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Originally Posted by Larryp
Hi Gary, I can see a fair bit of logic in your arguments, and I can see you have researched your subject well.
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Thank you Larry.
I am a professional Electrical Engineer and have been a member of the Institute of
Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for 35 years.
We've consulted to Lucent (formerly Bell Telephone) and Telstra Research Laboratories.
By the late 80's, the professional literature was overwhelmingly pointing to the
fact that future telecommunications would be predominantly digital.
My principle interests were in areas such as computing, computer architecture,
integrated circuit design and embedded computing and it was obvious by then
that unless countries started to transition their public switched telephone networks
to new digital networks that they ran the risk of falling behind economically.
Thus it was a great pity for Australia when in the period that Telstra (formerly Telecom)
had Frank Blount as CEO up to 1999, that there was no push to change the public
switched telephone network (PSTN) to an all digital system. Blount was an Engineer
himself and should have known better.
If you had raised the topic with me in after-dinner conversation back then, I
was already on the soap-box that we needed to go digital.
Ziggy Switkowski was Telstra CEO from 1998 to 2004 and also totally
missed the boat. Rather than appreciate that they better start deploying fiber,
Telstra attempted to squeeze whatever was left out of the copper switched
network.
By then I was jumping up and down on the soap-box if you were unfortunate enough
to ask.
Sol Trujillo was Telstra CEO from 2004 to 2009 and again there was no movement.
Telstra was so confident that they would be asked to build the NBN that it came
as a shock to their board when their bid was rejected because it was incomplete.
Back in December 2007, IEEE Spectrum magazine quoted an estimate attributed
to Gordon Moore, founder of Intel, that perhaps one quintillion
- that's 10 to the power of 18 - transistors are fabricated within devices annually.
Moore went onto say -
"We make more transistors per year than the number of printed
characters in all the newspapers, magazines, books, photocopies,
and computer printouts".
And that was back in 2007.
Just in the first three months of this year alone, a UK company you may never have
heard of called ARM Holdings, reported that some 2.6 billion CPU chips based
on their design were shipped.
Apple meanwhile has the largest market capitalization of any company in the
world, exceeding that of Exxon.
So computing and electronics are trillion dollar industries and that doesn't
count the enormous economies that now flow across the world's networks.
So I have not been thinking about the NBN just for the last few years.
I have been advocating a digital network for decades.
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For my part, I do not know if NBN will be a good thing in the long term, or not.
From what I read in the newspaper today, Ziggy Switkowski is being courted to take over the running of NBN Co., since it is way over budget, well behind in roll-out and the uptake by potential customers is poor. This doesn't surprise me, since goverments are historically poor at building anything efficiently or profitably.
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Under Switkowski's reign Australia was set back several years by him not making the
decision to go digital.
He therefore is not the right person for the job.
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With such a poor client uptake, perhaps it is being overpriced, or perhaps some people are worried that since it is government owned, it will allow more government intrusion in their lives.
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Australia is a vast country. This is not just one of those "mega projects" like you
see on TV. It is a mega mega project. The global engineering fraternity acknowledged
it as that even before it began.
The major delay was during the long negotiations with Telstra over access
to the existing trenches. That also required shareholder approval. The deal has
been struck and so it should now be quicker to lay cable.
Projects of this magnitude tend to be slower at the start as there will always
be some unknowns that are initially encountered which require innovative solutions.
When the rabbit proof fence was first being constructed in the early 1900's, the
camels would sometimes eat poisonous vegetation and become sick.
As RJ Anketell, who was an officer of the Public Works Department in West
Australia, wrote in his report of 1907 -
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Originally Posted by RJ Anketell, 1907
When he fills himself up with poison he resigns his mission on the fence.
If he is caught in time with only a modicum of poison in him,
he waits for a dose of permanganate of potash, which the driver pours into him to the
accompaniment of many oaths, while the beast froths at the mouth and looks as sick
as only a poisoned camel can.
We used to lose a lot of camels this way until Mr Mann, the
Government Analysts, discovered that permanganate of potash was a good antidote
for the poison. Up there we have to be very careful still. The country is covered with
poison bush. We hand feed the horses, but we have to tie the camels up at night and
muzzle them by day when we are working along the fence where there is poison.
That cure is a great thing though, and lately we have not lost a beast. I have tried it in
horses, too, and it has cured every time.
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In other words, Australia has the legacy of a huge land mass that can
present all sorts of obstacles to the building of infrastructure and
people learn on the job and improvise on the fly.
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Can someone tell me if a similar project has been carried out in another country?
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Many, many countries have deployed FTTH either in full or in limited stages.
South Korea and Japan have very deep penetration.
The People's Republic of China is deploying fiber to the premise.
Ireland is doing the same.
Here is a list -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_t...ses_by_country
The decision to use an FTTH architecture was also partly driven by the advice
of countries that had mistakenly taken the FTTN route.
At a UK parliamentary inquiry British Telecom's (BT) former Chief Technical Officer,
Peter Cochrane, who spent most of his career there, has publicly declared that -
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Originally Posted by Peter Cochrane
“Fibre to the cabinet is one of the biggest mistakes humanity has made. It ties a knot in the cable in terms of bandwidth and imposes huge unreliability risks … It is a shame, but I understand why people have made that decision. They have made it worldwide, by the way.
The number one fault problem with copper is water ingress. Fibre does not care about water … The fault level in an optical network goes down very low. You can reduce manning, buildings, power consumption and everything.
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Article here -
http://delimiter.com.au/2012/04/30/f...ays-ex-bt-cto/
My nephew has currently relocated himself and his family to Hong Kong
where he is working for the next few years.
In April this year he wrote me -
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Originally Posted by Gary's nephew in Hong Kong
Did I tell you that I have fibre to my router? Not fibre to the node, not even fibre to my apartment block, but fibre all the way to my router.
I have a 300 Mbps home internet connection but could have 1 Gbps if I paid another ~AUD$30/month. For about AUD$35/month I get unlimited internet, which also provides me with IPTV (charged separately - another AUD$35/month - but simply carried over the fibre).
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