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Thread ID: 108620	2010-04-05 04:05:00	Discussion: Why fibre to the door?	Chilling_Silence (9)	PC World Chat

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
873053	2010-04-05 12:31:00	Little different. Imagine right now the bridge is owned by an independent 3rd party company, and there are other companies already building proposed alternatives. Then imagine that the Govt comes in riding on a white horse and wants to add yet another wider bridge, when there's already more than 1 replacement underway. Would it make sense? FTTH will *not* remove caps. A move such as the Pacific Fibre cable will go a long way towards increasing the competition on per-GB data charges, which is where NZ's main bottleneck now is. The SCC cable has sufficient capacity, but it costs NZ too much to use it per-GB. Adding Fibre to NZ won't change the per-GB cost, so we'll still have dismally small plans that simply cannot sustain all this HD content that everybody raves about as being the currently foreseeable main use for FTTH... I don't imagine that the bridge is owned by an independant third party because it simply is not. The taxpayers already paid for Post and Telegraph to lay the copper we currently have and then sold the network to a third party. I might add that if it was not for the kiwishare you would be paying for local calls and I for one would not mind that anyway. So perhaps the previous Govts should not have invested earlier and then you would not even have the copper and we would not have phones or the internet at all. What do you mean by saying adding Fibre to NZ won't change the per - GB cost? If that's the case why are Telecom and others laying Fibre? If the bridge was owned by an independant third party like me for example there would be a toll collector on it I would then build another with the proceeds etc.	Sweep (90)
873054	2010-04-05 16:00:00	Screw fibre optic, I just want ADSL2+ that works! I'm 200 metres from my cabinet so when it's upgraded to ADSL2+ properly I *should* get 24Mbit. That would be good enough for me.... AND many times cheaper...	Agent_24 (57)
873055	2010-04-05 21:44:00	Ah but you forget that this first bridge has already cost the independent 3rd party many times over for their upgrades from the initial bridge. Sure it worked at first, but 3/4 of it has been torn up to be replaced with new roading that's smoother, additional onramps etc. In fact Telecom have upgraded their exchanges over 5x in the last 10 years since Broadband was first announced, not to mention this new rollout has absolutely ZERO funding from the Govt. So why are others laying Fibre? Because as you say, it's the future, and there's money to be made in it, not to mention Telecom Chorus *has* to in order to support their network topology of Fibre-to-the-Node for all their cabinets. As Agent_24 said, having ADSL2+ within 2KM should give over 80% of the country absolutely awesome speeds, and this is all finishing within the next 20 months. This is one company who's gone out and done it all on their own, so why should the Govt be effectively wasting my hard earned taxpayer $$ on building yet another network? Clearly there's no current need, and independent 3rd parties see there will be a need for it in the future, in fact 99% of all the Fibre that's laid already across the country would have been done-so before the Govt announced it's FTTH plan, so it's not like everybody has suddenly thought "Oooh Fibre, now that's a nice catch phrase, lets build some of that stuff", with the exception of Steven Joyce.	Chilling_Silence (9)
873056	2010-04-05 22:24:00	I'm surprised nobody has mentioned backup - too many people and businesses don't back up until they have been burnt. If every city had something like citylink where everyone gets ridiculous amounts of cheap, fast national traffic, there would be plenty of online backup servers spring up & people would use them because it would be cheap & easy.	Greven (91)
873057	2010-04-05 22:36:00	with telecom/chorus upgrading/installing newer and bigger cabinets( one 50 meters from my house), will they have to supply new routers or will we have to buy them? Telecom have already begun to supply you with ADSL2+ routers. All they ask is that you stick with them for 12 months rather than run straight off to another ISP. Seems fair enough considering there's absolutely no requirement for them to give away Routers. That said, I'd personally *always* buy my own, higher quality, but it's a nice gesture at least. Yeah, talking about Fibre-optic cable, I don't really know what Telecom is doing, we have fibre optic in our area since 1996 (Howick & Pakuranga) but Telecom never made use of it for Internet. Agreed, there's Fibre here near where I live out west Auckland too, but it's the cost that keeps anybody from using it. Why does it cost so much? Because they know you're going to use a truckload more data on Fibre, because it *is* currently viewed as a "premium" connection. Remembered they spent millions of dollars 'updating' the cable supposedly for Internet and digital cable TV. They did tried cable TV for about a year or two but stopped for reasons unknown. We were one of those 'pioneer' customers at that time but stopped subscribing because of reasons which I forgot. lol Why wasting money on the 'road side cabinet' where there is better option - fibre optic cables? Any body knows why? Yeah pretty much money. The idea is that you *can* run Fibre from those Cabinets to the home, but compared with laying Fibre-to-the-Node, that costs exponentially more. There's also the view that a good ADSL2+ and VDSL2 connection is "far more than sufficient", especially with todays data caps. Imagine opening up the motorway to a speed limit of 200KM/ph, but only allowing 50 cars per-day on it before it started to cost you $10 per-trip. What would the point be? You'd get a few people there faster, but the rest of the time people are just going to be stung for money. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link - in my case, and I believe many others, the weakest link is my ISP's connection via Southern Cross to the USA. The government should be encouraging Sam Morgan et al. Absolutely! Wholeheartedly agree. In fact, something like that which would have a legitimate effect on the country is something the Govt should be backing more than their current efforts. Why? Well right now even for the current infrastructure that is in-place across the country, the international pipes are still the bottleneck. Not due to capacity, the SCC is nowhere near capacity, but purely because of the cost of running it. Adding something like that in will have a significantly greater affect, combined with ADSL2+, VDSL2, and FTTN than any FTTH rollout will if we leave that as the sole source of data to the country. Yeah, Vector are right, it'd be like changing from having a straw to a tap for water, but if they're forgetting that it's going to cost people astronomically to use the actual water ... imagine what one single leaky tap could cost (virus infected PC on a 10m/bit symmetrical connection) if it's costing you $1 per-litre of water? Because IMO that's where things are heading... Question: What will Fibre to the door give us that today's ADSL2+ connections can't? Chill's first argument can be loosely summarised as "xDSL is 'good enough'". The key points to consider here are that while DSL technologies might be fine for our needs as content consumers today, they don't support the needs of businesses who are creating content and adding value, and isn't future proof. Yes, bang on the money, though I'd be interested to know how many NZ businesses are in "the business" of making content like that, or how many additional opportunities it's actually tangibly going to open. I've highlighted the point about the connection being asymmetrical - even with VDSL/VDSL2 increasing both up and downstream speeds, DSL technologies focus on downstream speeds which are all well and good if you want to consume content, but not helpful if you want to create content, add value, and actually grow the economy. Which I can relate to fully, considering I do VoIP for a living, having a faster upload allows additional calls to be placed over the line, amongst other things. The argument about QoS being a solution to all our problems seems like a bit of a red herring - as Rodney Hide loves to say, we need to make the pie bigger, not just find a different way to cut up the pie we already have. Making better use of a 1.5mbit upstream pipe using good QoS policies won't help a school stream high definition audio and video to a music assessor, who needs both good quality video and good quality audio to properly assess the ability of a student. True, however we beg the question: Why must this be live? Why must a whole school have high quality video? Then we run some numbers around the theory of actually doing this: 1x stream of 720p video including audio at 4,000kbps 1x 100m/bit Fibre pipe (We'll round it to 100,000kbps) 100,000 / 4,000kbps = 25 concurrent videos at once. So we see here it's not enough even on a symmetrical pipe to run a whole classroom of 30 kids at once, each uploading video. What if we didn't do HD-video? Well then perhaps at 320x240, we could run the stream say at 600kbps? Or, what if we just had 1 stream, perhaps there's only one tutor overseas who's a specialist for this instrument the child is learning or whatever... Again we're back to the fact: For Schools, it's a unique requirement. If you're a homeschooled child however, and need to do something like that, then ADSL2+ is more than sufficient. Latency, jitter, and low stream quality in general makes it different to see/hear the subtleties which differentiate a "good" musician from a "great" musician. From a medical perspective, having a good high resolution image is critical for diagnosis - what might be good enough for Youtube isn't good enough for a medical specialist. Agreed, however I know that the likes of this medical place I've mentioned already have Fibre. You can get Fibre if you really need, but the cost of running it is the prohibiting factor. Ring Orcon and ask about their HSNS plans, that's not even Fibre! Or, ring around and get a price for Fibre to your home. I did, it's only going to be worthwhile if you *have* the high upload requirements, or some need of the guaranteed connection. From the technology perspective, I don't think there's any argument that fibre is better - it supports better upstream speeds, and is more future proof. We know today that Bill Gates' alleged statement that "640K of memory should be enough for anybody" was short sighted - saying that DSL speeds is good enough 10 years from now would be making the same mistake. Sure, it's definitely better. However considering people don't even generally use the ADSL1 speeds, having ADSL2+ and VDSL2 is already largely future-proof. I know that my machine doesn't go over 2GB RAM usage. I consider myself a power user. I've got 4GB of RAM regardless because it was cheap to buy. Imagine if it wasn't cheap though? Would I still have bought the 4GB, or would I have stuck with 2GB knowing it's more than ample for what I do today, and think about later upgrading when the need arises? Different, but food for thought. From a cost perspective, Chill has cited some exorbitant prices for fibre connections using today's pricing - and he's right, it is expensive. What we need to remember is you can't use today's figures as a reliable indicator of what FTTH will end up costing - it's a bit like using mobile broadband rates from 5 years ago as an indicator of what we'd be paying today. Estimates thrown around by the govt at the moment suggest an entry level pricing of around $50/month for fibre broadband, which isn't too far off entry level DSL plans. Yes, but if you look at the likes of broadband plans over the last decade, where we started off having 128kbps upload and 256kbps downloads, the actual data allowances haven't really changed. In fact, there used to be free national traffic, no to mention the truckload of people who were on Telecom's GoLarge plan which allowed 2m/bit download and unlimited traffic. Has the base fee changed? Not really, no, its still costing you around $40 a month (Though some are down to around $30). What about the data usage? Nope, it's still the same, potentially even more restrictive? So what has changed: Max speed. Will a faster line grow the economy? Or the ability to use that slower line to it's full potential? These sort of infrastructural investments rely on critical mass to make it affordable - if we look at the Northern Gateway Toll Road as an example, it's thanks to the large number of users which make the per-trip cost so low. If there was only a fraction of the traffic using it, then the tolls would have to be much higher to cover the cost; that is assuming that a public-private-partnership would have been possible at all. I think we also need to be careful with assuming that our broadband usage patterns will remain the same - i.e. mostly relying on international content - as the impact local content delivery services may have could be huge. Again all the more reason why we should have bigger caps, not faster pipes. Having established that DSL might be good enough for us here and now, but it simply isn't good enough in the long run, let's answer this first question - what does fibre give us? - A robust, future proof technology - Infrastructure which is affordable as we can't base assumptions on today's prices - Decent upload speeds to support for the type of activity which will generate economic growth - i.e. content creation - A bigger pi(p)e (which still needs to be cut up properly with QoS... but it's a bigger pie nonetheless). Absolutely, however Fibre is already available to the people who want to do that. If I want to do content distribution like that, I can go and do it right now and get a Fibre line at home. What stops me? The cost. Why is it so expensive? Will FTTH improve that? Not likely. You're essentially going to be replacing one transportation medium for another, but still placing restrictions on the amount of times you can use it. Moving on to the second big question: Should the taxpayer fund it? The first thing to examine is the notion that we can wait for the private sector can do it. Sure, why can't we? There's already a lot of it happening, just see here: broadbandmap.govt.nz It's literally just the "last mile" that you have to pay for the connection of. For me, the $200 or $400 setup & connection fee for Fibre is not the prohibiting factor. This country has seen from experience that waiting for Telecom and other companies to roll out fast broadband simply puts us in catch-up mode. How many years has it taken for FTTN to happen - how many years did we put up with horrendous ADSL1 speeds on ancient and outdated copper phone lines? You have a good point there, however it's also worth mentioning that the local phone exchanges have had their broadband equipment upgraded over 5x in the last decade. That's new technology rolled out every 2 years. ADSL2+ inception was 2003: en.wikipedia.org We got it in 2007, along with many other countries who decided to deploy it. VDSL2 inception was 2006, it's being deployed now. ADSL inception was only 1998. When did we have it? Within 2 years, yes that's right, we were on the cutting edge when it was deployed. Literally the "product" came out, and we had it in here. I'm not saying it's an excuse for poor connections, I'm saying we literally made the best of a technology that was not designed to have a long stretched out country such as NZ implement it, yet we did anyway. The FTTN and "Cabinetization" is of world class standards. They've ramped up production from 5 cabinets a month, to 5 a day! That's some pretty damn intense project management going on there. We have a lot of fibre backhaul, and pockets of availability in Auckland, Wellington, plus a handful of other main centres, but that's about it. Fibre, like any major piece of utility infrastructure, is something that needs critical mass to succeed, which means that private enterprise will not take the risk - especially in a geographically dispersed country like NZ. Why not? We did with ADSL? Telecom took the risk, though granted they didn't have to lay out new cables everywhere, they have with the likes of FTTN. The rollout cost is well over half a billion dollars for Telecom with their Cabinetization, however I'm unsure if the cost of $150,000 per-cabinet includes the likes of the fibre rolled out to them or not. Now they've fronted all that, on their own, one single company ... Then you look at others like Citylink, Vector etc who've already begun rolling out Fibre in the last several years. Did they have Govt incentives to do so? Nope, that's right, none. But, they did it anyway. Imagine what would have happened if previous governments decided to leave the electricity network to the private sector, and just wait until the demand was there? Likewise, what would have happened if the Post and Telegraph office had just left it to private companies to lay a few phone lines here and there? What about our roads? Unfortunately in order for these sort of infrastructural investments to be made, it requires someone to stump up a large sum of money, and not expect a return for a long period of time - something which no sensible company will gamble on. Yet I can see Telecom Chorus have already done this, with absolutely no requirements at all from the Govt to do-so. Lets look at your scenario again and compare apples with apples: There's a slow tramway in-place that gets people around auckland, which works fine for most people who use it. The Govt wants to come in and put in a full railway beside it, but it's not going to get you anywhere new, and it's not going to cost you any less, you'll just be able to do what you already do in a slightly faster manner. Such as a trip across auckland taking 15 minutes instead of 20. Worthwhile? PPPs are a good way of getting private funds into public infrastructure - like the toll road I mentioned earlier. A private company would never have built that road on their own, so a little bit of encouragement and support was needed to help make it happen. The $1.5b of taxpayer money earmarked for the FTTH plan is just like that - a pool of money which will be used to help fund infrastructure around the country, in conjunction with private funds. But companies are already investing without the need for Govt funding. The infrastructure is already largely there. Again, see the Govt Broadband Map website. It's also important to remember that it will eventually be recovered as bits of the network are sold off, so it isn't a one way expense like the billions we throw at welfare. Consider it more of a $1.5b loan which the government (via Crown Fibre Holdings) won't get back for 10-20 years. Yeah lets fix welfare while we're at it, but still, shouldn't a Govt who's trying to come out of a recession, and fix a country up, be trying to think about their spending in more realistic terms rather than just "This is some damn fine technology we're rolling out here, we don't need it right now, but a decade down the track when I'm out of office I'm really hoping the country will be using it". So the key question is, when is taxpayer money justified for infrastructural investments? Well, fibre, at the start of the 21st century, is like the electricity grid of the early 20th century. It's a utility, which has huge set up costs, does not have the demand necessary today to make it viable for a private entity to build on their own, and can aid significant economic and social development. Little different if there's already a an electric grid in-place... We've finally caught up to some parts of the developed world thanks to ADSL2+, but we'll fall behind yet again if we stick our heads in the sand and say "just let Telecom sort it out". Potentially, however 2-4 years is not a lot of time for a large corporate to see a new technology come out, get permission from a board, shareholders etc to replace the new gear which has literally only JUST finished being installed, go out, implement it, upgrade the network, then do it all again... We're still on the forefront there, technology to deliver broadband to homes over such a long distance isn't exactly bursting at the seams ... A FTTH network is a long term investment, which provides the infrastructure we need for economic growth in the long term. Governments invest in infrastructure not just to serve the needs of today, but to serve the needs of the future - roads, hospitals, rail, electricity - broadband in the 21st century is just another utility which is essential for any 1st world developed nation. DSL technologies will serve us for the next 5 years - fibre will serve us for the next 50. True, but if the infrastructure is already being implemented by other independent 3rd parties, does it specifically matter if that technology takes 7 years, or 15 years, when we know for a fact we don't specifically have the demands for it right now? I end this (very long) post with this: imagine what would have happened if we waited for the private sector to build our electricity network - what sort of life would we be living? Fibre is, in today's terms, what power lines and the electricity grid was early in the 20th century. That's a good question, but lets rephrase it: There's already electricity to your home. You can use it, but you're only allowed to use a certain amount of devices at any given time. Such as turning on 20 devices. You also have to pay for everything that you use, so you get a very small amount free (Such as 24-hours worth of 20-device use), but after that the costs are astronomical. The Govt comes along with an additional Fibre grid, so now you can turn on as many devices at home as you like, but you only get 24-hours worth of 20-device use, after which it costs you. Are people going to rush out and start leaving on all their lights? Nope, because of the astronomical usage costs, which FTTH will not solve ;) Wow what a long post, I should be working :P	Chilling_Silence (9)
873058	2010-04-05 22:42:00	I'm surprised nobody has mentioned backup - too many people and businesses don't back up until they have been burnt . If every city had something like citylink where everyone gets ridiculous amounts of cheap, fast national traffic, there would be plenty of online backup servers spring up & people would use them because it would be cheap & easy . That's a good point, and "use of the cloud" or off-site data hosting is supposed to be another fast emerging technology . Personally I backup using Mozy . USD$5 a month for unlimited space . My wife has a few hundred gigs worth of family photos . It's still backing it all up over the 'net . If we were on a paid per-gig plan, we'd be screwed, however we're on Big Time, and last month we did over 300GB . Sure, it's taking a while to backup all her data, but we asked ourselves this: Would we rather pay up-front and buy another HDD to back her data up to directly (It backs up wirelessly to my machine as-is), or would we rather let the backups take their time over the 'net and backup her information over as it can? It's not time-sensitive for us, so this is highly cost-effective :) If we were on a paid per-gig plan like the vast majority of the country is, or like any of the proposed "FTTH for $50" expectations are, we'd be screwed . . .	Chilling_Silence (9)
873059	2010-04-05 23:20:00	Holy freakin crap Chill, I think that should go down as the longest (and most informative) post in history! :lol:	wratterus (105)
873060	2010-04-06 01:20:00	I would rather see pacific cable http://pacificfibre.net/	Ollie (794)
873061	2010-04-06 01:44:00	ive switched off, chill knows his stuff and seems pretty passionate about this subject Should have had a proper debate, good arguments on both sides :)	Gobe1 (6290)
873062	2010-04-06 01:49:00	We already did have a proper debate.	Sweep (90)
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