[clug] [OT] Broadband clangers

[Jason]

I think for me the NBN is not so much about what you can do at 100mbps max vs 20mbps max (I think that is the current max, not sure) Its about getting everyone onto a more level playing field, getting rid of rim exchanges, (The 1.5mbps available to me in outer Watson is a joke in the inner north of the capital city of Australia). And hopefully it will be about not privatizing the lines like they did last time and that everyone claims was the biggest mistake with the privatization of Telstra. Although I realize they are planning on privatizing this one as well, but I think that is best left as the next fight for now.

Things I am looking forward to are running my websites from home connections instead of paying for external hosting, having decent quality video chats with my fiancées family in Korea, decent quality streaming movie rental (iview is usable at the moment but it would work better above 3mps I imagine). Backing up snapshots of my whole home directory off site might be nice, or if its fast enough why not my whole drive (so I don't have to bother remembering what I had installed, or how I had apache or cron setup).

I expect that this will involve upgrading the trunks not just the last mile, which will mean more opportunities for science projects like the square km array which produce bucket loads of data.

 From my work prospective, the sports institutes around Australia have some of the worst Internet connections I have seen, Im sure we could offer some great services to them if we even had 20-30mbps links to them.

Jason

On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 10:28:42 +1000, Bob Edwards <bob at cs.anu.edu.au> wrote:

> Kerry O'Brien on the 7:30 report last night interviewing Tony Abbott:
>
> "KERRY O'BRIEN: It's fibre that - where the signals will travel at the
> speed of light."
> (from http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2010/s2979381.htm )
>
> As if, somehow, signals travelling down fibre that "last mile" will
> somehow be noticably any faster than signals travelling down copper
> that same last mile...
>
> There was also a debate on ABC News 24 last night with Sen. Conroy
> (sorry, I simply can't grok the ABC archives...) where he says
> something like: "we need 100Mbps to enable future technologies like
> the SmartGrid".
>
> My grid meter runs at 19200baud and is bursty... I guess they may
> want to have 5000+ grid meters running per household... that would
> be a killer app for a 100Mbps connection...
>
> I am not necessarily against having a 100Mbps link, I just don't see
> why the minister is using SmartGrid as part of his argument. This is
> not going to need anything more than about 300bps, if that. The
> minister must have more compelling reasons to invest $43B for the
> NBN than enabling SmartGrids.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Bob Edwards.