The slow strangulation of telework in Australia From the day I arrived in Australia, I’ve had a high-speed broadband connection. The owner of the ISP came over to my flat to set it up, attaching a point-to-point wireless link to my terrace, then aiming it at his offices. Within a few minutes I had the very same 5 Mbps symmetric connection that I’ve enjoyed ever since - even …
First, Labor runs roughshod over the free market - which arguably could have delivered higher bandwidth services to the nation’s homes by now - with their poorly-thought-out, poorly-sold, and even-more-poorly-implemented NBNCo.
Sorry dude but Telstra has never shown any indication of wanting to do anything and neither has anyone else in the market. When I got here there were still plenty of sub GB/mth plans at higher cost than anything in the UK. It was a deeply uncompetitive market with nowt but shite on offer. Why innovate when you can gouge on sunk capital? The regulatory environment seems a bit poxy also - no wholesale and retail divisions here. Why enforce separation when you're in the pocket of the corporation? The threat of the NBN is the only thing that has gotten these lazy shits to make a move.
Under Ziggy Telstra was investigating fibre to the home, later downgraded to fibre to the node under Sol. The stumbling block was the ACCC not entertaining a request by Telstra for preferential treatment on regulated access. Telstra took it's bat and ball and headed to the mobile space where Telstra's Next-G was born to enduring applause from shareholders. The NBN was a dummy spit by Kevin to Sol's intransigence. That clash of egos has crippled the fixed line telecommunications space for the last decade and probably for the next.
The regulatory environment seems a bit poxy: this is the crux of the problem. While our feral wing nuts are running around trying to scare their voting base with tales of terrorists under the beds and the intelligence community bans branches of mathematics in order to stay one step ahead of the enemy the country goes to hell in a handbasket with no reform anywhere it is needed. For the next 10 or 20 years the demographics will work against any real progress in Australia. Sit back, enjoy the sunshine and marvel at how a country - even one led by the best of British talent - can get it so wrong.
Ziggy had no vision. Back in1996 Telecom had a plan to deliver FTTP by 2010.
Sol FTTN proposal was going to deliver at the time slower speeds than ADSL1 but charge even more for the service on top of that to restrict competition by being the only provider in the network.
The NBN was to release the strangle hold grip of competition. As the 12 page report for the tender for FTTN shows.
We had the same problem at the office here, ADSL2 struggled for VPN users because the uplink speed was poor, it was basically constricted to a 2Mbps link.
We've since moved to 10Mbps Ethernet, later upgraded to 20Mbps Ethernet, and so now VPN users have a much better time accessing the office network.
At home, I run a web server that has a similar problem. These days it's not too bad, with ADSL2, but in the past it was a 512/128Kbps ADSL link, the 128Kbps uplink was PAINFUL!
Ring your ISP and get them to put you on symmetric. Grown up providers will ask a few questions about your usage, but since you are using a business class service it shouldn't be any problem.You are using a business class service, aren't you?
I am on a business class service, so this is a possible option. It was more of a problem before we switched ISPs: I couldn't do any ringing up as I wasn't the account holder and wasn't the one paying the bills.
This has changed, I am listed as the account holder, and I receive a monthly bill that, come July, I multiply by 12 and pay in a lump sum.
I can go ADSL2 Annex M, which gives a bit more upload oomph at no cost (other than a newer modem that supports it). Internode offer SHDSL, I suspect I'll need a new router to deal with that, and I'm not sure where to source one from. This will need research.
If NBN is coming in a few years, I'm probably better off sticking it out a little longer and doing the switch then. If it'll be closer to 10 years, then it might be worth jumping to something like SHDSL in the interim.
I am lucky out here as my apartment building has just installed a private Fibre connection (Seeing as the NBN is a complete farce), I now pay around $70 per month for 25Mbps Download AND Upload (I could pay more for up to 100Mbps each way but meh), I work at home (mostly) for a company who are based out in the Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne and who get a maximum of 7Mbps/500Kbps (shared between 9 people I might add), I physically cant do my job at times in the office.
Sorry, but usually free market would deliver high bandwidth services only in densely populated areas where it can return big revenues, or where the state subsidize it ("free market" in this case means "free for us, not for you").
It's what happening for example in Italy, where the government asked to reach at least the 85% of the population with hgh bandwidth services, but the main telco TIM (previously Telecom Italia) thinks it's too expensive - even in rich areas but witthout big cities (lots of small buildings to cable) - and wants to deliver far less - but then it brings it in poor areas without a big population just because the state paid for it... being the infrastructure costs the bigger ones, if someone else pays for it it's ok even if there are not many customers, while it becomes not interesting if there could be far more customers, but you have to pay for the infrastrucure.
VSDL2 could bring up to 100Mb/s (symmetric), but again Telcos would need to bring access within 300m from buildings, and also I'm sure they are afraid more high-bandwith users will put much more stress on their backbones, and would require eventually to invest to upgrade them as well. Thereby, give people the lowest bandwidth they still find acceptable, and keep investment low as well, so share prices are not touched by less revenues....
VDSL or FTTP same thing, DSLAM cab will reach approx 600m (65db) before dropping significantly. Oz is miles away from giving a good BB service. I was in Cairns last year and the best I could get was 2mb, that's in the city. That ruled out a move to YORKIES KNOB. What an address to have man...pure gold..
VDSL or FTTP same thing, DSLAM cab will reach approx 600m (65db) before dropping significantly. Oz is miles away from giving a good BB service. I was in Cairns last year and the best I could get was 2mb, that's in the city. That ruled out a move to YORKIES KNOB. What an address to have man...pure gold..
not likely. Aside from certainly being legislated/bureaucrated out of existance as a favour for "Big Friends tm"), as the most urbanised empty landmass/country on the planet there are big problems aside from the cluelessness of what passes for politicians and business leaders here. (a) a few, say 14 urban areas surrounded by widely spaced small populations. (b) A weird belief that over-servicing the bigger centers with multiple choices of poor performance somehow magically produces cheap adequate services. Competition I think it was called.
( c) a complete inability to understand economics 101. There are such things as natural monopolies, like water, electricity and large scale communications where competition is a meaningless term due to the large initial capital costs.
Nationalise the lot and make them government businesses with a clear services public good mandate. What might work in small countries with high population densities does not work in the reverse situation.
Finally, a challenge for Tim Worstall. A bit out of his field, but I would like his analysis on effective broadband policy for large land masses with small population.. He knows his economics and can explain his reasoning well.
The basics of that analysis actually sound quite similar to the UK; obviously the scale is a bit different, but the concept of urban areas with multiple largely-independent providers competing in a race for the gutter (whilst trying to achieve customer lock-in by going multiplay, phone, broadband, TV, mobile), and notpsots serviced largely by one retailing wholesaler who dominates the market in a vertically integrated way...
Word to the wise: look at BDUK and learn how NOT to do cost effective broadband coverage rollout in 'partnership' with the private sector.
Nationalise the lot and make them government businesses with a clear services public good mandate.
Maybe you're too old to remember the days of national telecoms monopolies. I can, and they were shit. Along with 99% of other state monopolies. All that happens is that service gets worse because you've got nowhere else to go, and because the useless politicians intervene more, and use the monopolies as grace and favour appointments for their mates.
If the state owned the assets, but then contracted out operation and management on a region franchise basis things might change, problem is that the state doesn't have the money (or will) to nationalise the assets. But they could still achieve something similar that would work for both the UK and Oz. Force the legal separation and demerger of the telecoms infrastructure assets from the current integrated monopoly. This asset business would be attractive to pension funds and utility investors, giving low cost of capital and a willingness to inject more capital if the returns are there. Then, invite bidders to contract for the management, operation and upgrade of regional parcels of infrastructure (that the regulator defines, this isn't a pick and mix for the private sector). There's plenty of companies would like this work. The franchise could be for twenty five years to offer continuity, but subject to a stringent SLA including improvement critiera - and reviewed on a staged basis perhaps every five years. Material failure against KPI of the SLA would allow other operators to submit bids, which would focus operators minds, but if they consistently hit the KPIs then the franchise can't be contested. The KPI need to be non-technical and customer led - I wouldn't care how the network makes things work, but if the purpose is to deliver national broadband then they could choose whatever technology was economic.
All of this is simple, has exemplar models in other sectors - in concept similar to the French affermage model, and the regional splits in networks is common in power distribution. All that's required is a good, pragmatic regulator who takes a customer perspective. Sadly they are as rare as hen's teeth, particularly in telecoms.
This could give the UK and Oz about 98% genuine high speed broadband coverage in perhaps five to seven years. But for those living miles from anywhere, then it's always going to be uneconomic to provide services without either a subsidy or customer contributions.
"a few entrepreneurs got off their backsides and changed things using LLU."
In the UK, one of the significant factors was probably when BT Retail said they were looking at using LLU to compete with ISPs like Bulldog and Wanadoo. That is, BT plc's own Retail subsidiary was threatening to not use the services of BT plc's own Wholesale subsidiary.
This was in 2004 when Pierre Danon was in charge at BT Retail. He moved on shortly after this episode, don't know why.
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/1892-bt-retail-considering-using-llu.html
Statements that aren't factual don't help carry the argument:
"Almost every home broadband connection in this country uses some variation on DSL" - ignores nearly a million cable subscribers (http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/8153.0/)
"The upper end of the [ADSL] range is somewhere around 1 Mbps" - doesn't take into account Annexe M provided by some ISPs that gives an upper end at 2Mbps.
It is appropriate that the photograph shows vans with Tasmanian registration plates. The island state of Tasmania has always fared worse than other Australian states, due to the high cost of shipping 1s and 0s across Bass Strait.
When Telstra was the only provider of this service, the costs were extortionate, but we were told they couldn't possibly be lowered. Strangely, once the Basslink cable gave Telstra a little competition, prices dropped to merely being "very expensive". Many ISPs over commit their bandwidth across Bass Strait to offset the cost, so even those with shiny new 50/20Mb/sec NBN connections may only be giving 1Mb/sec actual throughput in peak times.
If you need to work on some files from home, isn't it easier to take a pile of work home on Monday and return with it on Friday? Or have a courier pick up a flash drive and deliver to the office?
At 19 Mbps, ten gigabytes still takes almost 1.5 hours to upload. If you have a hundred, you're looking at 14.5 hours upload. With a flash drive (or an external USB disk), suppose at 40 MB/s read/write sequential speed, it takes 42 minutes to copy to or from (4.5 minutes at 400 MB/s read/write speed), add 2-3 hours, and you're looking at about 4-5 hours (or 3 hours) for delivery of complete content.
There are limitations, of course, and not all jobs will support that approach, but it's a solution for some at least.
Sadly, the reality is that most Australians don't care.
38% of fibre connections on the NBN are 12Mbps and a further 38% are 25Mbps.
The speed take-up profile is arguably the most accurate estimate that Labor made in the NBNCo Corporate Plans.
Australians who need fast speeds (> 25Mbps) are in a minority and have 2 options:
1. Move to FTTP area now or HFC in the near future
2. Request FoD when it becomes available
When you consider the cost of FoD it is likely to be less than the moving costs.
Yet there are people lucky enough to get FTTP with out paying for it. For the HFC getting an upgrade to 3.1 with out customers paying for it. Yet you expect people to pay for FOD on FTTN when they can't deliver the speeds as well as paying more than what it would have to deliver FTTP in the first place.
I couldn't even get ADSL 1 for the first 6 months. I eventually got ADSL 2 after having new cabling installed from the nearest Telstra popup. Our phone lines were originally pair-gain, in a new housing estate no less.
Speed, I've heard of that. 3Mbps is the absolute max speed around here.
Politicians simply don't care about the future, beyond the next election cycle anyway.
The NBN produce a weekly report on progress. It's not particularly fast at about 360,000 premised passed a year (to meet it's final targets it will have to go much faster). The much-maligned BDUK project is doing around 2 million properties a year. Of course it's always necessary to qualify this as the conditions in the two countries will be very different; Australia is much, much larger with a lower population density (but bear in mind the great majority of the Australian population live in urban areas and NBN are tackling the really remote areas with satellite).
The NBN is also rather a large budget, at about £18.4bn, or the equivalent of about £46bn in the UK if adjusted for population levels.
http://www.nbnco.com.au/corporate-information/about-nbn-co/corporate-plan/weekly-progress-report.html
http://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/The-Superfast-Rural-Broadband-Programme-update.pdf
Large population centers poorly served with un-caring monopoly providers filled in with sparsely populated areas filled with myriad small towns unlikely to be serviced by anything faster than a carrier pigeon. A few very lucky areas who have been google-networked; but even news on that has been quiet lately. A curse on all the politicians who allow this mess.
1) It's asymmetric, not asynchronous
2) Most people don't need to send around gigs of data every day. It's not the slow strangulation of telework, it's the slight disadvantaging of people who send gigs of data on a daily basis for their work. Everyone else can still telework just fine.
3) It's not all "creative" people, it's some video and audio specialists who can't work from home.
Seriously, this is a terrible article. A few adverts have to be made from the office if you want them to transfer straight away, and your podcast audio takes longer to send before you downgrade the quality anyway to fit into a podcast-sized file. THEREFORE TELEWORK IS IMPOSSIBLE - no.
Indeed. "[T]he typical use cases for 21st century professionals: retouching RAW images, podcasting CD-quality audio files, editing HD movies"? The typical use cases? I'm a "21st century professional", and so are a great many of my acquaintances, and very few of them do any of those things.
I work from home, and upload latency is a lot more important to me than bandwidth, unless the latter is really low. And what I do is plenty creative.
I'd be sympathetic if the article weren't so narrow-minded and generalizing.
As a Brit living in the cloudy North, I too felt the need for a bit of context.
I realise that Australia is big, and that some people (like a retired cousin of mine) live in the middle of nowhere, and I fully understand that those outlying communities may have bandwidth limitations.
I was most interested in the author's first sentence about getting a direct wireless link to a (presumably) very local provider - which implies a line of sight location and a population density high enough to provide enough customers for a wireless link based business.
I also gathered that there are locations with high bandwidth (Universities as always) which raises the possibility of co-working spaces as a possible small business idea.
Would any of the Sunny Southern hemisphere based commentards give us a simple time-line on connectivity? Is there a Web page?
Pint icon: it is Sunday and it is raining (again).
on HFC too but not timeouts just completely disconnects when it rains. The connection issue takes out the modem which needs to be rebooted, the bridged ip console becomes unresponsive !.
Not entirely helpful for someone who doesn't know what they are doing.
I have to send large projects that I rar up of course. If Im waiting to receive a delivery from an ADSL connection it could take days. rar projects could be between 200mb for sound mixes crunched up to gb's. Sending on HFC is much faster than ADSL but still sluggish even using btsync.
If you use dropbox for instance, I believe it is uploading to S3 virginia therefore regular timeouts and very slow compared to uploading to S3 sydney. Use bit torrent sync always.
I cannot wait for the day for 1000/1000 business needs this ! Business also needs a connection that stays up especially when it rains ! I have lost time and money dealing with downed connections in the past.
"...we regularly pass around near-gigabyte raw sound recordings of interviews with guests. With my connectivity it takes about half an hour to transfer something like that."
Sorry to snipe, but wouldn't high bitrate MP3 reduce that near-gigabyte WAV to about 60 MB? 256 VBR encoding would do that, and should be good enough for broadcast. Certainly it would put you well ahead of BBC DAB broadcasts in the UK, in quality/bitrate terms.
Lets, for a moment, set aside the issues surrounding xDSL, and go to the more pressing problem.
Here in the bush (not in a city) we refer to it as 'Ziggy's Legacy'
Esentially, way back when everyone wanted a telephone, Ziggy has a problem. It was going to cost waay too much to actually send people out to lay new cabling. So instead he sent out crews to install the 'pair-gain' systems. There are 2 kinds. We'll set aside them for the time being. Ziggy then had a choice, he could install a card that wasnt adsl/model compliant for 5,000 each, or he could install an adsl/modem compliant card for 10,000 each. guess which one he installed?
Anyway, now the non-adsl/modem cards are obsolete, and the adsl/modem compliant ones are 20,000 each. Modems and adsl do not function on pair gain systems, the only way is to make sure Telstra gives you the one spare not-on-the-pair gain system line, which is limited to 1500/256 (aprox 150 kb/sec download speed).
Thus Ziggy's Legacy' saved a bunch of money, and made things look rosey, but adsl and modem users were unable to use their equipment on the pair gain system.
Some of the information contained in this post is probably wrong or incorrect due to my failing memory, so please, correct it.
Send flames and abuse to /dev/null
"ISDN was commonplace in American *homes*."
As it was in at least some European countries.
In the UK, BT weren't really interested in ISDN as it was a threat to their massively profitable "leased line" business. When it did eventually arrive in the late 1990s (not many years before the volume rollout of DSL began), BT residential ISDN (HomeHighway) was a bit of a joke, at least in pricing terms.
Maybe BT and Telstra went to the same school?
You nailed it. Telstra wanted to preserve their profits irrespective of the cost to the economy.
When the government first allowed competition, in the form of Optus, I was vehemently opposed. Oh how I have changed my mind about that!!!!! Telstra still maintained a scrotal clamp on telecommunications through the shitty rotten old copper network. When Rudd announced the NBN, my initial reaction was that he was prepared to invest $43B to loosen Telstra's stranglehold on the economy, and get high speed broadband as a bonus.
Then the other guys got into power, decimated the NBN, and gave us FraudBand instead, incidentally (intentionally?) preserving Telstra's power.
Been there done that here in the states. Went to cable when all else failed.
No, it cost the equivalent of 10000 EU. But the alternative was to live at 9600 baud over copper POTS when it rained[1], and you can't even load a typical website at that speed; satellite was completely useless for VPN work when the curse of the crackers forced everyone to go to SSL/TLS. 800mS between keystrokes on xwindows....
Rather than mentally shiver in the heart of digital darkness we gave up buying toys and invested. So that now I can write comments like this one!
[1] Verizon, like Telstra, went for wireless and abandoned anyone using copper. With the same results for most people, Dante's Copper Inferno.
"That doesn’t sound too bad until you consider the typical use cases for 21st century professionals: retouching RAW images, podcasting CD-quality audio files, editing HD movies, and so forth."
I have sympathy, and, fortunately, decent ADSL speeds, but I'd argue that outside of HD audio-video creators teleworkers wouldn't die off with crap upload speeds. I've had worse upload speeds (which at the time seemed blazing fast) and was able to work OK. Since I don't have to deal with audio, I can work remotely by having a remote desktop session and all the hard stuff happening on the remote PC.
It's really amazing how much faster remote desktop is when you turn off all the unnecessary desktop animations.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
