eevBLAB #17 - The Australian NBN SUCKS

[Richard Crowley]

Dave, I don't think you appreciate the amazing hassle of rolling out fiber to the kerb. I was living in Manchester when Nynex cabled the city and I watched as they dug up every street so that they could lay their green conduit in preparation for the cables. The disruption was terrible and the traffic problems were annoying beyond belief. Thankfully the job only needed to be done once and as technology improved the coax was taken out and replaced by fiber by using the old cables to pull through the new but even now, decades later, you can still see the scars on the pavements where the work was done.

Wow. They put fiber along every street in my neighborhood (and most others in the area) several years ago. There was very little physical disruption because they used "Ditch Witch" horizontal drilling machines under the sidewalk, and only opened up a small section of sidewalk about every 50m.

[madires]

Wow. They put fiber along every street in my neighborhood (and most others in the area) several years ago. There was very little physical disruption because they used "Ditch Witch" horizontal drilling machines under the sidewalk, and only opened up a small section of sidewalk about every 50m.

Works mostly for rural areas without much utilities. In cities there is no way without digging. In Frankfurt, for example, are some streets where you can find 10 or even more conduits just for fiber, besides telephone, power, gas, water, sewage and so on. Digging in a city costs about EUR 1000 per meter.

[zapta]

This rant sounds to me as the old I-want-X-so-the-government-should-provide-it-to-me.

[ivan747]

I was pretty salty about being TWO MILES away from the nearest Google "Fiberhood"

Three words:
Microwave
Radio
Link

[ivan747]

They put in residential first to get the voters. I don't think they are too motivated for smaller voting blocks. does NBN even perform better?

Yup, plus they don't want to mess with the big corporate IPSs.

[Richard Crowley]

Wow. They put fiber along every street in my neighborhood (and most others in the area) several years ago. There was very little physical disruption because they used "Ditch Witch" horizontal drilling machines under the sidewalk, and only opened up a small section of sidewalk about every 50m.

Works mostly for rural areas without much utilities. In cities there is no way without digging. In Frankfurt, for example, are some streets where you can find 10 or even more conduits just for fiber, besides telephone, power, gas, water, sewage and so on. Digging in a city costs about EUR 1000 per meter.

Horizontal boring is used everywhere in my region. In downtown as well as out along country roads (or cross-country). 

All buried utilities are required to be "detectable" (typically with a conductor buried along with non-conductive pipe/fiber/whatever.)  And utilities are required to be able to locate and mark their locations on-demand. And we are required to call the underground locating service to come out and mark everything BEFORE we can dig more than a few cm into the ground.  When they installed fiber to my house, the utility locator service come out before and marked where the water, gas, and electric underground utility feeds were.  Spray paint on the ground/pavement/lawn.  Red for power, yellow for gas, blue for water, etc.

[ivan747]

That is very neat, I like it.

You don't see many conduits buried in Santo Domingo. It's mostly utility poles, managed by the electricity company. They are the ones that give ISPs and telecom companies space for their cables.

That said, I have seen fiber being buried.  Not that disruptive as digging a freaking metro or tunnel (and at a slow pace!). The Metro is done, thankfully, and its awesome. Fiber usually creates some local congestion but that's it. Oh and you don't hear about it, you just stumble upon the traffic bottleneck and then discover it's one of the ISPs.

[Throy]

Wow. They put fiber along every street in my neighborhood (and most others in the area) several years ago. There was very little physical disruption because they used "Ditch Witch" horizontal drilling machines under the sidewalk, and only opened up a small section of sidewalk about every 50m.

Works mostly for rural areas without much utilities. In cities there is no way without digging. In Frankfurt, for example, are some streets where you can find 10 or even more conduits just for fiber, besides telephone, power, gas, water, sewage and so on. Digging in a city costs about EUR 1000 per meter.

I wish they had something in the rural areas by me.  I'm stuck with the Telekom Hybrid shit on a 2MBit DSL line.  The LTE only works in the middle of the night and during the day I only get the speed of my landline.  My upload is usually at least two times faster as my download.

[LA7SJA]

Outskirts of Oslo Norway, 30/30 fiber 17 AUD/month (100/100 50.8 AUD). We buried fiber by volunteers around the condominium so that all 384 apartments now has 6 fiber cables into each apartment. Two for internet 3 for television channels and one spare, and we own the infrastructure itself and can negotiate line prices on behalf of more than 1,000 apartments in 3 condominium and more vill join us  soon. The fiber and switsches did not cost that much more than only the new TV cables we were forced to install by f... EU shit regulations. Crimes dosn't pay, if the government runs them.

Johan-Fredrik

[cmpxchg]

That map is utterly confusing. How can you have fiber in a bunch of isolated little spots all over the city? You need fiber returning to some sort of backend to provide the actual bandwidth. On that basis, you would expect much larger spots to be covered.

[madires]

That map is utterly confusing. How can you have fiber in a bunch of isolated little spots all over the city? You need fiber returning to some sort of backend to provide the actual bandwidth. On that basis, you would expect much larger spots to be covered.

The classic design is to build fiber rings and to connect a building/block/business park to that ring. Which technology is used for NBN's fiber based internet access? GPON? In that case you would place an OLT at a central spot to serve an area. For residential areas mostly street cabinets are used, for business parks it would be a room in a central building. Large buildings often got a dedicated unit. The OLT is backhauled via the local fiber ring to the telco's data center or PoP.

[Artlav]

That's so cute. I thought only our government was talking about "supporting the small business" while doing the opposite.

[Artlav]

Serious question, is there a link between the east coast and the west coast?
When i was in Australia in 2010-ish, people told me that internet between Sydney and Perth was only via cables going to Americas to Europe to Asia to west coast, all the way around the planet.
Was that the case, and is it still?

[Towger]

Obviously they have used the wrong cable. Next time buy one with rodent protection. Yes, it's a little bit more expensive.

I have see samples of SWA multicore fiber which was eaten through by rats. It was used in an airforce base to link the control tower with radar.

[Rasz]

The $30BN+ National Broadband Network (NBN) was supposed to catapult Australia into being a world leader in internet communications.

Was it really? I mean REALLY? From what I remember from the very start NBN process was hijacked by Telstra execs getting a say in it. You are building a National Fiber network with DATA CAPS on INTERNAL TRAFFIC . All arguments about congested expensive international undersea cables go right out the window. This is beyond stupid, the only reason that comes to mind is trying to preserve incumbent profits (Telstra? expensive cellular plans?). Together with US you are third world countries when it comes to internet connectivity. Its especially funny because every time this subject crops up I hear about population density, I can get fast cheap internet in middle of bumbfck nowhere in EU, while you pay $400 for 20Mbit in Sydney, biggest and probably densest city in AU?

 For a comparison in Poland/Romania its normal to get a small EU grand (couple million euro), build small (<100km) fiber ring network and connect as many clients as you can get your hands on at symmetric 1GBit/~20euro a pop, no data caps obviously. This is probably mainly possible due to mandatory sharing requirements for incumbent infrastructure in UE.

You dont limit people to two ice cream scoops in the summer, you bring second ice cream van and sell twice as much. Internet is not a scarce resource, data caps are clearly only an instrument of protectionism. Sane people faced with reaching capacity limit simply upgrade (one time cost) so they can service more clients (recurring profit). Insane systems (at&t) cherish capacity limits, because it gives them power over artificially scarce resource.

Your problem appears to be of political nature. I bet your park has direct fiber connection with NBN, but why bother cannibalizing profits?


/boasting mode

Btw right now in capital I have access to two hybrid fiber networks (last mile cable, fiber ring backbone). Old one 250/20 $24/m and 120/10 $16/m, new one 300/10 Mbit $16/m. There are also business 150/20 at $25 and 300/30 at $50 plans with SLA (still over hybrid network), plus dedicated up to 10Gbit direct fiber offerings for big business. Of course there are more than a few ADSL/VDSL providers sharing incumbent telephone lines too. Fastest VDSL2 offering is a ridiculous, and unattainable due to cable quality and length requirements, 600/60 Mbit VDSL2 at $25. Everything slower is cheaper, 100/10 is ~$18.

Did I mention we have free wireless internet? 2011 LTE frequency allocation auction had a provision mandating winner to provide free 512kbit UMTS 900MHz internet for 3 years after reaching 50% coverage milestone, and LTE 2.6GHz for 3 years after reaching 75% coverage milestone. It is currently estimated this free internet will be available up to 2019 :-). Of course there are limits (disconnect every 60 minutes, captcha, yet still NO DATA CAPS), but it is free and available everywhere.

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pl&u=http://jdtech.pl/2011/09/aero2-najczesciej-zadawane-pytania.html

ps: you accidentally EEVblog #805 on www.eevblog.com

[pedake]

Just watched that video...
HOLY SH**!! I would never have thought that Australia is so underdeveloped internet wise...
This is SO expensive!

I am quite curious about the reasons for these unbelievable prices. (?)

Even our offices in Tajikistan in Central Asia's nowhere have 50/10 Mbit/s for some 150 USD for commercial users!

I have a 1 Gbit symmetrical

https://www.swisscom.ch/en/residential/internet/offers.html

[mariush]

Romanian here... I pay ~ 26$ / 23 euro  for 500 mbps down / 25 mbps up cable internet without caps and speed limits , plus digital tv and phone. Proof is here : http://www.upc.ro/internet/abonamente/  (1 $ = ~ 3.9 lei)

Though I think Romania  is somewhat of a special case... in big cities a few smart teens bought business internet plans (very expensive) and installed network cable in apartment buildings and split that single business internet plan with several families for a small profit.  From there, it moved on to connecting several apartment buildings with regular network cable to make small gaming networks and help with file sharing and with more subscribers the owners of these networks also upgraded the internet to keep people happy.
They used the electricity poles and paid small fees to connect these neighborhood networks and as they extended they also started to use fiber to improve speeds (otherwise they'd lose customers to other neighbor networks). 

Basically, these semi-pro networks paved the way for the current internet service providers which gradually bought all these small networks and gradually replaced the amateurish infrastructure with proper fiber and more reliable equipment. 
A lot of fiber is still on electricity poles but it's gradually and slowly moved underground.

[eV1Te]

I found this nice comparison of the prices that cloudflare pays for their lines in all of the continents:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/

Australia is 20x more expensive than Europe and 12x more expensive than USA. They also mention that Telstra is the most expensive ISP in the world!

[nctnico]

Just watched that video...
HOLY SH**!! I would never have thought that Australia is so underdeveloped internet wise...
This is SO expensive!

In the EU you will also find that a business internet connection will be just as expensive. It has to do with the amount of data (likely to be more) and guaranteed availability. Fortunately you can get consumer internet connections for sane prices in many places. So all Dave has to do is get fiber to his home and then build a link to his business using 2 directional Wifi antennas.

[EEVblog]

WTF is the broad band price? It the commas between numbers thousand separations or decimal separations? If it is AUD 40+k, it is absolutely crazy!

Yes AUD$40000
It is not a joke.

[Artlav]

Yes AUD$40000
It is not a joke.

Have you tried looking at satellite internet prices?
I've seen someone videoblogging from Siberian wilderness with a car-mounted dish, that cost him a few thousand $ in equipment and traffic for the whole multi-month expedition.

Then again, you might not have the same satellites in the southern hemisphere, and he might have had some kind of advertisement bonuses...

[EEVblog]

I am quite curious about the reasons for these unbelievable prices. (?)

A Telstra monopoly.

[EEVblog]

Have you tried looking at satellite internet prices?

No.
People in my building complain about the reliability of the BigAir wireless dish on the roof that only has to go a few hundred meters to the data hub a few streets away.
I need a rock solid reliable connection, that means fibre.

[5ky]

Relevant: http://www.itnews.com.au/news/australian-internet-fails-pigeon-test-159232

spoiler: a carrier pigeon transferred data faster than telestra

[zapta]

I am quite curious about the reasons for these unbelievable prices. (?)

A Telstra monopoly.

Looking at their prices here, $55 to $83 USD/month

https://www.telstra.com.au/broadband/home-broadband#