They’re supposed to abide by OH&S regulations. Whether they do or not seems to depend on the individual installer. I’ve seen the whole gamut, from no safety gear at all to so many ropes and harnesses that they got tangled up and pulled my TV dish out of alignment.
My last was the NBN Fixed Wireless. The installer laboriously screwed brackets to the roof every step of the way. He told me that he’d actually omitted a few of the approved precautions to save time.
Meanwhile, Huawei is campaigning to use 5G to fix NBN wireless:
Spare spectrum? Not according to anyone in the industry that I know.
Always keep a fully charged mobile as well as a good internet plan for the mobile, and hope the thieves don’t find that tower too. NBN, the Spirit of Australian Governmental responsibility.
Events have now overtaken the original plan. Fixed wireless and satellite were only ever stopgaps. That’s now becoming ever more comically impossible to deny.
Spending on infrastructure is a problem, only if we expect the job to be ‘finished’ this year (or if we’re still living in a fantasy world where privatisation works).
What was the ‘final’ plan for remote areas that are now serviced by satellite? My understanding is they used an existing commercial satellite system ( that was superseded tech, IPSTAR I think) as the stopgap before the two purpose built satellites were ready. It may be that the new satellites (or their links) were way underpowered for the need but that is another matter.
FW tech is quite capable of providing quite adequate service but implementation was stinted so that the current nodes are overloaded in some cases but not all. Is that what you mean by stopgap?
I am not playing word games, to me stopgap is when you know full well the solution has a very limited lifetime, it looks to me that the planners thought they had an enduring solution but made a different error, of grossly underestimating the requirement.
The original objective was to give at least 90% of the population FTTP (subject to an implementation study), this base 90% was raised after the study to around 93%. The other 7% would for the forseeable future under the Rudd budget of around $43 Billion spend, be done by Satellite (25% of the that 7% or roughly 3% of connections) and Fixed Wireless (75% of that 7% or roughly 4%). The 7% would over time decrease as more fibre was rolled out as the NBN Co became privatised and the owners implemented improvements. Some would on that basis remain on FW or Satellite for some considerable time but taken at that level the service they would receive would have been much better as there would be fewer sharing those limited services.
From the study:
" Set coverage objective as fibre to 93 percent, fixed-wireless and satellite from 94 to 97 percent and satellite-only from 98 percent—achievable within estimated expenditure of $43 billion
Government’s initial policy announcement set an objective of providing fibre to 90 percent of premises and using wireless and satellite technologies to deliver at least 12 Mbps to those 10 percent of premises expected to be beyond the reach of fibre. Based on detailed geospatial modelling of every address in Australia, the Implementation Study recommends that the NBN coverage objective be adjusted to take fibre to 93 percent of premises by the end of the 8-year roll-out. Another 4 percent of premises should be covered by a commercially-tendered fixed-wireless service delivering at least 12 Mpbs—and much greater speeds for many premises in the coverage area. NBN Co should provide a wholesale Ka-band satellite service to ensure at least 12 Mbps is delivered to the remaining 3 percent of premises, and also to provide a coverage option to the 4 percent of premises within the fixed-wireless footprint. "
Instead we now have about at least 7% but likely 10% or more on FW and about 3 or more percent on Satellite (with poor uptake of the satellite option at the moment). This large increase was never accounted for and is why there is so much extra money required by NBN Co from the Govt to address the congestion on the FW and Satellite services."
Netflix and others were always going to be a large part of Internet usage by the time the first NBN design was being developed. Anyone who couldn’t recognise this at the time the ‘multi-technology mix’ was being foisted upon us was either an idiot or wilfully ignorant - and in either event has wasted billions of dollars of our money on building a 20th century solution to a 21st century problem!
The ‘final’ plan was that the NBN would be ‘finished’, then privatised.
What’s ‘adequate’ now is quite likely to prove inadequate next week. By stopgap, I mean no technology (available or probable) except optical fibre will meet foreseeable demand. We should continue pushing fibre to the logical limit. With telecommunications infrastructure, that limit is when we have to turn around and start replacing the oldest of what we’ve put in.
As to the implementation, the 2011 network design rules showed ‘up to’ 1440 premises sharing ‘up to’ 900 Mb/s. The 2016 rules showed ‘up to’ 2640 premises sharing the same ‘up to’ 900 Mb/s. The 2018 plan increases the backhaul to ‘up to’ 4Gbps, but there are no explicit plans to upgrade existing towers. There’s some suggestion that the number of premises has been reduced, but that isn’t reflected in any of the documents I’ve seen. If you can find the documents, see section 2.7.6 Wireless Access Planning Hierarchy.
Perhaps they thought it would be good enough to carry them through to privatisation. So satellite and wireless ‘stopped the gap’ to that point.
OK but how do you do that in regional areas (now FW) and remote areas (now sat.)? Are you suggesting running fibre to them all? Where is the logical limit for fibre?
As much as we can build within the service life of the fibre. 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 …”
Most commentators go with a century. Of course, that would mean keeping the infrastructure in the public sector.
Tonight’s 730 on town-dwellers relegated to fixed wireless: NBN Slowdown.
The distance would suggest most of these customers are in the NBN Satellite coverage area?
Another way to assess the scope would be to consider all premises with an exisiting copper connection as being practical for fibre. It is a simple given that the government found the funds over time to run a physical copper line to each.
While we seem to have an aversion at NBN level of running fibre overhead, it is common elsewhere. Also within Australia in certain applications. It is an alternate approach for the longer low customer runs (look to customers on SWER services for scope).
A further step might be to set a target spend per customer. Perhaps an average of $10-15,000 extra spend for the more than one million premises in the satellite and wireless NBN footprint. Perhaps that would address 80-90% leaving a much smaller number on the FW and satellite which would deliver a vastly improved service for those in the interim.
Shooting the Breeze and a few Canberra clay pigeons?
There is every reason the funding should come from the return on investment from the NBN. The NBN Co has been set commercial business targets by the Govt. When the NBN is sold the new owner is going to demand a return and profits. Rather than see the billions go as profit to a foreign equity owner, the profits under the alternative of retaining public ownership could go back to the public. Set against a target spend to fix the NBN starting with the worst served customers as a priority. Perhaps $2.5B pa would do nicely as it represents only 5% on the $51B investment? That would provide without escalation $25B over the next ten years, and potentially convert the NBN to a world class asset. A private equity owner is unlikely to do the same, divesting as soon as possible every liability it cannot convert to a fully user paid for upgrade.
Yes, this is a socially conscious and shared solution as the costs of all funding for all future upgrades should be spread across all users equally through their overall use of the NBN. Not costs to be lumbered as seems likely on those stuck on satellite within sight of town, or wireless because it was too convenient to backload customers on to an exisiting FW tower or ultimately at the long (25Mbps) end of rotting copper FTTN.
A suggestion that is so Right any modern liberal minded Australian would support it.
I know some of us tend to scare ourselves with big numbers. Some have no concept of value, so costs loom irrationally large, but it’s really not that big a deal.
As last night’s 730 piece suggested, most of our problems stem from trying to do the job cheap and quick.
I agree that the project has not been given the breadth of vision that its importance deserves. I agree that we have had too much politics and too little engineering. I agree that re-using the copper in built up areas was dopy and we should have gone straight to fibre. I agree that FW and Sat. have been stinted and some people are the worse for it.
However nobody has yet shown me that FW and Sat. technology cannot give adequate service for those outside built-up areas.
To conclude that therefore fibre must be supplied anywhere in Oz regardless of cost is not warranted on the evidence. However grand the vision may be those who spend taxpayers’ money need to account.
One point to resolve is how do we agree or redefine an adequate level of service for the nation, and what does it need to be?
The next point is having agreed the adequate level of service (which is a moving target with time), what it the quantum of customers each satellite or FW tower can service.
Presently the majority of customers on Fixed Line NBN receive a far superior service in respect of speed and data allowances for only a marginal increase in cost compared to Satellite and FW NBN customers. It would seem highly unfair that for an extra $10-20pm City based consumers can enjoy unlimited streaming service in Full HD or better. Something that up to 1.1 million Australian premises (2.5M Aussies) will not be able to access. It is the sort of thinking that belongs in the 19th century when only the children of rich glaziers and shop keepers could afford to send their rural families to get a proper education post primary school level. It’s made worse by knowing that many areas with FW and Satellite that can’t connect to the nearby FW tower are within kms of exisiting fixed line services. The differential cost of connecting these premises to fibre FTTC or FTTP are not 2 to 3 times the already high costs of FW and Satellite.
That consumers were not realistically consulted on an individual basis and able to directly negotiate the options upfront to pay the increment, came about from the NBN Co’s Selfish desire to expedite rollout and connect as many premises to FW as possible to minimise the total cost of the NBN in rural and near township areas.
It depends on many issues to be balanced out. As with many aspects of life some citizens have an advantage in who they are and where they live and others disadvantage.
As for living outside metro areas there are pros and cons. Sometimes an effort is made to balance out the cons such in the days of copper wire you paid the same flat fee for connection and local calls despite the costs being much higher. In other areas there are ongoing deficiencies such as access to medical services.
Hardliners one side say if you choose to live there deal with it why expect a subsidy, at the other end is the view that all citizens deserve exactly the same regardless of cost or circumstances. I incline towards some compromise.
If it comes to a choice between gold plated internet and better medicine in the bush I know which I would choose. Before somebody says that these are not necessarily mutually exclusive, it is just a frinstance, there are always costs to be weighed and complications to consider and perfect balance is but an ideal.
Geostationary (really geosynchronous) satellite is fundamentally limited by the speed of light to quite high latency. Short of major breakthroughs in physics there is nothing that we can do about that. So some applications (those requiring low latency) will never work well on (geosynchronous) satellite.
Just my opinion but “regardless of cost” does not exist in the real world. There is always a scarcity of resources so that spending X billion on giving some region access to e.g. FTTP/N instead of satellite / FW comes at the price of not spending X billion on something unrelated but similarly desirable - unless you want to put up the money for your own FTTP/N connection.
Hence government must always prioritise spending and inevitably that means that any given person won’t agree with all of the government’s choices.
Some of the issue that has perhaps slipped under the radar is that the smaller townships and the communities these support are fading because of that very lack of service they receive. If we want prosperous rural and semi rural communities to be sustainable/sustained then spending money to do so is required. This does mean that “city folk” may have to pay more to subsidise the cost of providing that service just as we had to under the Universal Service Obligations of the PTSN service. It isn’t anything new to do so and it is about a nation valuing all it’s citizens equally regardless of where they live.
If we didn’t have rural industry such as farming, mining, forestry we would suffer even more greatly as city livers than we do now. Fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, construction materials, iron ore etc exports and so on would to a very large degree be curtailed or disappear as no one would even want to live as less than second class citizens.
Satellite was always seen as a measure to provide a service to the minimal number possible…that is why under Rudd’s plan communities of even 1,000 were going to get FTTP. Most of these nowadays even with Fibre Backbone running very close if not within their boundaries are getting either FW or Satellite as the MTM NBN does not account for their needs.
Want and aim to provide e-health consultation service or even perhaps one day an operation by remote service then you can drop satellite as a satisfactory means of doing so, and with tower congestion FW while much less laggy would not support the needed traffic. Even trading shares or goods can be severely impacted by these constraints.
The attitude of some towards those who help us by living remotely, is that they should put up with it (whatever they suffer a lack of) because “they choose to live there”. A very selfish and short sighted viewpoint in my opinion. How do we know what value those people do and will provide us with into the future if we deny them the opportunity to show us what they could do when given the access they require.
In 1872 Australia finalised the Overland Telegraph from Darwin to Port Augusta - just one of many ambitious projects to join the country to the rest of the world. At the time the Australian population was just over 2 million (although this estimate probably excludes the indigenous population).
Extrapolating from that experience to the modern day, and the benefits of modern technology, one can imagine that the benefits of connecting (almost) every Australian - because very few really live in the outer Barcoo and one cannot imagine connecting those few other than by satellite - provide a much greater cost-benefit than the Overland Telegraph did in the 1870s.
(You will note that even the outer Barcoo had a standing population of at least three.)
Returning to the subject of fixed wireless connections for a brief moment, I came upon a rather old but quite intriguing article today. Useful information if you are on fixed wireless but your neighbours (and hopefully friends) are on FTTx.
