SteveJ-restore-test

I think there are 3 actions the Gillard Government can undertake to improve the prospects of the NBN. 1. Reform NBN Co into a Co-operative owned by Telcos and ISP's. Takes away the problem of the wholesaler being a monopoly and setting prices too high. It's necessary to get the voting/Governance right so Optus/Telstra don't automatically control it, but still have some influence. Funding? I don't know enough about the topic to know how the Govt can raise bonds for a Co-OP. Perhaps they can be allowed to raise Govt Guaranteed Bonds like the old Telecomm/Telstra Bonds. 2. Let the market speak!! Allow subs to prepay for service to bring forward their installation. This allows retail customers to put their money where mouth is, and is an additional source of cheap funds. There'd need to be several levels of pre-payment from ~$250 to $10,000, each with a different incentive/discount schedule. If whole street or communities pre-paid to $2,500/household, that should ...

At 'Comms Day' 2012, Malcolm Turnbull asked : [ more audio ] "Why do we need to run fibre into every home?" We aren't building a network for 2010, but one able to easily handle the demands of 2020 and upgradeable as needed during its 25-30 year life. There are 3 reasons we "need to run fibre into every home", beside the obvious [3G/4G networks are perfect for mobile devices and exactly wrong for fixed services]: Storage (Disk & Flash) drives demand for bandwidth, especially upload capacity. A Cyberwar will be won or lost in 3 minutes. Defences must be automatic and "full-coverage". Australian Telcos don't just not co-operate, they actively self-harm to attack competitors. There is also a wild-card: Just what will Apple come up with in 2013 to follow on from the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010. Will it be "TV done right" as Walter Isaacson implies, or something closer to the "Knowledge Navigator"? Either way, we'...

AUSTRALIAN TELCO BUSINESS PRACTICES Australian Telcos aren't just uncooperative, their behaviours are pernicious, obstructive and often perversely self-injurious. This (and the GFC) is why Telstra's share price fell around three times pre-NBN, and has recovered over 10% in the short time since the NBN arrangement has been completed. There are 4 incontestable examples of this: Telstra/Optus cable rollout. ISDN only as a 'premium service'. ADSL 1 (ACCC intervention), ADSL 2 turn-on and ADSL 2 DSLAMs & ULL (non) churning. Mobile roaming. The massive and predictable waste of money caused by Telstra purposefully overbuilding the Optus network, even as they deployed, was sheer bloody-minded behaviour. When they'd beaten Optus to a standstill they proved that to "queer the pitch" (prevent others from 'scoring') was their only objective by never completing their own cable network. Telstra had the resources and capability to finish their roll-out to 85-...

There's a counter-intuitive effect with marginal cost of Production Factors, like energy (and Teleco services) - using the factor more efficiently, consumes more of the resource. Because you make more profit, lower prices, produce more and demand for the resource increases. The Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate/Jevons Paradox: "energy efficiency improvements that, on the broadest considerations, are economically justified at the microlevel, lead to higher levels of energy consumption at the macrolevel." The structural reason is simple: the market is highly price elastic, so decreasing prices a little lifts total sales considerably. In economics, this is a well solved problem for non-monopoly markets, "Profit Maximisation" occurs when MR = MR (Marginal Revenue equals Marginal Costs). [For monopolies, MR = 2*MC, IIRC.] In the 70's & 80's at O.T.C., we made record profits each and every year - by exceptional marketing and sales strategy, which included drop...

1999/2000 saw the laying of the "Eastern Gas Pipeline" (EGP) - 795km from Longford in Victoria to Horsley Park in Sydney, at around $450M. It carries natural gas from Gippsland Basin (and Bass Strait?) and provides additional supply security to NSW. The mainline route is : close to the towns of Bairnsdale, Orbost and the Cann River, before turning north past Bombala and Cooma. From the eastside of the Snowy Mountain region, it travels northeast to the coast through Nowra, Port Kembla, Wilton and on to Horsley Park to its termination point on the outskirts of Sydney. Country Energy Gas is the NSW regional retailer. The Energy Networks Australia State Summary say this about the NSW country towns connected to Natural Gas: There are 24 210 km of reticulation mains serving 901 000 customers in the State’s major urban areas, and its large and small regional centres. Wagga Wagga, Tumut, Adelong, Cooma, Bombala and Gundagai, Albury Nowra, Bomaderry ...

Traditional Telcos, "phone companies", are exactly the wrong people to own and operate consumer Broadband networks, and their close relative, Cable TV. There is an inherent conflict: Telco Engineering is very different to Computer Data Network Engineering. You cannot be good at both or build networks that are good at both. The network & equipment designs and tradeoffs are antithetical and antagonistic. Telcos make money from phone services, which are relatively low bit-rate. It is against their commercial interests to sell high-quality, high-speed data networks at affordable prices. To expect them to cannibalise their most profitable line of business is asking for incompetent & irresponsible management, which puts them in jeopardy from corporate regulators and malpractice suits from shareholders. There has always been a fundamental conflict of interest in any Telco rolling out Internet broadband services: cost-per-bit charging either makes telephony effectively free o...

For many years I had the uneasy feeling that the Telco Engineers I worked with/for over most of a decade at O.T.C. did not actually understand Computer Data Networks. Here I attempt to formalise and explain that thought. The implications/ramifications won't be examined in this piece. History Telephone/Telco Engineering dates back to between ~1880 with the formation of the first phone companies and 1915 with the first US transcontinental (long-distance) calls. Dial phones were introduced in the US circa 1919, but automatic exchanges had been invented well before. The profession of Telco Enginering has around 125 years of tradition and practice. As a profession, they have been very good at doing what they do - creating reliable point-to-point voice communication. They have extended into high-availability point-to-point digital services. Modern Computer Data Network Engineering dates from around 1982 with cheap mini-computers and the IEEE 802.3 standard for Ethernet. Cheap PC...

The National Broadband Network, NBN, is a chance to correct regulatory deficiencies, address broadband network design problems & high costs and ameliorate past strategic mis-steps. Gas network providers not leveraging their investment in 'holes in the ground' and high consumer connectivity was a huge strategic blunder. Allowing the 80% duplication of cable TV network was a massive failure of Government oversight. It would've been obvious within 2-3 months and should've resulted in quick, decisive action. As was not forcing 'roaming' between mobile service providers. The NBN design reflects that Telco Engineers don't do Data Networks well ... Exactly the same way you don't build a water, electricity or gas network as if its a phone network (hub-and-spoke). The technology choices & network design seem wrong-headed to me . They are not using off-the-shelf commodity hardware, but very expensive 'Carrier grade' offerings with limited scope...