but yeah, if it costs so much to lay out, there's a number of ways to recover that money without breaking things, and, as the AC above me points out, it's always possible to do it a bit at a time.
of course, the US government (or is it the nation as a whole? i'm not entirely clear on that) is functionally broke... i mean, how many trillions of dollars of debt are we talking now? :S
is it even Possible to pay that off? wow.
i wandered off topic. but yeah, if the national government can't pay for it, then orginise local government to do the actual work for your 'last mile' or whatever it's called (and naturally it would also eat/pass on the costs.) still has the same result. (am i correct in thinking that current telco/cable monopoly systems keep getting in the way of attempts to do this on local initiative? I seem to remember reading something like that.)
parentheses ftw!
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And so far, it is absolutely crushing the cable companies in those areas.
So rather than having an expansive national government, you get the same results, although probably a little slower. My concern is that large cable companies will get laws passed to block this sort of behavior.
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Re: Half a Trillion Dollars
Easy stop the War on Terror for about one week.
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I spy with my little FBI…
On a state-owned network, the likelihood of illegal and otherwise invasive broadband monitoring by various law enforcement agenices (often at the behest of big business, as you well know) is increased.
Since keeping their customers online is in the interest of the providers, they are reluctant to sell them down the river. If you take them out of the equation, you lose what small amount of consumer protection the current market provides.
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Re: I spy with my little FBI�
private ownership is, sadly, no guarantee of greater protections, nor of lesser ones. it's simply that the alignment patterns of the interests of the parties involved are different.
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Re: Re: I spy with my little FBI�
Yeah we all know that the Aussies and NZ types are the real cause of sept 11 and thats why the FBI needed that software installed ....
-sarcasm
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Re: I spy with my little FBI�
As for the network, that would be private owned. An ISP would provide the bandwidth to the data center, the hardware for distribution of the bandwidth, and the servers the manage it etc.
The problem would be in the corruption of the people managing the Data center. "favored" ISPs would get their provisioning done faster, perhaps get repairs completed faster etc. Or the state would step in and "require" the data shared in order to make use of the infrastructure etc...
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This is not expensive and it creates a market with competition
And guys, this is expensive only if you are not used to dealing with big budgets. Think of it instead as comparable to a few years or less of what is spent on road traffic infrastructure. Also: this is fiber, so it is an infrastructure investment that will last virtually forever.
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That’s the bit I’d be most concerned about. It’s not an insurmountable problem though. It just needs some very careful consideration and a whole lot of lobbying from someone other than the music and movie industries.
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2) They are laying down fiber, I imagine at the node points the ISPs would bring their own computers in to manage their customers network connections instead of the government trying to maintain a huge tech network which it is completely unable to handle. So no, they wouldn't be spying on you any more than what they do now.
3) Stop making stupid posts about technology and infrastructure when it's obvious you think "techie stuff" is magic and find it an accomplishment that you can send an email.
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an immodest proposal
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Yes we have a socialist streak, a good safety net for the poor and disadvantaged and that's why our country is a great place to live.
During the dawn of the internet Telstra (previously known as Telecom) was privatised which created an unfair monopoly due to most other telco's not having the resources to lay down their own infrastructure and instead they now rent a fair whack of it from Telstra.
Telstra not surprisingly now seems to be totally against the idea of taking part in building the national broadband network (NBN) because it will loose this monopoly and most likely go out of business soon after it is complete because it can't compete on a even playing field (although we use double-speak to avoid saying this politically).
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