Wireless the achilles heel for NBN: Yay or nay?

R&D will help wireless

What happens if there are actually developments in terms of faster speeds with wireless going forward? Not sure if the analysts have factored that into their arguments

Wireless currently can't be a replacement

I love how people keep throwing "speed" out there as the only factor to look at when it comes to wireless vs fiber.

To have scalable infrastructure you need speed, bandwidth, low latency, and ease of upgrade (plus other factors, but we'll stick with those).

Fiber has all of those. The fiber itself doesn't need to be replaced - just the nodes or software to upgrade them.

Wireless currently has one of those (speed) - and even that is debatable. With R&D you might be able to improve the latency and increase the upgradability, but not the bandwidth. Then if you actually CAN increase the bandwidth, you still need fiber backhaul to connect it all.

Wireless can/should only be an addition to fiber - not a competitor.

No thanks to wireless.

I worked for a wireless ISP for 5 years - I can assure you, while it's a nice augmentation to fixed land wire/fiber it is NO substitute, it may be able to offer superior flexibility but it's a long way off offering the reliability and performance (not just in throughput but latency) of cabled systems.

Edit: Why is that post spam?

For many wireless is all they have

One of the reasons for the popularity of wireless is the lack of an alternative. Many new development areas do not have the option of copper or cable connections.

Short sighted arguments

"When will people realise that there is no point giving everyone 100mbit connections if the lines into our country cannot support them.

Sure it will be great for local content. Though international will remain unchanged. I have a 20mbit connection right now and on average use about 10% of it. Simply because the connections to overseas sites are so woeful."

When will people realise that just because the infrastructure isn't there to take full advantage of FTTH rignt now, that's not a reason to not go ahead with it. These short sighted views continue to astonish me...it's like if back in the day, we didn't bother to link cities with telephone lines, because most people didn't have a home phone.

Surely there's the chance that by having a strong and fast national network, that the amount of content hosted locally will increase, reducing our reliance on international links. And to infer that international links won't gain any more capacity is just silly.

Just because most people aren't able to take full advantage of a fast fibre connection right now - before any cable has even been laid - isn't a reason to settle for a second best solution.

Speed, Bandwidth, and Utilisation

The argument that giving people 100Mbps broadband when the upstream pipes (particularly the international pipes) supposedly can't support it makes the presumption that everyone is going to be downloading at 100Mbps 24x7, when clearly that won't be the case (otherwise you'd need a 30 terabyte-per-month data plan).

But "fast" broadband, whether fast is 100Mbps or 50Mbps or possibly even 24Mbps (the max speed of ADSL2+) enables the introduction of new services and new service delivery models that are simply not possible in a timely fashion using slower speeds.

The argument that we should not try give households 100Mbps per second because the international links are too slow is akin to saying that households should not purchase cars because the roads would be too congested. It seems like a case of the tail wagging the dog.

Look at it this another way - a 56kbps dial-up modem can download 19Gb in a month running 24x7. Many home broadband users don't even have a 19Gb data cap, so in theory a dial-up modem should be good enough for them, shouldn't it? Well, no, it isn't, because an analysis based purely on the maximum carrying capacity of the pipe doesn't address the desire for timeliness. People want more speed because it means less waiting. Sure the line might be idle 95% of the day, but when it is called upon to deliver certain services such as Video on Demand that's when we'll see the benefits of its speed. Exactly why many people now choose broadband over dial-up.

100Mbps may be "more than necessary" at the present time for a typical home user, and that might lead us to think that ADSL2+ is still "good enough". But at least FTTP will deliver consistent speeds to everyone in its coverage area, unlike the distance-dependent ADSL technologies where there are still "haves" and "have nots" in terms of actual speeds received. Headline ADSL2+ speeds might very well be 24Mbits/second, but in reality only a very small percentage of people receive this speed, and only about 50% of ADSL2+ users achieve > 12 Mbps.

I would much rather have the "problem" of working out how to acquire more international bandwidth to satisfy users, in combination with a world-class, proactive network such as the New NBN, than the other way around.

Finally, if your connections to overseas site are "so woeful", maybe you should be looking at your ISP rather than generalising this across the whole industry. I suffer no such problems with my ISP (Internode).

wireless vs fixed

please please tell me where in fairytale land you get wireless download speeds of 21mbps? in 2years of use if i can get mine to stay around 25 to 50 kbps im happy! at the moment i am on bended knee praying that the nbn gets here sooner than later.

Wireless + Fibre

The way to go is both a wireless and fibre network. The fibre network provides the speed required for high-bandwidth applications (iptv, etc..), including the speed required to intermediate POPs (for wireless towers, etc..). The wireless network then provides users with on-the-go access to the internet.

Now when coupled with mobile IPv6, this will allow users to seamlessly roam from their fibre service at home to the wireless network at will without dropping a single connection.

As mentioned before, yes there isn't enough international uplink capacity if we were to all go 100mbit. But what you will find is that we currently don't saturate this international capacity all the time at the moment. Now, when coupled with the fact that a business is not going to upgrade their network unless there is demand for it, why would a company operating a multi-million dollar international link want to invest more into something that could potentially just end up being dark fibre.

Using the NBN we need to create the demand for bigger uplinks, that way you give the operators a reason to upgrade their network. Since this extra capacity will be used.

Waiting for the uplinks to be upgraded first, is just a waste since it will never happen.