Privatisation or government ownership - what's best for the people?

Don’t they keep mentioning “The Pub Test”…I keep looking for the formal description and standardised procedures of that test but all I can find so far is linkage to drinking beer.

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Regrettably it doesn’t address the one specific question that I asked. It simply also contains (more or less) the same claim. It may be the source of the claim. Hard to tell, particularly as neither article is explicitly dated!

However the context in which the claim is made in that paper makes it more obvious what is actually being claimed.

Importantly, one can infer that the claim has very little relevance to delivering an internet connection to a user. The kind of equipment that is capable of maxing out the (more or less) IR band on a single strand of fibre isn’t going to turn up in everyone’s house any time soon.

The throughput on fibre of various bandwidths of light can and have been measured. Speed of light (a known “constant”) and then each band that can be carried at the same time without interference from another band are known. These are then used to calculate and then test transmissions. There are also theoretical amounts that can be calculated from bandwidths of light that are currently not used for various reasons including the cost of producing the lasers to test it. Somewhere around 3.2 Tbps are the current limits but they may likely be exceeded by further techno advances. 10 Gbps are now home based possibilities (and actual services available) in various parts of the world of fibre connections and in business environments much higher speeds are achieved now and will slowly seep into domestic use.

in 2014 British Telecom (BT) and French networking equipment company Alcatel-Lucent achieved over a domestic fibre backhaul connection a speed of 1.4 Tbps (1 Tb = 1024 Gb) using a technique to allow more concurrent traffic to exist without collision.

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Have they? Can you substantiate that?

In general, any development in the radio frequency spectrum can be applied to optical frequencies. Therefore, though the numbers may have changed, the relativities should remain.

Memory’s a funny thing. Was it Telstra, the government monopoly? Was it Telstra, the privatised corporation? Was it Telecom, the corporation? Was it Telecom, the commission? Was it the PMG? Did it actually happen that way at all?

On that, we can agree.

If you’re genuinely interested, then you’ll contact the source.

I agree that domestically it is unlikely for many generations that we will see the heady heights achieved as to what is possible. It may never occur.

The proponents of the wireless side of things also talk a lot about what can be done but the reality of actual is something less. 5G has a capability of 10 Gbps but what will be achieved for some years to come is likely much less than this and then we also have to look at the shared nature of that bandwidth and who can use it to full capacity concurrently with another (or many more) users.

In the end and getting back to the reason for this topic I just think we need a public business similar perhaps to the way the ABC is run that allows public ownership with a charter that moves us forward in technology at the best pace for us as a nation with reasonable independence from it’s political masters so that political views do not cloud the best outcome for all.

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The original article is making a theoretical claim about a single fibre being able to carry around 1000 Tbps. Can you imagine the optical fibre equipment cost to install in everyone’s home? Since it is only a theoretical claim, the equipment cost is unknown. It has never been done. That is 100,000 times the 10 Gbps service that might actually be available.

I don’t doubt that a single fibre of the standard that select lucky households in Australia have could carry that much. The comment was about the in-home fibre optic equipment necessary to achieve that. (I couldn’t find a description of the equipment but presumably some kind of DWDM, let alone a unit cost.)

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How do you stop the NBN being privatised?

On all that I agree that on currently foreseeable domestic outcomes we are unlikely to see those outcomes. The theory behind the stated possibilities are real but as I mentioned the current tech does not allow those outcomes to be had. What a future awaits us all as things advance as long as we can maintain human growth/life without destroying everything at some point.

The equipment used in the test in still subject to commercial secrecy but I am sure these sorts of outcome will become more frequent and more public. If we think back to the heady days of the beginning of IBM PCs and their development and cost (and why I should have had shares back then) and the now almost throwaway cost of now common tech, wouldn’t we back then perhaps had a similar and possibly pessimistic (I do not mean you here but just the view of some would be that way) view of what is now reality?

Similar I would guess as to how the ABC has remained public for so long? Public pressure, strong legislation, even perhaps constitutional recognition of that position? But the NBN & the NBN Co were always sold to the public as being goods that would be sold to private ownership at some point and so does require a much greater rethink of what it should really be like.

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It refers to 4G as “experimental” (my smartphone says otherwise) and completely ignores 5G. That is why I am saying that the actual numbers have changed.

Generally, yes.

So are we in agreement that the numbers have changed?

The relativities between the hard theoretical limits should remain. (This is the actual figure of 20000x being quoted.)

The relativities between the best available actually built equipment may change.

The relativities between what is available using commercially viable equipment for the household may change.

The relativities between what is actually available to the household in Australia may change. (This might be most interesting to an actual internet user in Australia.) Sadly, in Australia, I don’t think there’s a lot of difference.

There’s a funny comment in response to the article you linked to although I can’t vouch for its accuracy:

You don’t mention that the experiments quoted require hundreds of lasers or expensive ($50k) water cooled research lasers to achieve these speeds. Let alone that the technology to modulate these setups requires a full 2m cabinet of electronics. You will NEVER see these speeds at home.

Taking the essence out of that … it makes sense to use this kind of high-end fibre technology to haul multiplexed data for a mass of users around big cities, noone would use RF for that, but at the edge of the network it is not as simple.

I think this is the only certain way.

My point is … whether government owned / controlled or privately owned / controlled … we need to think carefully about what trust, powers, etc. we invest in it. Some of the considerations might be there in either scenario, some might be unique to one scenario or the other. In some respects the current situation is the worst of both worlds (currently government but might be privatised at some point in the future) because we are forced to consider and plan for both scenarios.

It is difficult to forecast the future, either its needs or what will be available. At one point the world market for computers was going to be 5. :slight_smile:

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Did he say theoretical? As I said.

No. I went to the next link that contains close to exactly the same quote - but does make it clear that it is a theoretical claim.

Your link simply contains an unsupported, unsubstantiated claim - so it could be anything.

Your link: A single strand of fibre-optic cable can carry 20,000 times more data than the entire radio frequency spectrum combined.

The next link: This means that the information-carrying capacity of an optical fibre is about 20,000 times larger than the information-carrying capacity of the entire radio frequency spectrum. (and it does elaborate somewhat on what numbers and assumptions were used in order to make that claim)

How do we stop any privatisation? How do we reverse privatisations that have already happened?

As has been mentioned elsewhere, services delivered by public sector commission tend to go to pot when the provider is restructured into a corporation. Why that may be, I have no idea, but it does suggest that some services should avoid anything remotely connected with the private sector.

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Closer to home, the current performance of:
the NBN in all it’s forms,
the numerous mobile data services,
my aging ADSL2 which is still 18 months or more from having a replacement service from the NBN.

These are all real, no theory needed to compare which is better or who has access to which options, or whether we have an equitable outcome.

Consider also Public and Privatised health services?
Consider also the break up and part privatisation of electricity supply?
Consider also the original privatisation of Telecom Australia to create Telstra?
Even rail transport mostly bulk freight services now operate in a mixed state owned private enterprise environment?
There are also privately operated airports, toll roads and tunnels?
And as one of the community pointed out a significant degree of privatisation of aged care in the community?

Communications and data services are just another in a long line of changes.

Is there a common thread to how and why all these assets, once the almost exclusive domain of public ownership, have been privatised?

Where is the evidence of any benefits to the consumer from these examples of privatisation?

Why are some assets made available to the general public through share market listings, and others sold exclusively to private investment?

The most challenging common issue personally is one of equal access and equity. That’s said having lived, owned property and worked in two of our biggest cities through to small communities. It’s sobering being hours from any hospital, let alone one that only does procedures other than basic emergency and routine deliveries.

Our elected governments have been choosing the form of enterprise, public or privately owned entrusted to bring us essential services? The same governments directly for public and indirectly for private determine the level of service and cost to the consumer.

Which ever ownership option, the level of service to be delivered, and acceptable cost to the community (government funds) vs individual cost, appear as common issues in all the listed service areas?

P.S.
It is revealing to see for the NBN the more precise points comparing the relative merits of different technologies and their potential to provide competition or influence change.

It may be worth noting that there are other significant community topics devoted to such discussion. These topics being complex and finely focused as deserved.
Eg

And

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A common thread for some of them is vertical fiscal imbalance i.e. state governments have too little money for their responsibilities, and a limited revenue base.

For many services it is all about the money, rather than any attempt to benefit the consumer.

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Such is life (sadly).

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Which probably explains why privatisation rarely, if ever, benefits the people.

Is there a single privatisation that has unarguably benefited the people, more than the government of the day (and their mates, to whom the government sold the peoples’ assets)?

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We can be confident that there will be argument.

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An example of the latter would be the lease by the NSW government of 50.4% of a certain subset of the poles and wires for a period of 99 years. Perhaps that kind of deal wouldn’t suit retail investors.

More generally, if an investment is only permitted by law to “sophisticated investors” it may be more convenient for the seller to go with the latter rather than jump through the hoops to avoid that restriction.

There are probably lower cost overheads and less time and effort involved in going with the latter.

Privatisation in some form or another has been occurring for over a century, and will continue to occur. I suggest that question should be “what can sensibly be privatised, and what provides a social good that needs to be controlled by government?”.

As examples of the former, see space travel, the semiconductor, cryptographic techniques (which were classified as weapons by the US until the early 1990s, meaning they couldn’t be exported).

Examples of public services include telecommunications for all, as well as obvious monopolies such as airports and electricity provision. (You might also throw cable TV networks into the obvious monopolies category, seeing as a few suburbs of large cities got two lines of cable while most of Australia missed out entirely.)

Governments since the 1980s have been selling off the furniture to balance the books in the short term while leaving no assets to benefit future Australians. We have become a country of renters and owners in the worst sense, where not just homes but the entire infrastructure is owned by a few and rented to the many. This is not just short-sighted, but should be considered criminally negligent.

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