[clug] Light entertainment for this morning (NBN)

[grail at velocitynet.com.au]

> What he and nobody else has mentioned is $/Gb download costs.
> 10Gb/mth at 100Mbps doesn't allow for a couple of TV channels, and would
> be consumed in 3hours... That's gotta change.

If the model works anything like the TransACT network in Canberra (I keep
mentioning this company because they're already doing what the NBN wants
to do), your 10GB/month Internet traffic will come from your ISP, over the
broadband network, and you'll pay for the traffic separately from the
bandwidth. The TV channels will then come over the broadband from another
supplier (eg: SBS, ABC, Fox, whoever), up to the capacity of your
broadband connection.

It's like at home, you can quite effectively do video chat between two
computers on your LAN without using a single byte of traffic outside that
local network - where the LAN is analogous to the NBN, and the analogy
breaks down from there.

> -> He rolls that up to $8Bn/year for 8M dwellings - $1,000/year
>    then leaps to $200/mth - $2,500/year... Hmmmm

If you're running a business, you have to do more than just cover the cost
of your capital investment. A 250% retail price is more than reasonable
considering that you're covering the cost of not just the capital (that's
the $1000/yr number) but the people who have to keep working on the NBN
project to keep provisioning, billing, paying suppliers, answering phones
and cleaning buildings.

> "But do you then go the next step and put fibre-to-the-home to meet a
> demand which is not there today?
> "And I don't see it being there in 10 years' time."

10 years ago, when we were fooling around with dial-up Internet and 10Mbps
Ethernet, how many of us would have complained that our ISP was too slow
for streaming HD video? How many of us even tried streaming video over the
Internet?

In 10 years time, how many of us are not going to be looking back at the
noughties and wondering how we managed to cope with only 1Mbps to the
home? We'll be laughingly referring to the NBN as the little network that
could.

Demand will expand to meet supply.