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SILICON
SILIC
CHIP
www.siliconchip.com.au
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief
Leo Simpson, B.Bus., FAICD
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2 Silicon Chip
Publisher’s Letter
High-speed broadband in Australia
will be an expensive farce
Back in May 2009 I wrote about the federal government’s proposed fibre-optic broadband network and
how it would probably be a white elephant. I also
asked the question whether it was likely to use aboveground cable, like the present Optus cable network.
Well, already my misgivings are being confirmed.
The rollout of the new broadband network has begun in Tasmania, in a $700 million program under
the auspices of Digital Tasmania. They informed a
recent Senate select committee that 96% of the proposed network would be
via overhead cable. Aurora Energy, the state-owned power retailer, will string
the fibre optic cable along its network of overhead power lines.
Well, what an absolute joke. Is this what the rest of Australia will get for a
$43 billion investment? Talk about a third-world solution! Haven’t we learnt
anything from the rollout of the Optus cable TV network in the 1990s? Those
eyesore cables are still there and no doubt they will still be there for decades
to come!
At least, the trial BPL (broadband over power lines) experiment seems to
have been discredited (or has it?).
You don’t have to be a genius to see the drawbacks of overhead cables. Apart
from being an eyesore, they are subject to breakage and interruption of service
every time a power pole is knocked over by a car or by trees in storms – this
happens very frequently in Tasmania. The quoted reason, by Digital Tasmania,
is that overhead cables can be rolled out much more quickly than if they were
to be buried in trenches. Well, that may be true but it is a half-baked solution.
If cable is to be run, it should be underground.
I suppose the next part of this farce is that we will find that the vaunted
network speeds will not be nearly so fast as promised. Or maybe the upload
speed will be crippled as it presently is by Telstra and all the other networks.
Unless the speeds are a great deal faster than is presently available from ADSL2,
there is little point in providing yet another cable network, whether or not it
is based on optical fibres. By the way, does anyone know what speeds have
been promised?
In any case, we have to ask why the rollout in Tasmania will be so incredibly expensive at $700 million. That’s $1400 for every inhabitant of this little
island or about $3500 for every Tasmanian household. Just how expensive is
this optical fibre cable anyway?
Thinking about it another way, this might be one of the reasons why the
federal government wants to dismember Telstra. Do they want to get cheap
access to Telstra’s underground ducts? Why not just give $10 billion or so to
Telstra and they can put in the broadband network they originally proposed (at
a somewhat cheaper price)? After all, the government will need access to the
ducts in all those suburbs and towns where all cables are presently underground.
And where cables are above ground, why should we have yet another cable
strung along the power poles? In my own suburb of Collaroy for example, we
have Optus and Telstra cables, the phone cable and the power cables – it is
pretty unsightly.
This is yet another bungle by the federal government. Don’t they have anyone
in the Labor Party or in the bureaucracy who has any sort of understanding of
finance or business who can perform a rigorous cost/benefit analysis? Apparently, they have very little technical expertise but this is tragic.
Leo Simpson
siliconchip.com.au
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