So far I have found mobile broadband to be a bit of a gadget and that is about it. It might be handy to be able to have an Ipad at home and sit on the couch reading forums if the telly is boring, but wireless is still so unreliable and patchy that to spruik it as a proper replacement for fixed broadband as the opposition does is just silly.
If I am out and about, I am happy enough to accept that I will have degraded performance, I am happy to accept that I may be homed to a cell which currently has umpteen users on it so it will be slow to check up on the map of where I am going or whatever I wanted to look at. I am also prepared to accept that it might perform slowly as I am too far from a base station, or that it might not work at all and I might have to wander around to find somewhere it works. But if I am at home and want to use an Ipad or similar device, I will want it hanging off a WiFi connection that is close enough to be bulletproof reliable and fast and is homed off a fixed connection that does not cost me a bazillaion dollars because I decided to sit there all month watching youtube videos.
Fibre is here and now and the bandwidth available here and now is capable of being vastly in excess of current requirements, down the track with simple hardware changes it can be updated to cater to even higher speeds.
Wireless is here, now, slower, patchy, unreliable, as speed variable as ADSL is and as distance dependant and to give speeds comparable to the NBN fibre proposal relies on technologies that are not even out of the labs yet. And even when they are, to provide those speeds will require vast numbers of base stations to be fibred anyway! There are only so many you can hang of microwave hops before the bandwith of the microwave links becomes the issue.
Someone put it to me pretty well.
Fibre is what you want if you can get it.
Wireless is what you put up with if you can not get fibre (I suspect that I will be just outside fibre coverage myself)
Satellite is what you put up with if you can not even get wireless.
Whilst I generally agree with what you've said, it still doesn't address a few fundamentals which I have concerns with (keeping in mind that I am a fully licenced electrician and telecommunications cabler, have qualifications in fibre cable testing, and am currently part way through a bachelor of electrical and communcations engineering degree at university - so I have a general idea of what i am talking about, but not quite a fully fledged "expert" yet):
- Necessity - Sure, it would be great to have fibre right up to the ethernet port on the back of my computer, just as it would be great to have my own 4 lane highway that originates at my garage and terminates in front of my carpark at work, but cost versus reward makes it not worthwhile. An exaggeration perhaps, but I think I've made my point.
- Forecasting the future - By proposing an almost completely fibre-oriented solution, the government are basically prescribing the future to us. Had they gone for a more mixed approach, it would broaden the direction of future technology, and in my view, mobility is the future. Fibre is infinitely faster and better than copper, but let's not forget that even fibre has vastly improved and even changed standard gauge since it's introduction 15-20 years ago, so whilst it is here and now and very good, there's nothing to say it won't be replaced by some uber-fast silicon superconductor cable or something in the next 10-20-50 years... then we'll have spent $43b on an obsolete technology; if we shared that sum amongst mixed technology then we would expose ourselves to much less risk of that happening.
You mention that mobile broadband at the moment is slow, inconsistent and expensive. I agree 100%, and is exactly the reason why I think the NBN solution should include re-engineering of the way we transmit mobile data. I know 4G is on the way, which throws up an interesting situation, will people even use the NBN if they can more affordably subscribe to mobile 4G coverage on their mobile devices? - forego some speed for the added convenience, freedom and lower expense?
Another few issues which I have not been able to find answers on:
- Will the NBN solution provide the hardware at the network boundary to convert the light signals to electrical signals for transmission over the copper cabling within the subscriber's building? Or will they just provide every premises with an unterminated fibre core and the resident looks after the rest?
- Even if it does, the transmission over the 20-50 metres of the copper cable in the building is going to strangle the bandwidth of the fibre anyway to a large extent, so although it will still be better than having a hew kms of copper between you and the exchange, it will still only be as fast as it's slowest point.
- The copper cabling in 99.9% of homes/buildings will be cat3 voice grade copper or worse, which is shit/utterly useless for moderate-to-high speed data transmission, subject to high levels of alien crosstalk & EMI, is the NBN going to re-cable everyone's house in CAT6/CAT7 UTP copper (or multi mode fibre, for that matter) as part of the subscription? What's that going to cost the subscriber? Or is that included in the $43b estimate? Or has this dilemma not even been thought of by the government yet?
- What about people who rent? Are they going to pay exorbident connection/re-cabling costs, only to have to move house in 6-12 months? I think not....
I could go on for a long time with these questions/concerns, but at the end of the day, people need to realise that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If consumers think they are going to get 10gb/s broadband by 2020 for an even remotely comparable price as they are paying for ADSL now, they are dreaming....
