With the recent announcements of new consoles from both Sony & Microsoft, I’ve had some time to think about what this means for me. Both are offering powerful units, not quite on par with PCs, but much better than the current generation. Both offer similar features in so far as components (video card/CPU), so there’s really not much separating the two consoles as much as last generation.

Last generation there were marked differences between the two “serious gamer” consoles (sorry Wii/Wii U owners, can’t be serious when your hardware is 1 generation behind), yet they seemed to level out, with Microsoft taking the early days & Sony making it up in the end. I do feel this was mainly due to the PS3′s price drop from the ludicrous launch pricing.

I think both manufacturers learnt from this generation & built upon this for the next generation, although both took different things away.

Sony has looked to integrate their products with remote play features, worked on their store, & even revamped their party/game voice chat, something that many of us hated the PS3 for.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has gone full tilt restrictions. As many are saying, Microsoft have looked to create a media device with gaming capabilities, rather than a gaming console with media capabilities. For all the Xbox 360′s failings, when it came to gaming (especially with friends), it did it right. This new Xbox One (that quickly became Xbone, did no one think of this in the marketing department) is a lesson in how to loose as many potential customers as quickly as you can before launch.

The main features, while neat, are media related: 4k video, better integration with OTT/IPTV services, TV tuners, etc. These are features that I had been hoping would be included, as having to run a TV tuner in a computer then share  it with a console can be flaky at times. The problem is, while the Xbox One seems to get media right, it gets a whole heap of important things wrong.

Where to start? There’s the creepy way the inbuilt-unable-to-turn-off Kinect (multi-camera & IR light for controller-less gaming, with microphone) monitors what you are doing; or that there is NO power button, you tell it to turn on (does that mean it’s always listening?), or the convoluted way to lend games to friends & families; or even the ambiguous “it’s up to the publishers whether they restrict 2nd hand games”; & finally, the biggest one, the phoning home (via the internet) every 24hrs or you can’t play games.

That’s a long list of really weird, & downright creepy “features”. They have been lambasted from one end of the Internet to the other, with gamers of all walks joining the dogpile. Things became worse for Microsoft at E3 when President of the Interactive Entertainment Business, Don Mattrick, was being interviewed by SpikeTV & stated “fortunately we have a product for people who aren’t able to get some form of connectivity, it’s called Xbox 360″. Talk about trollbait, it’s almost on the level of the Steve Jobs said ‘you’re holding it wrong’ about the iPhone 4′s antenna problems.

As a long time Xbox gamer I feel that the 360 will be my last Xbox if more of these stupid restrictions & creeptures (creepy features) aren’t changed. Microsoft has capitulated on the need to phone home, so I feel it will only be a matter of time before they do the same on the rest of the poor decisions.

Time will tell, but at this stage, Microsoft have made a huge mistake in an area where revenue is growing rapidly, unlike the traditional Microsoft divisions.

Today I was presented with a problem by a twitter follower: Is broadband a commercial term or generic? Interesting question for me, but not for some. I did my best to answer the question in a simple yet technical way.

Sufficed to say, an uproar started, I mean, this is twitter, & I withdrew from the conversation. It got me thinking: many people have no basic understanding of terminology that determines their lives. Especially something like broadband, which has morphed into a commercial term.

In the beginning, it was a term to describe services that use a wide (generally multiple) freequency range(s) for their services (a broad band of frequencies used in the transmission). As opposed to narrowband, denoting services using a single freequency. It has no relationship with the speed, just the way the communication system works.

We generally don’t think of local networks in a broad/narrowband sense these days, it’s more about the speed of the card (10Mbps, 100Mbps, 1000Mbps, or, if you’re lucky, 10000Mbps) & the type of connector (CATV/CATVI or fibre).

With this in mind, bandwidth makes a little more sense. Bandwidth has come to mean the down/up speed  of a service. The bandwidth available to my current service is around 11Mbps down & 0.85Mbps up. The latency to the server is 23ms, I’ll talk about that shortly. The key is, my ADSL2/2+ service synchronises at 13Mbps yet the attainable speed is about 15% less than sync speed.

That’s a rather large drop in sync speed vs actual speed: thus is the nature of networking. Every point in a network creates latency & bandwidth reductions based on what it is & how well it’s functioning. If I were to do a similar test on my home (1Gbps) network, attainable speeds for a single user are closer to 500Mbps (depending on server, load, & what HDD’s I’m using).

When it comes to an Internet connection’s bandwidth, what affects latency are knows, unknowns, & known unknowns. For different techs these can be vastly different depending on what is being used. The main 3 technologies (copper, wireless & fibre) can give varying results when different unknowns, & known unknowns are applied.

For example, an unknown on fibre may be a cut cable, with wireless magnetic interference, & with copper water damage. And again: a known unknown might be obsolescence of endpoint equipment with fibre, usage fluctuations with wireless, & with copper it might be crosstalk. We know what might be there, but there are always ways bandwidth is being degraded on the last mile of a connection by both the environment & our own actions.

The bigger point of bandwidth is to look at both sides of the coin, with not only download speeds, but upload speeds being taken into consideration. To illustrate the point, the original satellite services offered by Telstra were what’s known as unidirectional satellite: your download was satellite, but your upload was dialup. Both bandwidth & latency were severely affected by this, & amongst (computer) gamers we would, unjustly, deride teams with satellite players. Even being on dialup was better than satellite for gaming.

But I digress, the differential between download & upload speed – 512Kbps download, 28.8kbps (but generally far less, closer to 14.4kbps) up – created both latency & usage problems. One only has to think of the data required to fetch webpage data & images from sites to realise how terrible that would be.

While things are slightly better with ADSL, we’re still talking about (maximum) 1Mbps upload speeds. Quite crippling when you think about peer to peer connections.

One thing as an infrastructure geek I’ve learnt is that the slowest point in a network is the speed of the network, if both parties are sending (TX) at 1Mbps but receiving (RX) at 24Mbps, the speed of the network is still 1Mbps. A point illustrated beautifully at work the other day.

I can normally move files to servers at around 100Mbps, we have a good link to our Co-Lo provider, & our net is served from there. There’s only minor latency between working on a local server, or a remote server. Alas, all is not well in the land of Sortius, we have one last site that the connection to the network is ADSL. No doubt around 10Mbps, however the uplink is 512Kbps (0.5Mbps). Using this is barely possible via Windows Remote Desktop. The server refused to download a file & an IT manager remarked “It’d be quicker for you to ride a bike”. So a massively fast connection made redundant by a slow upload speed.

This is not to say if a connection isn’t capable of massive upload speeds is unworkable for everyone. A wireless connection may be perfect for someone who only checks email & browses the web, DSL & cable, for now, satisfy those wanting more from the Internet, & the future is looking like a fibre dominated world. The key is that the future doesn’t bode well for technologies that aren’t capable of ramping up bandwidth rapidly, with much of the fastest copper connections in lab stages with speeds far below fibre.

The future of the Internet is fairly clear to geeks & the like: we can see it as a multi-directional broadcast medium, rather than the current unidirectional system. The key to capitalising on this is understanding that smart management of bandwidth, latency, & of course, affordability, will ensure everyone is capable of creating & experiencing what content they want.

One thing to remember is that we all use our networks our own way, it has become part of humanity to be part of this greater grid. The key is not thinking “what’s best for me”, it’s thinking what’s best for all of us.

But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.

Matthew 12:36-37

I thought I’d start off with a quote from Tony Abbott’s favourite book, or at least he likes to pretend it is. With the recent furor from the Liberal & National parties over Prime Minister Julia Gillard giving a speech taking direct aim at Tony Abbott’s rampant sexism & misogyny (yes, another one), I’d look into Tony’s past to show how little regard he has for women.

Abbott, as we all have seen, has trouble convincing women that he’s not a misogynist. He’s used his wife, his kids, & even Liberal party MP’s to defend his thumping record on women. Most, if not all, these speeches enter the realm of apologist, distracting people from the “Real Tony” to build a picture of a soft loving person.

It seems that the press gallery are happy to lap this up, if not spruik Tony’s credentials as a nice guy. His “Tony I Know” campaign, while derided by much of the public, was front page news.

So who is the “Real Tony®”? A man who respects women, or a rampant misogynist? Well, you decide when reading the following quotes from Tony Abbott’s own blog on abortion:

• Abortion may not be the precise moral equivalent of infanticide but it’s not just removing an inconvenient wart or cyst either. (07/08/04)
  
• To a pregnant 14-year-old struggling to grasp what’s happening, for example, a senior student with a whole life mapped out or a mother already failing to cope under difficult circumstances, abortion is the easy way out. (17/03/04)
• But because I had been audacious enough to suggest that 100,000 abortions a year, more or less, was a national tragedy, that there was an abortion pandemic gripping Australia, I wasn’t to be trusted with this power. (09/01/09)
• A serious debate about fertility might force us to rethink our attitudes to permissive divorce and abortion and recognise them for what they are: a concession to human frailty rather than a badge of social liberation. (03/08/02)
• There is actually a good reason why Christians should speak with one voice on life issues but not on economic ones. The sanctity of life is a higher order moral issue than the promotion of social justice. (06/07/07)
•  I should state that to me abortion is something that I would rather not see. (21/08/02)
• But in this debate I think it is worth stating my view that the best that can be said of abortion on demand is that it is a concession to human frailty rather than a badge of liberation (21/08/02)
• I’ve chosen to run this risk because, as all sides now seem to agree, 88,000 abortions a year (on the most reliable figures) are far too many. In my view, abortion is a tragedy, not a crime. Still it’s worth trying to bring these huge numbers down. If these initiatives help women to make genuine personal choices rather than socially-conditioned ones; if they help women in an almost impossibly difficult situation to feel less alone, they will ultimately be one of the Howard Government’s more significant achievements. (02/08/06)
• Obviously, my views on [abortion] are well known. But I have no plans for any change whatsoever in this area. (30/07/10)
• I suspect that Malcolm is just as unhappy about the numbers of abortions as you are or as I am. He was stressing, though, that – in his view – it was ultimately a matter for the woman concerned. It was to help women to understand that they had more than one “choice” that the Howard Government set up the pregnancy support hotline and pregnancy support counselling. Let’s hope that in many more situations, the prospect of a child will seem more like a gift and less like a burden. (21/11/08)

While not earth shattering revelations, this does point toward a man who has disdain for women seeking abortions as opting for the “easy way out” & somehow being less of a woman than someone prepared to raise a child under difficult, if not impossible, circumstances. The idea that an abortion is the “easy way out” sickens me & devalues any woman who has had an abortion, no matter the circumstances.

The problems with sexism & misogyny in the Liberal & National parties don’t seem to stop at Abbott, with Pyne & Hockey well documented as following the PM shouting/singing sexist slurs at the PM. Today, even Mal Brough had to admit to some rampant misogyny at one of his own fundraisers in the form of a menu.

Just spoke to Mal Brough. The offensive Liberal menu is real. From an fundraiser for him in Easter.

— Latika Bourke (@latikambourke) June 12, 2013

The admission by Brough that he served up “Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail – Small Breasts, Huge Thighs, & A Big Red Box” shows that these people are not prepared to respect women, let alone the current PM. Brough is claiming ignorance in the matter, apologising with the almighty “but…” attached, denying any authority over the approval of a menu for a dinner he was running. Not only that, Joe Hockey claims to have “never seen the menu”, yet was the guest of honour.

I’m not sure how Hockey orders his food, but I generally use a menu to help when deciding what to eat.

Anyone suggesting that the PM’s attack on Abbott & the Coalition’s misogyny is without basis must first take advice from Abbott & judge them on their past.

[UPDATE]: ABC 702 Sydney have interviewed the former venue worker who spotted Mal Brough’s menu.

With the recent announcement that the Coalition won’t be touching the last 500m of the copper network, this article may be moot, however closer inspection of the Coalition’s co-funding model for FTTH is needed.

Hidden within the Liberal party’s broadband policy is a little gem called “co-funded fibre”. On the face of it, this seems like a good idea: allow “state or local governments, utilities or investors” to pay for half of a FTTH deployment in an area they feel needs it & the government will pay the other half.

“Wonderful,” I hear you shout, “surely my ISP/council/local/state government will be onto this straight away!” Not so! Co-funding will only be made available if it is “commercially or operationally infeasible”, and even then, “NBN Co may refuse any co-funded proposal that is commercially or operationally infeasible, provided a written explanation is provided to the originator and NBN Co shareholder Ministers.”

So essentially, unless it can make money AND the board of NBN Co AND the relevant Minister agrees to it, you won’t be getting FTTH. This does not bode well for any possible FTTH co-funding, essentially limiting it to areas with high socioeconomic indicators, leaving the poor to pay the full cost for “fibre on demand”.

Any deployment that gives preferences to the rich while punishing the poor is doing the exact opposite of what any NBN was intended to do: improve speeds across the board. If anything, it will lead to digital ghettos in some of the highest population density areas of Australia, further disadvantaging the poor while rewarding the rich.

As I’ve long stated in blog & on Twitter, running a mix of wired technologies will set many areas back 20 years in the digital world, with them relying on a crumbling network to receive “high speed” broadband.

There is no justification for the vague language & seemingly cruel policy of refusing FTTH co-funding for low socioeconomic areas, if anything it breeds inequality in a world where the poor rely heavily on the internet.

This may all be moot with Turnbull now stating that they will avoid touching the last 500m of the network due to asbestos. This casts doubt on co-funded fibre, fibre on demand & the “fibre extensions” that Turnbull has claimed will come. This also casts into doubt the requirement (listed in the Coalition’s policy) that all VDSL2 nodes need to be ready to upgrade to fibre:

Where NBN Co extends fibre beyond an exchange but not to user premises (i.e. deploys FTTN) it will be required to plan and build in readiness for future upgrades that take fibre further into the field. All FTTN designs must be upgradeable.

This is at odds with what Turnbull claimed last night on Lateline, however getting him to be honest rather than use weasel (no offence to weasels, they’re quite awesome) words to get out of commitments is impossible.

There is little left in a policy designed to create massive technological disparity between the poor & the rich that hasn’t been thrown out the window, so for now we can call the policy dead in the water.

Recent reports of asbestos being mishandled by contractors doing remediation work for Telstra has become the distraction-du-jour for our ever (un)vigilant media. With both journalists & the Coalition attempting to use asbestos as a political wedge, the disingenuity of the outrage from Abbott is there for all to see.

The basic fact is: asbestos was used a LOT before 1986 in the telecommunications network. The Coalition has known about this since at least 2001, & have fielded questions during question time on their knowledge of asbestos in the telecommunications network.

So why the faux concern after so many years of ignoring the problem, to the extent that the Coalition sold of Telstra with full knowledge that there would be asbestos claims in years to come? Simple, to distract from the real problems with the Coalition’s broadband plan.

With Turnbull attempting to blame NBN Co for Telstra not enforcing basic asbestos handling guidelines among their contractors, & Abbott ruling out any work on the last 500m of the network, we can see how much thought is being put into policy.

TAbbott just ruled out any option of voluntary fibre to the home as pits and pipes "will not be touched" over last 500m.He's making it up!

— Robert Oakeshott MP (@OakeyMP) June 4, 2013

Turnbull’s performance on Lateline last night exemplifies the hypocrisy of Liberal party MPs. Not only did he shirk the Coalition’s responsibility with regard asbestos on Telstra’s network, he went on to claim that the asbestos in the ground was somehow NBN Co’s fault. There was some rambling about mismanagement, even though NBN Co has no control over Telstra.

The hypocrisy didn’t stop there, with Turnbull claiming Bill Shorten has been creating a “national panic” & that the Liberal party’s response was measured. Which is laughable considering Turnbull then went on to paint any remediation of pit/pipe infrastructure as some national disaster in waiting.

When called on this, Turnbull, in his usual arrogant way, rebuked Alberici with nonsensical bullshit. Claiming that cutting into pit & pipe to construct cabinets wouldn’t create any asbestos risk.

Turnbull has all but confirmed that the Liberal party have no intention of upgrading Australia’s communications network to FTTP. This goes against the Liberal party’s own policy documents which call for co-funded FTTP deployments where economically viable.

That Turnbull is able to get away with lying in such an obvious way on national TV is a disgrace, he should be lambasted for his uninformed rhetoric.

So what does this policy shift mean? To put it quite simply, the Coalition will not be doing any copper remediation when installing FTTN, they will not allow technicians to work on the worst part of the network, you will not get “fibre on demand”, nor will co-funding, as spelt out in the Liberal party’s policy, be available.

Essentially any targets set by the Coalition’s policy can be thrown out, as without remediation on the final 500m of the network there is no way that 25Mbps is possible, let alone 50Mbps is possible on FTTN. Not only that, if you do have a fault, the Coalition have essentially banned any repairs on your service.

This kind of knee jerk populist policy modification is the epitome of stupidity. To allow emotion to overrule sensible responses serves only to buy votes, but not to actually resolve long running problems with our telecommunications network.

If we look at the history of the Liberal party when it comes to asbestos, it’s clear that any concern now is just lip service to buy votes. Tony Abbott himself refused to turn up to a meeting at his own electoral office with Bernie Banton, claiming the campaign to get a mesothelioma drug on the PBS was a “stunt”, Julie Bishop attempted to block compensation from mesothelioma victims, John Howard tried his best to hang on to James Hardie donations, the list goes on.

For anyone within Liberal party ranks to claim that somehow they are concerned about asbestos in the ground is laughable. This is all a stunt to cover up how poorly received the Liberal party’s policy is.

The only way Abbott & Turnbull can win the communications debate is to claim that less asbestos will be disturbed under the Coalition’s plan, that their plan will be quicker, & that it’s “good enough” for Australia. None of this is the case. It would be nice if a journo pulled their finger out & called Turnbull on his blatant lies. I have tried to get responses from Turnbull’s office on any of his policy, but all I seem to get is spam about how awesome Turnbull is for doing the St Vinnies sleep out.

While I do support St Vinnies, that’s not what I emailed about.

We are rapidly reaching “peak derp” when it comes to the Coalition’s broadband policy, and as we have seen over the last few weeks, Turnbull will do everything he can to reach this rating. No lie is big enough, no hypocrisy sickening enough for this man with no plan.

Just a bit of a gloat post, I was mentioned last Friday (30/05/13) in Senate Estimates by Senator Conroy. Quite chuffed that I’ve been mentioned in parliament.

I do like Senator Cameron’s (Chair) comment in there. Yes Doug, being a geek is a badge of honour!

Two weeks ago I emailed Malcolm Turnbull to get details on the Coalition’s broadband policy & have yet to hear back. Due to his inability to answer the questions within an acceptable timeframe I am now force to publish the letter with no reply.

It’s a sad day when even the basics of a policy can’t or won’t be clarified by a Shadow Minister. The email is as follows:

Dear Mr Turnbull,

 I am writing to follow up on some claims made in the Coalition’s Broadband Policy document & the background document associated with the policy. I currently write for my own blog (http://sortius-is-a-geek.com/), Independent Australia, Australians for Honest Politics & New Matilda, & wish to have clarification before publish an article.

• When costing the policy, was the cost of upgrading to vectoring included in the cost?
• The move from 25Mbps to 50Mbps during the 2nd phase has me puzzled, is this happening via remediation or by deploying vectoring to every node based service?
• How many nodes will your network comprise of? & if this hasn’t been taken into account, how can your policy be costed?
• At what rate will your policy need to deploy nodes & how will these rates be achieved?
• What will the total cost of moving from VDSL2 to VDSL2 with vectoring to FTTP cost? Has this been taken into account prior to developing your policy?
• How much of the copper network will need to be replaced to run VDSL2? What portion of Australia’s copper network has pairs not compatible (below 0.40mm diameter/26AWG) with VDSL2?
• Have you discussed the challenges with deploying a VDSL network with TransACT? Were the problems they faced with Telstra’s copper taken into account? Were you aware TransACT had to run their own copper to deliver VDSL (not even VDSL2)?
• What is the return on investment for your policy?
• What will happen if your policy is enacted & the budget is blown? Will more funds be assigned to NBN Co?
• Are you able to provide a complete cost breakdown of your policy such as cost per node, cost to upgrade to FTTP, maintenance costs, etc?
• Has the societal impact of your policy been taken into account? 

Your prompt reply would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Kieran Cummings

Over the past week Malcolm Turnbull has made some very misleading, to the point of deliberate deception, statements on both the cost of connecting to the NBN & the rollout footprint of the Coalition’s FTTN plan. Both statements were designed to cast doubt on the viability of FTTH without any evidence to support this.

Firstly, let’s look at Turnbull’s claim that NBN FTTH connections are not free. Well, there’s not much to be said on this other than people are not being charged to have FTTH installed. This has been clearly stated on the NBN Co’s website since it went live, the only way Turnbull could get this so wrong is he is intending to deliberately mislead voters.

This is in contrast to the Coalition’s plan, which users will be forced to pay for FTTH services & to have central splitters installed if they want to take full advantage of VDSL2. The costs associated with an FTTH install are still a bit muddy, however looking at BT’s estimated costs, it could be upwards of $6000 if you don’t take into account labour & device cost differences between the UK & Australia. The average connection would more than likely sit around the $3000 & $5000 mark, as these will be users sitting outside the 500m sweet spot for 50Mbps VDSL2.

The next claim by Malcolm Turnbull was over the weekend where he claimed that under the Coalition’s plan there would be more premises connected to fixed line services. How Turnbull is going to do this while carbon copying the NBN’s rollout footprint I have no idea. Maybe it’s the fact Turnbull is again misleading voters into thinking they will get fixed line services when they will be delivered as wireless services.

There is no way that Turnbull can increase the number of fixed line broadband services without seriously compromising the costs set out in his own policy. If we look at a presentation by Bevan Slattery, Managing Director & Co-Founder of PIPE Networks, gave at a CommsDay event in 2008 (amusing that this is where it came from) slamming Labor’s plan to deploy an FTTN solution (at the time VDSL2 on 12Mbps), the costs associated with the final few percent of the population grow exponentially. The cost differential between 95% of the population & 97% of the population receiving 12Mbps VDSL2 was almost double. Keep in mind, these are 1500m+ loop lengths & only guaranteeing 12Mbps.

For Turnbull to increase the fixed line rollout by even 1% of the population we would see massive increases in costs, so any claim by Turnbull that an increase in the rollout footprint is possible under the Coalition’s plan is again misleading. Seeing as Turnbull put his name to the policy, this has to be a deliberate deception to bring in votes from rural areas. The same rural areas who are against the Coalition’s plan.

We can expect more claims like this from Turnbull in the lead up to the September election, with him banking on the fact most voters have not read, nor will double check, his policy. We can only hope that journalists pull their finger out & do some basic fact checking before publishing comments like this. I won’t beholding my breath for Politifact Australia to follow these claims up, nor for them to find the claims as “Pants on Fire” in their “Truth-o-Meter”.

In my dealings with technology over the years, one thing I’ve noticed is that the simpler an argument is made for a specific technology, the easier it is to make a wrong decision in acquiring said technology. There is no greater sin among geeks & techies than to ignore the finer detail of an argument, the technicalities are generally what get you into hot water in the end. Of recent years, with broadband being at the forefront of the political debate, simplification does seem to reign supreme.

The major problem with prosecuting the case for faster broadband in Australia is that many of the people making the decisions on what plan is best (voters) find it difficult to understand some of the nuances of the debate, so people, including myself, resort to simplistic arguments. This is not aided by social media, as short, to the point, arguments are more digestible than a long winded nuanced argument that may be lost on many readers.

A good example of this is the recent announcement by Samsung that they have developed a networking interface that will be a candidate for 5G. Twitter was abuzz with “NBN out of date” tweets saying that “5G was here” & lauding the 1Gbps speeds (over 2km mind you) as an “fibre killer”. Sadly, these people were wrong. The oversimplification by many news outlets to describe the new interface as 5G was wrong. Not just a little wrong, but completely wrong.

The research Samsung (and Ericsson for that matter) are doing is developing interfaces that may be submitted to the ITU to be considered for 5G. Not the same as 5G, considering the ITU haven’t finalised the 5G standard. There’s many examples in tech of R&D that never made it out of the lab, or if they do, are never used. In the end, candidates for 5G may never be utilised due to frequencies used or transmission problems.

A good example of this was when LightSquared attempted to use the 1525-1559 MHz frequency range for a hybrid LTE-satellite service. Due to the frequency range butting up against GPS’s frequency range, it caused large amounts of interference & was canned.

The same can be said of comparing British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom & the NBN. Both BT’s & DT’s network started in a much better position than any telco in Australia’s is in now. They had decent copper running past a majority of premises, they have a massive workforce capable of deploying such a network, & the population densities of their cities dwarf Australia’s sparse cities.

If we look at the BT’s deployment, even Sydney (~2000/km²) or Melbourne’s (~1500/km²) population density doesn’t compare to the top 136 cities in the UK, with the top 120 being more than double that of Melbourne.

So how can the cost of BT’s rollout be compared to the NBN? Well, it can’t. Costs associated with the rollout will always be lower when population densities are so different, & the network is already in such good shape to handle 17MHz frequencies.

Looking at Deutsche Telekom we can see similar, albeit less stark, contrasts between Australia & Germany: higher population densities, low attenuation copper, & a network that has already had heavy investment over the last decade. Something interesting to note is that when DT deployed their FTTN network to 10 million customers (just 2 million more than the Coalition’s plan intends to connect), they needed to build 330 000 nodes. Yes, that’s 5x the number Turnbull intends in a country where the urban population density is more than double that of Australia. The reason for doing so was to keep loops short enough to support 25Mbps services, as Turnbull wants to do.

So we can see, once we dig deeper in comparing technologies & deployments around the world that using them as a case to support not deploying FTTP we can see that not everything is as simple as cost. There are many hidden costs that don’t seem to have been taken into account by the Coalition in their policy document, which leads me to believe that the policy was cooked up overnight to appease the many detractors of the Coalition’s lack of policy.

I have put a few questions to Turnbull a week ago about much of the detail that is lacking in the policy & have yet to hear back from him. It’s concerning that journalists have not pulled Turnbull up on the obvious differences between Australia & the UK/Germany, nor have they questioned the lack of detail on how many cabinets or how much of the copper network would need to be replaced. Without these details, the policy isn’t worth the paper it is written on.

It’s interesting to note, after being interviewed by a journalist recently, their reaction to much of the information they had collated from many interviews was “the more I find out, the more complex it all seems”. Giving simple comparisons, or making simple arguments, ignores the complexities involved with deciding the best technology for the NBN. Unfortunately the complexities do mean people have to learn about some of the finer points of networking, things such as latency, upload bandwidth, line attenuation, & copper gauges.

Many will not bother & will just parrot what their favourite political party is saying, however the NBN should transcend political affiliations to deliver the best possible solution to service Australia well into the future.

Of recent days it has become increasingly apparent even to the layman that Malcolm Turnbull’s broadband policy is a dud. There are no redeeming features (it’s not cheap, it won’t be deployed faster, & the cost/benefit of the policy is hard to see in a positive light) & Turnbull is refusing to answer deeply technical questions on the policy that should be instantly answerable, if not in the policy itself. Even Seven’s Sunrise was in on the dogpile of anti-Coalition broadband policy, their only criticism being that the rollout isn’t quick enough.

While they may not know why the plan is destined to fail, there is definitely a feeling of “why bother” when it comes to saving so little to deploy such a step back in technology.

The biggest hurdle for the Coalition’s plan is to convince technical experts that the Coalition can break the laws of physics & deliver a minimum of 25Mbps to every Australian (& 50Mbps to 90% of Australia). This will be a hard case to build as there is so much evidence to show that these speeds would not be viable in Australia. Even as far back as 2004, Telstra, then under the direction of Ziggy Switkowski, stated that they had no interest in trialling, let alone deploying, VDSL2 to Australia, stating that they “see fibre to the premises as the most likely technology to support very high speed access services of the future”. Yep, that’s 9 years ago that Telstra had no interest in using copper to deliver very high speed broadband.

Why would they say this? Is it that they know what’s deployed in the network & realise that they’d see little improvement over ADSL/ADSL2? Of course it is. Telstra well know that the copper deployed is just not up to the task of running VDSL, let alone VDSL2, & it’s not just because of faults.

The reality is that little of Australia’s copper on the distribution side (what matters for FTTN) of the network is over the 0.64mm diameter cable (aka: 22 AWG) that VDSL2 requires, much of it is in the 0.40mm & below class, with some newer areas having 0.50mm deployed. The only places I’ve come across with 0.64mm & above cable are rural areas. Most of the 0.64mm & 0.90mm in the bush is long line PSTN with loading coils. Essentially the higher gauge was used to extend a phone line out to a farmstead or the like.

The main reason for doing this is the cost of copper, Telstra couldn’t afford to deploy 0.64mm over 0.40mm due to being more than twice the weight per metre, that’s a lot more cost in both cabling & transportation. Essentially what Telstra (or Telecom or even PMG) did decades ago is the same thing the Coalition are doing now: saving money at the cost of future-proofing. While it may have been prudent in a phone-only world, the world of high speed networking takes no prisoners when it comes to myopic deployment of networks.

Having looked into BT’s solutions & read what experiences many are having with their FTTC network, it’s clear that the same solution just doesn’t fit into Australia’s telecommunications environment. In the UK, those that are able to achieve higher speeds have almost no attenuation on their lines. Looking through the DSL Reports forum, we can see many UK customers posting their speeds & line attenuation. These real world examples show how low attenuation really does have to be to achieve anything close to BT’s “up to” limit of 79Mbps.

Even with line attenuation of 7 dB, users are still not able to break 70Mbps, leading me to believe that 50Mbps will be laughably impossible. Looking at the attenuation of the cable gauges deployed in Australia, we can see that even without taking in the dB loss from joints in the cable, loop lengths will have to be tiny to even achieve 25Mbps.

0.30mm = 30 dB/km
0.40mm = 25 dB/km
0.50mm = 20 dB/km
0.64mm = 15 dB/km
0.90mm = 10 dB/km

These are approximate dB/km measures & assume mid range cable (not the highest quality) to compensate for older infrastructure. So, we can see that in countries like the UK & Germany, with their mostly 0.64mm cabling, are sitting near the low-attenuation end of the above list, averaging around 7.5dB for a 500m copper run. With this amount of attenuation you will receive just under 70Mbps at 500m, not too shabby for a copper line service.

By adding in connectors (~0.5db loss per termination point, joints can be even higher) & the true state of Australia’s copper cabling, we can assume that the speed vs distance quoted on most VDSL2 profile graphs are 1/2 to 1/3 the distance quoted. So in the graph on the left, we can see that with a line attenuation of 13.8dB/km, 25Mbps speeds are achievable at the 3000ft (900m) mark & below. If we modify the speed to represent actual line attenuation in Australia, that number comes out closer to 25Mbps @ ~380m from the node. That’s quite a small run considering to get to the pit out the front is around 20m from the first socket into the house.

With this in mind, it’s easy to see why telecommunications professionals are up in arms about the claims put forward by Turnbull. There’s few options for a base speed of 25Mbps to be achievable, both being rather expensive.

Firstly, the loop length of all services can be kept under 400m by deploying more cabinets. The amount needed for every copper service in Australia to be on no more than 400m is hard to judge, but with the estimate of 60 000 nodes required for a “less than 1km” loop length (as Turnbull has said previously), less than 400m could mean over 100 000 cabinets.

Secondly, the copper can be upgraded to 0.64mm diameter or above cable. This would make little sense as the same cable Turnbull is claiming could be used but is being ignored by the ALP’s NBN would not be used by the Coalition’s NBN.

Both solutions would increase the cost of an FTTN deployment by magnitudes, & neither would be a future-proof solution.

The more logical option for Turnbull is to revise down the minimum speeds & essentially trash his own policy, all under the guise of “better economic management”. If it is good economic management to knowingly deceive voters by claiming your substandard plan for broadband in Australia is a viable alternative to the current plan, then I’m at a loss. As I demonstrated recently, the upgrade to VDSL2 & then vectoring will impose far more of a financial burden on the government than going straight to FTTP will,  & adding extra costs like increasing the node density and/or replacing  much of the copper, does nothing to convince me that the Coalition’s plan is viable at all.

In an ideal telecommunications environment a decade ago VDSL would have made sense. To attempt to deploy VDSL2 in a degraded network, the projected budget & performance of the network will suffer to the extent that this folly will be remembered for generations as “when Australia’s telecommunications were set back a decade”. There will be no easy fix once upwards of 60 000 cabinets have been deployed, we will be stuck with a lemon that we will pay dearly for in decades to come.