broadbeans2

 

Unions have told the ABC that Telstra's copper network is in a state of disrepair, with workers at the coalface of the infrastructure using plastic bags to protect cables from water.

The telecommunications pits have been nicknamed 'bag-dad' by contractors because of the plastic bags, that are in theory supposed to keep the water out.

The copper network is a crucial element of the Opposition's alternative broadband plan.

But Shane Murphy, the assistant secretary of CEPU's New South Wales branch, says as far as he is concerned, there is no other option than to replace the ageing copper wires.

"Unless we do it, customers around western Sydney and across Australia will have poor internet and phone services for many many years ahead," he said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-23/telstras-copper-network-in-a-state-of-disrepair-say-unions/4774342

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Gus: as if I did not know... At least the last Telstra technician who fixed the connection in the street to my place managed to make his work watertight despite the connecting box flooding regularly...

Meanwhile some people see little value in the NBN... Why?... I have no idea but they harp on about new technology that would make the NBN obsolete in 10 years time... to which another technology could make that "newer" one obsolete within 5 years time and so forth... Crazy... In fact the cable NBN has as much longevity in it, as the Sydney Harbour Bridge... It may have been "superseded" (actually traffic added to) by a tunnel but HELL, we still use the Harbour Bridge... Some people point to their cell phone and claim that this is the new technology... It is to a point... But not enough and too unreliable to run the massive downloads of the future. As well the radio transmissions can be more affected by solar weather than we care to know...

 

But Mr Murdoch does not like the competition from the NBN... I rest my case..

 

See story and image at top...

 

 

 

Despite what Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says, Malcolm Turnbull is not the man who "virtually invented the internet in this country". Even if it was a joke, it's a bad one and it's wrong.
Mr Abbott made the comments in a speech to his parliamentary colleagues on Friday morning. He said he had a very "strong" front bench but that there was "one person who I particularly want to mention".
"We have a strong and credible broadband policy because the man who has devised it, the man who will implement it, virtually invented the internet in this country. Thank you so much Malcolm Turnbull," he said.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/who-really-invented-the-internet-in-australia-20130628-2p1xy.html#ixzz2XUsAwmNN

If one tells bullshit with confidence, it could pass mustard, eventually... BUT when Tony Abbott tells bullshit with confidence, it's still crap... Malcolm the inventor??? He could not splice the red and the black wires without getting zapped... Jokes aside, the COALition broadband policy is CRAP... MONUMENTAL CRAP!...

 

 

Verizon pursues all-wireless phone service in seaside N.Y. town

By Cecilia Kang, Friday, July 5, 9:54 AM

FIRE ISLAND, N.Y.— Battered by Hurricane Sandy, this seaside getaway is being rebuilt with a radically redesigned telephone system — a glimpse of future technology that many residents say they don’t want.

Verizon, the only phone company in town, wants most of the island and its 500 homes to go all-wireless, ending for good its century-old copper wire phone network. That means phone lines buried underground or strung between poles and then stretched into homes will go out of service and be replaced by an experimental wireless service that sends calls between cell towers and home receivers.

Although it carries only voice calls today, the new technology is a harbinger for faster, more capable mobile and Internet services expanding across the nation.

Phone giants Verizon and AT&T have let some of their traditional phone networks atrophy and have put tens of billions of dollars into the mobile and high-speed land-line Internet services that generate more revenue. The new communications infrastructure — which features fiber-optic cables in built-up areas such as Washington, as well as wireless systems in more remote locales — is billed as a catalyst for economic growth. It has introduced new home functions such as video conferencing, streaming games and hundreds of high-definition television channels over cable networks.

But customers are finding the rapid change unsettling when it comes to a service that had become a reliable, invisible utility. The Verizon system being phased in at Fire Island, called Voice Link, lacks many basic functions of land-line phones and may not promise the same reliability or regulatory protections.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/verizon-pursues-all-wireless-phone-service-in-seaside-ny-town/2013/07/04/9120fa80-ac4c-11e2-a198-99893f10d6dd_print.html

As the COALtion still pushes for nineteenth century technology that came along with the telegraph, the copper network in Australia has been degrading — with about two years of life in it left, in some areas... This is why we need the NBN urgently and stop bickering about the price and/or the implementation of it... The difference of speed is quite telling (see image at top) especially as computer speed is soon going to leap again, with new much faster chips. Meanwhile 

 

 

Australia the cheapest place to operate a mobile phone, OECD finds

Study of mobile pricing in 12 countries reveals Australia is on top for post-paid monthly plans
Australia is the cheapest country to operate a mobile phone, according to a comparison of mobile costs in 12 OECD countries.

The OECD has published a study of mobile pricing, examining the effect of up-front handset 'discounts' on total cost, and comparing pricing between countries.

The report considered three categories of monthly mobile expense: 100 calls with 500MB data, 300 calls with 1GB data, and 900 calls with 2GB data. For each country, the average of plans from two different providers in each category was converted into US dollars and US dollars purchasing power parity (PPP), which takes into account price differences for the same goods in each country. Plans considered were all post-paid, rather than pre-paid, and included the handset in the plan.

This measurement shows Australia has the lowest costs across all three categories.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2013/jul/08/australia-cheapest-mobile-phone

 

 

LIBERAL frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull has expressed regret over "vulgar anglo-saxon" language, after his senior policy adviser told a critical NBN blogger to "get f****d".

Mr Turnbull's policy adviser, Stephen Ellis, delivered the spray to technology blogger Steve Jenkin, who has been critical of the opposition's National Broadband Network policy.

In the published emails, Mr Ellis told Mr Jenkin he normally marked his emails as "junk" when he received them.

"Nobody challenges your numbers because nobody takes your psychotic rantings seriously," Mr Ellis wrote.

"Given what you write is a delusional fantasy that exists only in your own mind, you can get f*cked. Have a nice life."

After inquiries by News Corp Australia, Mr Turnbull took to Twitter to respond.

"Regret my staffer's lapse into vulgar anglo-saxon in an email to a blogger," he said.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/national-news/federal-election/turnbull-sorry-for-adviser8217s-attack-on-nbn-blogger/story-fnho52ip-1226692964374#ixzz2bHMUlPmX
Note: installing the Malcolm-Abbot Internet, the NilBitsNational MAI, would also be a way to "get f****d"... Don't vote for Abbott and his silly contraption... And feel free, use some vulgar anglo-saxon words to describe Abbott...

 

"The telephone copper network is not completely finished. While fiber is deployed massively, another technology of high-speed starts commercially across France in October: VDSL2. The technology promises to triple the maximum speed copper network — from 28 megabits per second (Mb / s) currently to 100 Mb / s VDSL2 — at a cost of only a few dollars extra per line. 

Problem: The eligibility conditions are drastic and gain fades away more than one kilometre from the distributor (the strip where subscribers are connected). The gain relates only to 16% of the lines, as determined by the regulator, ARCEP (Regulatory Authority for electronic communications and postal services), who prefers to rely on a maximum rate of 50 Mb / s instead of 100 claimed for VDSL2."
http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2013/10/02/a-qui-profitera-la-derniere-evolution-d-internet-sur-cuivre_3487433_651865.html
In comparison, fibre to home network can deliver up to 1000 megabits per seconds with a effective rate of 400 megabits per seconds...
Copper is moribund. Really...
Especially considering that a lot of the copper network in this country — Australia — is dicky and would need to be replaced, especially the lines to many homes when the telephone network was last updated in the 1970s — that which the Liberals (CONservatives) want to use in their dismantling of the NBN — those wires that are often connected by corroded twistings — dicky connection that start to grizzle bad when the weather is wet. 
Will most homes need 400 megabits in the near future? YES! an emphatic YES! The copper cannot deliver 400 megabits, let alone 100 megabits at a stretch...
The future is fibre to home... The trick of the Libs (CONservatives) is to make you pay for it — twice over. Or not to deliver it, to protect Uncle Rupe. See comparisons at top...

 

Tony Abbott recently pronounced the former government ''wacko''. The Prime Minister was not referring to Rudd's campaign of Count of Monte Cristoesque vengeance, or to Gillard's bizarre ''real Julia'' gambit, or abandonment of single parents to Newstart. No, for Abbott, what's certifiable is the Labor Party's national broadband network.

Abbott told The Washington Post that his government is ''changing the objective from fibre to every premise in the country to fibre to distribution points.'' From madness to sanity, yes?

Well, not quite. Since the Coalition announced this plan, industry experts have noted that the fibre-to-the-node technology will be slower and less consistent than Labor's fibre-to-the-premises plan. The FTTN's copper lines have a narrower bandwidth, lose signal strength with distance, are less durable and have limited potential for upgrade.

Yes, Labor's plan is expensive, but it seems a more secure long-term investment. This is why Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the world wide web, calls the NBN ''a wonderful commitment to getting everyone connected''. This is why internet pioneer Vint Cerf admitted to being ''envious'' of the Labor plan, and why the head of the International Telecommunications Union, Hamadoun Toure, said the NBN would make Australia the ''No.1'' world broadband.

This is not, of course, the final word. I am no expert on broadband technology. Online debates about FTTP and FTTN burn and smoulder for days, and rightly so: it's a legitimate empirical debate. And even with a robust plan, the Labor government might have fumbled the roll-out, like a drunk dropping keys on every front porch in the country. It's easy to sell possibilities - actuality is often more dubious.
The more intriguing point is that Tony Abbott, despite many expert judgments in favour of the Labor concept, has declared the plan ''wacko'' to a prestigious overseas newspaper.

Most obviously, this is poor diplomatic form, which has already been criticised by pundits as a ''rookie mistake'', among other things. In other words, even if Abbott is correct - and there is no evidence that he is - it is considered unstatesmanly to play partisan domestic politics on an international stage.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/broadband-view-out-of-whack-with-experts-20131103-2wul2.html#ixzz2jeSkWpx4

 

The head of the National Broadband Network has told a Senate committee that speed guarantees have "lost currency".

NBN Co chief executive Ziggy Switkowski has faced a grilling at the Sydney hearing, which is focusing on the Government's guarantee of minimum speeds.

Before the election the Coalition promised download speeds of between 25 and 100 megabits per second to be available to Australians by 2016.

But the strategic review of the NBN has found it will not get halfway to meeting its targets.

The strategic review, conducted by the NBN Co, also found the Government's proposed fibre-to-the-node (FttN) network would require about $12 billion more than estimated in the Coalition's April 2013 policy.

The original figures were announced under Labor and Dr Switkowski has previously criticised the way they were calculated.

Under questioning from former communications minister Stephen Conroy, Dr Zwitkowski said he was not interested in promises on the NBN.

"I do not buy questions that demand us to guarantee anything," he said.

"It's clear that after four years of NBN, guarantees have lost currency."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-17/nbn-promised-speeds-not-guaranteed-switkowski-says/5161398

The Libs (CONservatives) lied to get elected... and if they did not lie, they were ignoramus first-class and this is not good enough... Add a bit of dosh and this country can have the best internet in the world rather than this botched up concoction which we knew was a botch-up job... Turnbullshit should resign from his "lack of communication" ministry and go and cry at the bad-will he's inflicted on the Australian people of this fair country. He should start to piss on Hockey and Abbott for his redemption, but this may not be enough... Even if Labor's NBN was going to cost a bit more and be a couple of years late, as time goes by, at least we'd get something to be proud of. With this abortion of a communication network, we can only ask as we've done many times, this is a deliberate sabotage done by the Libs (CONservatives) to suit Mr Murdoch's cable TV network... Is it not?

See comparisons at top...

 

Australia's second-rate NBN has received further criticism recently as NBN Co struggles to make improvements, writes Paul Budde.

THE GLOVES ARE OFF now that Telstra has stopped using diplomatic language to savage the NBN. Its chairman stated that Telstra and its competitors could have built a better NBN at lower costs. It is, however, important to first go back to the original NBN — a fibre to the home network to 96 per cent of Australian households.

It would not make any sense to have the competition build overlapping fibre infrastructure. However, when the Government changed the game and went for its second-rate multi-mix technology version, I agree with Telstra that at that stage it would have been better for the Government to abandon the NBN altogether and leave it to the industry. We would have had, in many areas, a far better network at lower costs than the one we have today.

If we go back before the current NBN was conceived – around the year 2005 – the plan was to just spend $5 billion to provide high-speed broadband to regional Australia and leave the rest to Telstra and other players. However, at that stage, Telstra didn’t want to play ball, hence the Government’s intervention with a nationwide plan.

Only a day before Telstra’s savaged attack, I was interviewed by ABC Radio in Orange after several people there had received a letter from Optus telling them that their so-called Speed Pack 3 of the NBN Fixed Wireless subscription would be discontinued as from December 2019. This product provides a 47/18Mbps service, but instead customers would be provided with the Speed Pack 2 product which provides a 23/4.5Mbps service. Customers could also end their contract without any penalty fees and shop around for another service.

This clearly shows yet another problem we have with the NBN. Obviously, this is a serious setback for people in regional areas, as we see the quality going backwards. As I have mentioned before, it is people in regional and rural areas who arguably benefit the most from high-speed broadband in relation to its social and economic benefits.

The discontinuation of the service is not an initiative from Optus as such, it has been forced upon them as NBN Co is making changes to the underlaying wireless infrastructure. As a result, Optus can no longer guarantee the speeds promised in the Speed Pack 3 and under strict regulations from the ACCC they must deliver the speeds that they advertise, so they have no other option than to withdraw this product from the market.

In the meantime, I also received further information that NBN fixed wireless customers in other parts of the country have received a similar notification.

There have been widespread complaints about the performance of both the fixed wireless NBN and the satellite service the company provides. Both the Government and NBN Co have indicated that they are aware of the problems and that they are looking at solutions.

As is very often in this case, if you ask what the problem is, the answer is “money”. It looks to me that more capacity is needed in these networks to provide both higher speeds and a more consistent quality of service. This would require more infrastructure and will cost extra money. At a time when the NBN company is doing everything possible to get their financial house in order, the last thing they want to do is to spend more money.

But there is more trouble for the NBN. On the matter of maximising their revenues, it was interesting to hear Vocus asking serious questions about the mission creep of the NBN company into the business market:

• Is NBN ‘wholesale-only’ when it proactively contacts one of your customers and directly negotiates a contract that sets out buying commitments and terms of service? 
• Is NBN ‘non-discriminatory’ when it advocates for end-users to take up a 100 per cent NBN solution, then promotes certain retailers? 
• Is NBN ‘wholesale-only’ when it signs contracts directly with end users to ensure long-term use of new fibre, when that customer has a separate contract with the retailer for a different term?
• Is NBN ‘acting in a transparent and accountable manner’ when it asks end-users to sign confidentiality agreements and tells end-users they must seek NBN’s consent to discuss contracts with their own retailer? 
• Is NBN ‘non-discriminatory’ if it provides a fibre-build quote to one retailer, but doesn't make that quote transparent and equally available to other retailers?

Obviously, Vocus thinks that all the answers to these questions are “no”. Originally, the NBN was launched as a wholesale only residential service, but as it's scrambling to earn enough money in order to make their business model work, they have launched a range of services into the business market.

There are also complaints from RSPs about NBN Co’s RSP Development Fund. Under this scheme, the company co-fund with certain RSPs up to $100,000 in the residential market and $100,000 in the business market to invest in a range of activities such as sales automation, billing system upgrades, CRM integration, software integration for “continual improvement” processes and sales and training development. The complaint here again is that this intervenes with NBN Co’s neutrality position.

It will be very interesting to see what the ACCC has to say about all these industry complaints.

As if the NBN company is not in enough trouble, it is now paying for international research that will show that the bad performance ratings achieved by Australia on the international broadband ladder are all wrong and it will provide its own research to prove the independent researchers are wrong. It will be interesting to see they outcome of the research they are paying for.

 

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/the-nbn-is-no...

 

Read from top.

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/26885

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31828

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/25982

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/11793

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34970

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31969

 

 

The firm overseeing the rollout of Australia’s $51 billion taxpayer-funded national broadband network (NBN) has been slammed for lacking transparency and dodging public accountability.

“Secrecy is part of the NBN model,” University of Sydney Associate Professor of Urbanism and Telecommunication Planning
Tooran Alizadeh told The New Daily.

The criticism followed a shock revelation by Telstra, with the telco announcing that it would scrap its 100Mbps NBN plan for customers connected to the network via certain connections.

Dr Alizadeh said the decision highlights the need for greater “data transparency” from NBN Co.

NBN Co should be forced to release more information about the footprint of its multi-technology mix so that the rollout can be properly scrutinised by academics and independent experts, she said.

The scale at which NBN depends on inferior technologies is beyond repair,’’ Dr Alizadeh said.

 

Last year, a study led by Dr Alizadeh revealed that around one in two homes in the nation’s three biggest cities had been dudded with inferior NBN connections.

“For people in these residences, access to the so-called “fibre network” remains only a fairy tale,” the researchers wrote in The Conversation.

In 2013, the Coalition government scrapped Labor’s plan for an NBN with 93 per cent fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) coverage, instead rolling out a mixed-technology NBN made up of seven different technology types of varying quality.

However, experts have long warned that many of these technologies will fail to meet the needs of consumers in the 2020s and beyond.

• Related: Cost ‘blowout’: NBN won’t be finished on time or within budget, telco experts say

On Wednesday, Swinburne University of Technology senior lecturer Steven Conway said Telstra’s decision to axe 100Mbps plans for FTTN/B/C customers shows the NBN has failed to deliver for Australians.

The NBN’s problems will continue to worsen, with Australia fast approaching “a breaking point where we are going to be left far behind”, Dr Conway said.

• Related: ‘Embarrassingly slow’: Australia’s broadband internet ranked fourth slowest in OECD

“When you compare us to any other first-world country, in terms of the speed at which data can move and the amount of data we have to move, we’re going to be left in the dark ages.”

Although it will be expensive to fix the NBN’s issues, it must be done without delay to allow Australia to “participate in first-world information economies at a level comparable to our competition,” Dr Conway said.

“If we don’t take action within the next 12 months we are going to suffer quite enormously – on a macro scale as a country – economically.”

 

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/tech/2020/02/27/nbn-co-secrecy/

 

Read from top.  Thank you Malcolm Turdshit and Tony Turdy... You're fucted the many things you touched...