Video: The NBN reaction

video What does the everyday person on the street think of the Federal Government's plans to build a $43 billion National Broadband Network?

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Earlier this week, the Federal Government terminated the National Broadband Network tender process with no winner, instead flagging plans to invest billions in building its own fibre-to-the-home network to 90 per cent of Australians over the next eight years.

On the day the plan was announced, ZDNet.com.au took to the streets of Sydney to get reactions from the everyday people.

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I agree Anonymous -- 09/04/09

I agree that not many laypeople understand or even care that much. "Just make it work" is what I hear a lot.

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Cost does matter. Sydney Lawrence -- 09/04/09 (in reply to #320129067)

Thanks for that interesting report. I expect the answers may have been quite different had those questioned been told the cost of the NBN would probably be twice what customers are now paying.

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How do you know the cost? Anonymous -- 09/04/09 (in reply to #320129069)

How do you know the cost will be double what people are spending? Is this figure pulled from Turnbulls comments? How does he know? Pricing will be set by the ISP, and like ALL internet technologies that have debuted in Australia, may be initially pricey but will drop in cost over time. The existing infrastructure wont just go away and everyone migrated with the flick of a switch to the nbn - there will be competition between existing services and new services trying to attract customers which will help keep costs down.

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I Don't understand why they are investing in this Dan Donoghue -- 09/04/09

Japan is already at 1 GBit for intenet connection speeds *I forget where I heard this, if it is inacurate, please correct me.

AU has 24 MBit, This is "acceptable" at this point in time but our PM was on the radio the other morning talking about how this investment will give us 100MBit.

Lets think about this, 100MBit when there are countries already on 1,000MBit.

$43b for an upgrade in the order of 4 times when there are countries in the order of 40 times to me just seems stupid.

So you invest massive amounts of cash and 6 or 7 years in to a speed that is slower than what you already have overseas.

So in 6 or 7 years when this is complete, what will be the overseas benchmark then? I feel that this move is simply putting us in the same situation again.

I have 24MBit at home and I can pull 350 meg in 7 minutes on this connection. So this upgrade would bring it down to ~2 mins and whilst that would be better its still not as good as Japan where it would be ~12 seconds.

I wonder what speed Japan will have in 6 or 7 years.

I suppose at least one up side is the employment opportunities creation.

My personal opinion of this is don't waste your time going to 100MBit, just go straight for the 1 GBit, It may cost more in the short term but it is ONE upgrade instead of two. As soon as the 100MBit upgrade is complete they will anounce that it is too slow so now we need to spend more on going to 1 GBit.

*The 6 or 7 years and the 100MBit speed are both what the PM quoted on the Nova breakfast show in Sydney.

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One further point Dan Donoghue -- 09/04/09 (in reply to #320129095)

Why are we even bothering with cables? Wireless is where it is going, that is where the investment should be.

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A lesson in fibre RL -- 09/04/09 (in reply to #320129099)

Just because Wireless is popular doesn't mean it's better. A fixed internet connection is more reliable and less of a bottleneck than Wireless.

Besides, once the network is built, a simple upgrade in the equipment can increase the speeds from 100Mbps to 1Gbps. Even now, the experts are currently working on technologies to produce speeds of up to 64Gbps through fibre.

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@Dan William W -- 09/04/09 (in reply to #320129099)

ADSL2+ is all good if you live next to an exchange as you nearly get the full bandwidth of 24Mbps but if like me living on the border of an exchange the speed drops dramatically. I'm about 4Km from the exchange and can only get a line sync of ~4.7Mbps.
This is why fiber is needed. With fiber there is only very little if any speed loss with distance, so we really will be getting close to 100Mbps.
Fiber has the potential for huge bandwidth but it also depends on the type of fiber technology. Some are made to be longer but having less bandwidth while another is made to have more bandwidth but with a shorter length. Therefore if the right fiber cables are laid in the ground there is potential for higher capacities than 100Mbps in the future. Its not only the fiber that determines the overall speed but it also depends on the technology used in the exchanges where the fiber terminate.

Even though wireless is where its going, it will never be able to reach the speeds that can be achieved with fiber. Not only that but it can be unreliable, has higher latency and with more people connected the bandwidth reduces for each connected user. In the future it might be different though, who knows where wireless technology can go.

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