Because that’s not what experience shows. The last time I checked, fibre that’s been in service for more than four decades was showing no signs of degradation. Nobody really knows how long fibre will last, but many commentators go with a century.
As Quigley said in Senate Estimates:
“ We speak to the manufacturers of fibre. They simply do not know how long the fibre will last because they can see no mechanism by which it would degrade-unlike copper … ”
You fear that something better might come along. OK, if that happens, we stop the fibre and start doing whatever the something is. At present, there’s no sign of your feared ‘something’. We can only go with what we know. Allowing ourselves to be paralysed by fear of the unknown is not an option. There’s too much that we don’t know.
We may well hit a cost wall or run out of time. Some premises, we might not get to. On the other hand, we might get to every premises in the nation. As it stands, there’s only one way to find out - and the cost is not a thing to fear.
Given the time-frame, it’s quite possible that the network will finance its own construction (provided it’s kept in public ownership). In fact, the potential is such that network income will probably need protection from predation. As I said:
This discussion encourages analogy with the national, state and local roads networks.
The Internet in many ways is one of the roadways for the future, if not more immediately.
99+% of the nations premises have access to the front gate on sealed roads. The general speed limits are 100kph, with local areas dropping to 50kph.
The highway and roads network provides an approximately equal level of service. A rural residence is not limited to travelling at 5kph and a 500kg max vehicle weight to travel to the nearest Capital. Why should access to the internet be treated differentially?
The cost of the ribbons of bitumen Criss crossing rural Australia have never been charged directly to the local residents. If that were true they would still be puddle and dust ridden rutts suitable for 4WD only.
It’s a poor argument not to extend the fibre internet or an equivalent level of service to a similar number of properties, on the public purse. It simply requires a plan, time frame and a commitment from government?
Argument by analogy is weak and unconvincing at the best of times. You can twist it any way you like and the outcome of one argument may or may not be the same for the analogy drawn.
For example, in my region there are:
private roads that are gravel and full of holes and barely passable when wet,
council maintained gravel roads that vary from poor to quite good,
council maintained sealed roads that vary from poor to quite good,
one lane highways
multi lane highways
I could say this represents the range of network speeds available in regional areas. It is nothing of the sort but there is an analogy.
In the instance of the NBN comparing Satellite with FTTP is about as practical and useful as a string of porters carrying luggage on a jungle path vs a 6 lane Motorway and a fleet of B-double long haul trucks.
Read either way you might like.
Perhaps those near the motorways should give up their B-doubles and hire porters. Motorways make great walking paths if you can remove the traffic? Only joking.
I would not suggest 100% fibre is practical either.
The original objective of this particular topic targeted the cost of extending fibre beyond the NBN’s limited rollout. It questioned/challenged the real cost of the fibre rollout and asked what it might cost to run fibre independently.
One of the biggest financial hurdles now is that the NBN Co has already notionally attributed costs to every single premise in each service area. Any extension or replacement to the NBN Co’s account would appear to be a futile exercise.
I think the roads analogy breaks down when we consider costs. Very few roads can be made to pay for themselves directly (perhaps none). With today’s technologies, a well-managed telecommunications network rollout could come in at zero cost in the long term.
Re-nationalise the telecommunications infrastructure?
If you mean the NBN and NBN Co it currently is nationalised - mostly. That excludes the bits still tied to the deal with Telstra.
Ownership alone does not address the cost of extending fibre. That requires a policy change from the Minister responsible and a revised cost estimate and implementation program. Or once sold to a private equity owner, legislation if government mandates service levels for rural customers, or government perhaps subsidies.
As close as it comes at present is the NBN Co COAT trial per your link in May
Although this targets FTTN customers who cannot get 25Mbps, rewarding them with a fibre upgrade option?
Is the greater Australian community concerned sufficiently for the 10+% of the population outside the NBN fixed line footprint? Possibly only if any improvement comes without a cost to the 90%.
Which ever way fibre upgrades are added to the NBN it seems inevitable it will be an added cost.
As a taxpayer, I expect my money to be spent sensibly and to support those who - for whatever reason - need to be supported. This includes people in remote areas who need decent Internet access.
I already pay for a lot of things that I don’t necessarily agree with, but this equality of opportunity is something I absolutely agree with.
Think it through. Optical fibre cable is made from glass and petroleum-based plastics. Protected from the elements, as cable is in ductwork, both of those materials are practically everlasting. Some will probably last for thousands of years. On that timescale, the limiting factor is damage. Performance declines slightly with each repair. A length of cable that has been repaired too often must be replaced. I’ve been told that there are actuarial tables of how many repairs can be expected per annum per thousand kilometres. Optical fibre is stronger than high-tensile steel, so the cable is more robust than equivalent copper, but it still doesn’t do too well against a backhoe.
Quigley was replying to a question triggered by Murdoch media reports (Andrew Bolt, I believe) that the service life of optical fibre is too short to be economically viable. The original report was based on a spurious, error-filled email from a self-declared “network architect for one of Australia ’s largest Telco’s”. Google that phrase and you’ll find that the falsehoods were all over the Web in 2010. A great deal of such misinformation/propaganda was spread. Sadly it confused quite a few people. More sadly still, many remain confused.
No, I mean the whole of the infrastructure. The NBN doesn’t stand alone. It’s part of vital national infrastructure. In fact, I view it as little more than a project to repair some of the harm done by privatisation.
You will pay. The bill’s on the way - followed closely by debt-collectors.
Seriously, infrastructure costs. The cost is spread over time. Infrastructure that lasts longer spreads the cost over a longer time. Infrastructure than generates income can pay for itself over time. There’s no need to panic. You don’t really need to pay for it all by the end of the month.
Perhaps there is a misunderstanding. My original comment was “Just because it literally still works doesn’t mean that it is not horribly obsolete.”
I am not arguing either way whether the fibre will still operate perfectly in “a century or more”. I am observing that it may be completely obsolete in “a century or more”, because technology has moved on. The business case needs to stack up before it is obsolete.
I don’t want some government bean counter telling us that we can’t upgrade from fibre to some mind-bogglingly better technology that we can’t even conceive of today because the written down value is not zero (because they decided that the asset’s lifetime was 150 years).
I can’t predict when fibre will be obsolete, even less so than I can predict whether it will be obsolete. So I proposed a much more conservative estimate of the timeframe i.e. business case stacks up even with a 25 year lifetime. That figure was a bit arbitrary. You can say that you are confident that fibre will not be obsolete before 50 years, and hence go with a higher number of years. (The longer the period, the greater the uncertainty however.) Whatever the figure, the business case needs to stack up before it is obsolete.
This is not “fear of the unknown”. This is just financial commonsense. Every business buying a computer knows that the computer will be technologically unviable in some number of years and will have to be thrown out (even if still “working” perfectly). So the net benefit of having the computer has to stack up before that number of years.
All that said, there are things that we as a nation might do that go beyond mere dollars. We can in that case not argue too much about the “business case” and the “real costs” and the “real benefits” - but that then takes us outside the title of this discussion.
I’ve edited the title of this thread to broaden it a little.
In principle, all things are possible. In practice, not all things are equally probable.There are good reasons why many commentators put the service life of optical fibre at a century. Service life includes obsolescence. We can be reasonably certain that no technology will replace optical fibre within that timeframe.
Technologies don’t spring up out of nowhere. They generally have a long history in theory before becoming realities. Optical fibre, for example, has roots in the 19th century. Commercial fibre didn’t hit the market until the 1970s. There’s no prospect of any technology replacing optical fibre this century.
Quite the contrary. Any business run along similar lines would, at best, fail to thrive and would most likely fail altogether.
Telecommunications-grade optical fibre first hit the market in the 1970s. By the mid 1980s, Telecom (a public-sector enterprise) had replaced the Sydney-Melbourne coaxial cable with fibre. There’s no rational reason to believe that any “government bean counter” will behave differently if another technology crops up.
As I said:
Unless you can show solid evidence of your something, in practice or in theory, your objection has no rational basis. Even if or when optical fibre is superseded, the value of existing infrastructure won’t evaporate overnight.
Reviving this topic to report a new development. I don’t support private sector involvement in such vital national infrastructure but the fact that they’re showing interests is an indicator of the value.
I want FTTP, but if built privately (or by public-private partnership/PPP) it would need careful scrutiny and strong regulatory oversight - neither of which has been in vogue over the last few decades.
Seriously, telecommunications infrastructure is one of the many projects that could be used to pull Australia out of the coming depression. While some of the work is highly specialised, much isn’t. Operating trench diggers and pulling cable isn’t that hard to do, nor to teach.
Not only that, but dealing with the concrete and asphalt jungle in urban areas. Cutting a slot may not be a option (structural integrity compromised) or ‘repairs’ undertaken may not be to the standards or satisfaction of the impacted owner.
Underboring/horizontal boring is an option, but very expensive solution compared to an open cut.
If one says compares it to undergrounding electricity, it is about 4-8+ times for low voltage (more for HV) that of aerial installations. It will also be a similar multiplier for underground NBN cable. This is based on working in a network provider in the past where fibre, LV and HV were undergrounded…and undergrounding was avoided where possible due to its high cost in comparison with overhead/aerial installations.
There are also challenges with maintaining unnderground essential infrastructure as it can be impacted by a a number of things, such as humans accidentally digging it up (private telco backbone fibre is regularly impacted by digging and occurs possibly once every year or so), vegetation and soil movement, land subsidence, soil and riparian erosion etc. Repairing underground infrastructure is also more expensive than the aerial variety.
There are some advantages with undergrounding such as impact from vehicles or aicraft (light or helicopters) is non-existent, as well as impacts from storms or bushfires can also be generally less. The later can be overcome with engineering and maintenance solutions.
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