Well Malcolm that may be good for today and the next 10 years but what about 20 years’ or 30 years’ time?These two outrageous statements by Turnbull need addressing:
1. We don’t know what the demand is 20 or 30 years’ time from now and if you think you do you are kidding yourself.
2. More importantly, if we are going to invest in infrastructure to deal with the demands of 20 years’ time surely we should do it closer to that date, when we will be buying the technology of 20 years’ time. Which will no doubt be better and more efficient and have capacities we don’t have today.
Responses:
1. Reframing as "we don't know the future", so can't plan for it.
If you'd asked me about Apple and Microsoft in early 2007, pre-iPhone, whatever I'd said would have been wrong. Turnbull ignores the words of Apple: The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
All we can say about sticking with "business as usual" Copper & xDSL is that it is very close to its technical limits, each evolution costing more and delivering less. It's a good technology, for 1925 when it was specified. It's time to embrace the future.
2. pseudo-financial babble, a corruption of Net Present Value argument: withhold investment for as long as possible.
That's sheer bunk. It takes 10 years for anything to get out of the Labs, and then fewer than 1 in 10 "great ideas" turn in products, and then only a few get taken up.
We know the very cheap, very high-speed networks in 10 years will be Fibre, not Wireless not exploiting old "category 2" phone cable. Because that's what's in production now, or in the Lab.s
3. There's an implicit assumption in "we" that a) there's is an average user and b) we ALL share the same usage pattern and ALL want the same services at the same time.
That's bunk as well. The top 1% of users consume 10% of download, while the bottom 50% (half) consumer just 6.4% (six point four): an exponential distribution.
Broadband has a very wide spectrum of users and demand. A "one size fits all" service, like ADSL
Part of the change in broadband takeup from 2009, is Business/Government have increased services bought from ISP's from 28% of users to 48-49%. Instead of leasing very expensive ($8,500/mth for 10Mbps) services from Telstra, small and large business are figuring out how to use ISP services in their networks.
The NBN is about Business and all it's profits are generated by the top 25% high-demand users. The rest of us, the other 75%, get a Free Ride, either NBN services at cost, or heavily subsidised.
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