The Broad picture: Why AAPT opposes the NBN

So, what they are saying is that a company that supplies wireless services believes the government should invest more in wireless and a company that has invested a lot of money in fibre believes the government should let them handle the fibre networks... but with some tax payer money thrown in.

Interesting.

This is a total crock. You need fixed infrastructure as well as wireless to get the optimum coverage. The copper network went in the ground approaching a centrury ago. Today we have the opportunity to deploy the latest technology that will last another 50 to 100 years. We can overlay the wireless infrastructure over the in the ground services to ensure ALL Australians can have appropriate access to the information age. Lets not poo poo, either camp but get the best for the people of Oz rather than a few egocentric CEOs

It's probably unfortunate that this was labelled so heavily as "AAPT", an organisation that has been collectively brain dead, lost its shareholders a fortune, and could hardly be given away by it's previous owners. On the other hand the key PEOPLE in the Alliance are obviously very well informed. I don't happen to agree with most of their case, but parts make sense to me.

Perhaps we forget that the country was being held to ransom by Telstra, and although an option was to bring in strong legislation to enforce competition that's a path where every government has fallen short. We don't have more duopolies controlling our spending $$$ than any other developed country because we are smart at enforcing competition legislation!!

I see nothing wrong and a lot right in a government owned wholesale infrastructure. In fact it should have been done for all digital broadcasting as well, as all we have at this stage is entrenched the position of the current broadcast players including government handouts to them - this just extends the lack of competition. The central infrastructure will open the competition.

Where I don't agree with the NBN is the massive politics and pork-barreling and the wiring up of virtually every last Australian at disproportionate cost. The Leightons of this world, digging trenches in the ground, will end up with 80% of the current cost of the NBN which seems so totally idiotic that it has become accepted.

On the other hand, Australia being one of the most urbanised countries on the planet could wire up 90% of the population for 10% of the cost. But apparently we have voted to wire up every last person and shift $39 billion (90% of the $43 billion) from schools, roads, trains, universities, dental, health, and welfare into digging trenches to nowhere.

To me that's the insane bit. We get the politicians telling us on one hand that the $70 million needed to clean up the insulation fiasco will have to come out of other budget items, as there is "no money", yet we agree to wire up Cockfighter's Creek for $39 Billion without a blink.

How can that make sense, except to the dirt diggers hanging off the NBN?

us blind NBN supporters should listen to these corporations - rather than wasting money building a first class network, it seems from the very start our government should be looking to give handouts to them - the corporations responsible for our current third-world infrastructure - so that they might merrily continue building an inferior one.

and this has to be right because they are telling us it is.

These guys are so blinded by their self interest!

It appears the Alliance is peopled by suppliers of fibre today and as it is a sellers market they do not want to be drawn into line on prices by a little competition.

I have read 2 interviews from Alliance members and in both all questions were evaded. Every response here by Mr Broads are hedged and non committal.

The questions are answered as if the home user is the only market even though the Alliance members business is in the commercial marketplace. Their arguments are to gain lobby potential designed to engender mob mentality. And to say fixed broadband is reducing is a lot of hogwash.

And all those in the background cheering in his dreams, he cannot say who, no one is even joining them!

Can you spell " S-E-L-F S-E-R-V-I-N-G ", Mr Broad ?

This is being pushed now due to politics, what a load of BS. The wireless guy said he was basing his info on the US. Obama is talking about investing in a US based NBN, because what they have is does not take care of rural folk, and a lot of them have no good access to broadband at all, and this is the model the wireless guy is pushing, well get stuffed mate.

The other thing is that a US trained executive came into Telstra, was a massive FAIL, stripped 10s of millions of dollars out of Australia, damaged Telstra badly, then left laughing all the way to the bank. All because Howard screwed the Australian public by privatising Telstra without stripping out the infrastructure / wholesale side first, to maximise the float dollars he brought in to the deal.

I think that the NBN is a step to the future, but I notice that the conservatives in the US, and the conservatives here, are making points ONLY by being spoilers. Abbott lost, Gilliard did not win, and for now, I say let's go with the NBN without the filter, and lets not privatise the NBN CO, and keep it in public hands, so everybody has to play from a level playing field.

It sure seems like the wireless guy does not want a level playing field from my reading of the article.

I hear so many detractors of the NBN lable it a Rolls Royce or as with COS "a first class network".

A network Australia wide, hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fibre, the NBN is a minimal necessary network infrastructure.

But people like the Alliance want to sit like ticks. The want to dampen customers expectations, they are not in a position put together to mtake a reasonable offering to the industry.

AAPT (owned by TNZ) is currently seeking to sell its retail business to iiNet, this leaves it as a wholesale telco company, an owner of network infrastructure including both the original AAPT network that included switches and other exchange components and more support that became part of AAPT when TNZ purchased Powertel and merged it in. Paul Broad came to AAPT from Powertel.

NBNCo is a wholesale telco, AAPT is now all but a wholesale telco competitor, so is it any wonder that Paul is Allied against NBNCO on behalf of TNZ interests, poor old TNZ now have Telstra to compete with in NZ and NBNCo to compete with in Australia.

Perhaps if AAPT had stayed in Australian ownership all those years ago (and Optus had as well) then instead an Australian owned AAPT might now be merging with NBNCo or at least sharing its network with NBNCo instead of trying to fight progress using an argument of costs for Australia's progress.

It is rather hypocritical of AAPT to speak of any perceived wasting of money by NBNCo, as that has become what AAPT does best. In the last few years AAPT have been bleeding money out of the proverbial.

And when Paul states that people have been leaving fixed broadband, he is using obfuscation to muddle the issue. What has happened is that consumers have left fixed line phone services in droves due to the Howard era of higher line rental fees to artificially prop up Telstra's value for privatisation. By definition to have fixed ADSL broadband one had to pay line rental to Telstra, On realising that fact many people moved to wireless (originally with some providers giving users unlimited data allowances for a flat monthly fee) to avoid line rental, Telstra changed the wireless internet pricing zeitgeist in an upward spiral to reign in the trend.

The other question, without disrespect to Paul Broad, is that if wireless is such a wonderful enabling technology, why the hell haven’t AAPT invested in wireless infrastructure already, to enable its current but ever shrinking customer base to have obtained better products and those mobile data services in the past, and to avoid line rental?

So is the Alliance blowing smoke in our backdoor or do they know that wireless does not actually cut it in many real world contexts.

We went from gas street lights to electric street lights, candles to electricity, telegraph to telephone, vinyl LP to CD, analog to Digital TV, analog copper phone networks to digital exchanges that enabled digital conversion of copper voice lines and voice circuits. To adequately provide data capacity for the future, ALL copper circuits end to end must be replaced by optical fibre circuits that use high-speed laser optics to carry everything. This is not rocket surgery!

A debate about the NBN is well worth the effort. $43B is a lot of money.

As a nation we already have significant fixed telco infrastructure in place, owned and operated by perfectly legitimate private enterprises who, for the most part, provide pretty reasonable services.

It is arrogance (or ignorance) that the Government thinks it can do better itself with the NBN. The role of Government should be in defining and executing the regulatory regime for competition, not creating its own monopolistic entity.

Ultimately what will the NBN provide? Faster broadband. So what. That's what Telstra / Optus / TPG / AAPT / every other ISP I've ever dealt with has provided me since the 90s.

Don't kid yourself that the Government can offer these services cheaper or more effectively. We will all pay for this in terms of the opportunity cost associated with deinvesting elsewhere, e.g. aging hospital infrastructure, higher taxes etc.

Time for a serious debate people.

It is hilarious that Paul invoked a story about 3D TV being viewed over wireless in China, in reality that demonstration was probably for an entirely different purpose such as replacing cables in a home between media devices, and not the same application as is required when dozens of broadband users are requiring their own stream of 3D IPTV data delivered by a local neighborhood multiplexed wireless tower from one source, which would still connect back to a nearby exchange using fibre.

Even if some of them consecutively watched the same IPTV channel, each would need their own unique data stream because that is the nature of tcp-ip, it does not cache at the last mile, so the data overhead per user is an enormous burden on any wireless network topology going back to the source server.

The wireless transmitter is still the bottleneck. 3D TV needs twice as much data as 2D because it uses twice as many frames, to service each eye with a unique image. Over distance with many users, only FTTP can do this, and it still will when future broadcast IP TV resolution goes to 4K (more than 4 times the data of true HD and 8 times more for 4K3D), then the wireless network would not deliver output even for one wireless connected user.
FTTP will always scale up to meet whatever future commerce will bring us.
Current wireless Internet service is the equivalent of replacing copper infrastructure with an equivalent capacity over airwaves and in limited ways and for limited distances. To provide wireless Internet services comparable in capacity and speed to that provided by FTTP is many orders of magnitude beyond any wireless technology, even that which exists in research labs.

And to imply that soon, wireless infrastructure will do what fibre network infrastructure can do, and for less, is equivalent to saying that we can soon have flying cars that will use no more fuel to operate than a land bound car would use to cover the same distance.Gravity would disagree just as the laws of physics related to wireless networking would say no to the first proposal.

Wireless is and always will be a compromise, and in future when demand of spectrum for mobile data peaks for every mobile person, it will only be available for travelling, as a mobile adjunct to fixed services. Even the last mile wireless topology will then be replaced with fibre.

Telephones slowly replaced telegraph, eventually even over great and remote distances, Mobile phones are a less reliable companion to fixed voice services which are less prone to disconnection. Wireless Fraudband is also unreliable compared to fixed broadband. But this alliance wants us to accept less than best on the premise that we will pay less now and in the future. Wireless will always cost more than FTTP because you will be billed higher for wireless data no matter what these pundits say. Just as mobile phone calls cost more than fixed line calls.
If wireless Internet could be cheap it already would be.

If this is a COMERCIAL investment. It should be properly costed. Value for money.

If this is an INFRASTRUCTURE project it should be included and funded in the government budget.

When will Conroy say which it is????????

The role of Government should be in defining and executing the regulatory regime for competition, not creating its own monopolistic entity.
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The 'entity' you speak of is broadband infrastructure - not retail. you would only get full competition on the wholesale side if you laid parallel networks right across the country and retail providers got to chose which one they would prefer to tap into. another option - retail companies laying these networks on consumer demand (ie, wholesal/retail integration), is extremely expensive, and would create the problem when alternative retailers try to access this infrastructure to create 'competition.' a third option is that wholesalers lay out networks and set bids for retailers - but still the wholesaler in question would have a monopoly on this infrastructure unless it was duplicated, regulated to somehow curtail its monopoly power etc.

thus the lack of a national approach makes either wholesale monopolies, anti-competitive vertical integration (ie, wholesaler+retailer) or duplication serious problems. and in each case, the regulatory regime will have to be negotaated or curtailed from maximising the benifit to consumers/the nation by the fact that the government will remain absolutely reliant on these providers to guarentee essential infrastructure be delivered to voters. a fibre network is pretty much like other infrastructure - we here that 'competition' exists in privatised infrastructure (ie, public transport tenders, electricity etc), but in reality this is an illusion, and in many instances a semi-regiulated monopoly is an even greater disaster.

thats why i think they should build the nbn and keep it in govt hands.

AAPT should go and talk to the NBN. They are quite open to buying fibre all ready in the ground if it is cheaper then laying it them selfs.

The coalitions plan was to duplicate the fibre that was already in the ground. That was were most of the 6 billion was going.

COS
The problem is that private companies are not taking the initiative, just like when the government created the Australian phone system. You talk of a national approach on one hand then you criticise the national approach, you talk of regulatory enforcement of approaches but the private companies would hate that kind of regulation.

Private companies are generally reactive (and are so in this arena) to customers offering lots of money to get a service.

The NBN initiative gives the framework for the market to develop, a framework no company or group has considered up to now.

Wireless just doesn't serve the same purpose. It is never going to be an answer to fixed, wired, broadband. It's a shared spectrum, can never deliver the same speeds, response times, reliability or security that a wired network can deliver.

Whether you do FTTN, FTTC, or FTTH - the reality is that one of these is almost entirely necessary. And the first two would eventually become FTTH anyway.

Is it a surprise that the CEO's of a whole bunch of wireless Internet companies have come out in support of wireless Internet? No not really, they are just trying to protect their own self interests.

Will we still need good quality wireless Internet in the future? Absolutely, the growth of smart phones, laptops and other wireless portable devices is going to continue to lead to growth in the need for wireless Internet. But wireless and wired Internet are not competing for the same market. They are complimentary to each other.

Thankfully, it looks like the NBN will go ahead as planned, the structure of the telecomms system will change to allow genuine competition with Telstra, and the proposed Internet filter will be blocked in either the House of Reps or the Senate. That's a pretty good win for IT in Australia, and the future of telecommunications in general.

"Yes, but what kind of wireless plans, in terms of price, speed and download limit, do you want to see Australia have access to?"

Answer the fricking question, Mr. Broad. it was clearly laid before you twice and both times you declined to answer directly and went off on a tangential waffle.

You want to tell us "I don’t want to look back in 15 years time and think we’ve got it all so wrong and our kids are paying enormously for broadband they can’t afford". Yet you cannot give a figure for your alternative - you havent even done a cost-benefit analysis! So assertations on NBN cost vs yours are a little premature, one might say.

im also curious about the 3d wireless. was that a 30-foot range in-house wireless ('cable replacement' wireless, like wireless USB was supposed to be)? was it DVB-H? (digital broadcast to handhelds - i.e. mobile phone resolutions, not broadcast tv resolutions?).

how many people can come along and hit that cell before the streams become unviewable - is it a one-to-many broadcast or one broadcast pipe per receiving device? (broadcast bits required differs between the two).

there are plenty of other questions around the alternative posited - thats just off the top of my head.

i would accept the idea of 'the debate we had to have' if it weren't for the fact we've been talking about FTTx since 2000 now, why is it that only when the NBN is finally an established, 'yes, this is going ahead' policy, you AAB guys pop up?

We've *been* HAVING the debate, indeed HAD significant debate on the policy all through Rudds tenure. i think you kind of missed the boat there, and by showing up at this juncture have wound up looking like spoilers at the party unhappy the cake isn't an icecream one when it gets brought out. You're (more than?) a bit behind fellas, and i think the fact that noone else seems interested in joining your alliance is an indicator youv'e left it too late.

"We are not trying to play a political game"

No, you're playing a financial game. What, not making enough money out of the new network?

The extra cost for wiring up regional areas is of highest priority. Why should someone living in a regional area have rubbish communication infrastructure, yet in the city it is years ahead. It is the same dilemma for healthcare - you must spend more per capita in regional areas than you do in urban centres. If we told regional areas that it would cost too much for a local hospital, we'd never hear the end of it. The whole point of the NBN is to give regional areas decent communications infrastructure that is not viable for a private company to provide. Furthermore communications infrastructure underpins virtually everything you do. Also, regional areas often need to be the most connected because the population and industry is spread out.

@Jason

You are horridbly misinformed.
You have most of the CBD and about 5 million homes across the country in reach of a HFC. This is a massive failure on behalf of the market and private enterprise to actually build a quality network.

This is based on two reasons, the first being the huge barrier of entry to competition as Telstra owns a majority of the network and nearly all the exchanges. Apart from a few companies Pipe, TransACT and some ISP very few have built their own fibre network outside of business clients in the CBD.

So when you and Mr Board talk about leaving it to market forces you're taking the piss. Now Mr Board is protecting the interests of the TNZ wholesale arm of AAPT. I have no idea what vested interest you have other than being politically blind.

The ultimate issue behind 4G is that its still asymetrical, has a worse drop rate than ADSL and is a multi-access broadband technology meaning that your total bandwidth/user decreases as the users increase. 3G is even worse and for the Liberal party to push that as a suitable alternative to the fibre of the NBN shows how mis-informed and idiotic they are in their approach to IT and Telecommunications.

Well I make stuff for the web for a living. I live in Sydney and I have a supposed fast broadband connection (ADSL2+) The phone exchange is probably 5 minutes walk from my house and guess what.. my so called superfast broadband manages 8Mbs no where near 24Mbs it's billed at, what a rip off

Secondly as I make stuff for the net at a University I can tell you something else.. More and more people are making stuff to upload, not just download. More students hand in their work as media not as text, they collaborate with each other across networks, yet our current networks don't upload fast. (ADSL = ASYMETRICAL digital subscriber line)

Fibre networks to the home are not about passive consumption of youtube, they are about what happens to the nature of work as the cost of fuel rises. It's about how non city based communities rural areas can have their inhabitants educated, It's about how country towns could become distributed work places for big city organisations that may gain more financially by NOT leasing CBD realestate to house hundreds of people sitting in front of ...... computers.

Build the NBN and get on with it, and just think about mobile phone blackspots and drop outs before you place all your eggs in the wireless basket.. Oh and whilst you are considering wireless... What about the unresolved issue of the health / radiation impacts of mobile phone towers.. (Before I get flamed for that last one I don't have an opinion either way, but it MUST be part of the debate)

The future we build is more than a BS accounting exercise. Howard reduced this country to an accounting exercise stranger danger paranoia

Finally given the way the private sector has set out to rort stimulus spending ( The government didn't rort it it's the CEO's like Paul Broad who baffle us with incomprehensible stuff like our mobile phone contracts and deals that really hide what it's likely to cost), so it's irrelevant wether broadband is supplied publically or privately, we will still be rorted. So lets get ripped off with a good network.

This is a last gasp attempt by vested interests working selfishly against the national interest. "People are not using the top speeds", Paul says. When you can get top speed, which is rarer than some might be aware of, that might be true. The future however, will be different.

Paul says it's a step back. I beg to differ. Telecom/Telstra, being a vertical integrated enterprise has fought regulatory changes tooth and nail simply because they have been both the road's owner and the owners of the vehicles they wanted to put on it. If anyone else wanted to put their vehicles on their road they had to pay, BIG dollars, as they still do.

Going back to that would be a disaster.

The NBN Co will build a road and hire out the space to those with the vehicles to put on it. They will all have to pay the same rate to be on that road. This is a vastly different model to that Paul speaks of.

As for the usage of available speed; when telephony, free to air TV, a myriad of Pay TV providers and technology advancements occur to enable a HD quality experience via the web to communicate with family, friends, your local club committee meetings, etc, people will demand at least 100mbps. They'll need it.

They'll need very much faster speeds to access the high end graphics that will be possible to both send and receive in the course of their entertainment or the home run business or job.

Companies like AAPT ought to be thinking about their server infrastructure capabilities. They will be in the business of providing such facilities to content providers for a fee per hit.

If the Group 3 Rugby League competition wants to sign up subscribers to the broadcast of their matches, they will not want to invest in the large service capacity they'll need. They will be looking for a company to provide them with that. In today's money why not $5 per subscriber to that service? Can group 3 sign up 3-4 thousand? I think yes. That's $15k - $20k per month from one client. Why not all country rugby league? Why not the A League, why not the AFL?
Paul and his ilk ought to be thinking of the alternative because theirs is short sighted.

Frankly I've getting annoyed and dismayed at the lack of vision, fore-thought and simple greed being shown in regards to infra structure in this country, NBN included.
Frankly $43 billion is cheap for a decent class of network infrastructure.
Wireless has never been and will not in the foreseeable future be any where near enough to cater for the current and growing network connections of the community.

And as for someone who lives in a regional area and travels to work in even more regional areas and who often relies on the current crop of wireless technology, its never worked correctly. I've been in locations where I've had a supplied coverage map from both major telecoms and could only get a signal if i stood on a roof and faced a certain direction and hold my breathe, while the maps were saying perfect coverage.
I've had clients signed up to a new wireless plan with promises of faster access speeds only to find that they cant get the reception they need to get past dial up speeds and they've been locked into a contract which is going to cost a fortune to break and then have to pay for something else on top of that to get something which is topping out at 200k.

frankly major decisions like infra structure should be removed from businesses and politicians and given to a committee who can only weigh the decision up based on merits and cost (as opposed to the value of) is way down the list.