Telstra's 'future of medical diagnosis' needs just 5Mbps

Ignorance is bliss

It isn't the speed of FTTP that is needed for home medical uses, it is the reliability. VDSL2, which is what FTTN uses, is a royal pain in the rear to make reliable, and is very sensitive to interference. FTTP is not.

Before making stupid claims about speeds required, at least learn what you are talking about.

Simon, You are arguing that we should build the equivalent of gravel roads because it is marginally cheaper than a sealed bitumen road. You must know that these gravel roads will be paved over with bitumen in a few years time, thus almost doubling the cost of the build. Why not just build sealed roads in the first place?

The cost of rolling out unreliable technology like VDSL, as well as DOCSIS 3.1 which does not scale at all well to handle many households, is simply money down the drain! It will be replaced by fibre, as only fibre is reliable and future-proof. So build the fibre now and save the money that would otherwise be wasted on inferior technology that cannot scale to meet our future needs.

Simon, your arguments are made of straw, with cherry-picked data that does not include most of the many and growing use cases for a National Broadband Network.

The Lib/Nat party are supposed to be the better fiscal managers, or so they keep saying. So why do they advocate throwing 60 billion dollars away? That is economic vandalism! The Lib/Nat's plan is clearly designed to make sure their buddies at Telstra remain incumbent, in a comfortable position with a stranglehold on the nation's broadband infrastructure. There will be an inquiry into the gross mishandling of this important national infrastructure project, but by then it will be too late to build the network Australia really needs.

FTTN simply cant work!

I watched a Telstra womble <airquotes>"fixing"</airquotes> a node the other week, he started off by removing the manhole cover, then to my complete astonishment untied and unwrapped 3 standard grey supermarket bags that were holding what I could only describe as the Kowloon Walled City expressed as a series of wires. He then proceeded to test some wires with a multimeter, got some black tape out, connected a few of them together, re-wrapped the Coles carrier bags around the kraken of wires and called the job in complete.

This is what is running the future of broadband in Australia on 90% of the streets (you know - when it gets installed 5 years in the future), the suburb wasn't particularly old, definitely wasn't what you would call "Out in the sticks" (St Kilda East in Melbourne).

No hope

Where's all the hate?

Many years ago I'd get hate comments (and my post was deleted from Whirlpool) for suggesting that (1) the purpose of the NBN was going to be entertainment (2) The purpose of the NBN was not going to be "education", and (3) you weren't going to get high resolution radiography at home.

Now what do we see? A half dozen posts and the same number of upvotes. Where's all the hate gone?