Lots of playing the man and not the ball going on here. And not much focus on the facts.
Clearly none of you have bothered to look at the independent demand analysis. It sets out clear use cases and models demand growth over a ten year horizon, including multiple 4K video streams simultaneous with other uses. The existing NBN build is to that standard. It sets aside the really extreme use cases (about 4 mins per month in total), for which individual users can choose to pay for a faster connection should they really wish to pay for it. Willingness to pay is never entertained as a factor by most gold-platers.....they just want "the best" and want everyone else to pay for it.
I have yet to see an articulation of actual bandwidth demand for the uses cases being thrown around by the disbelievers. Show us what these things are that already exceeding the 50Mbps standard?
And for all the people using the two-lane Harbour Bridge analogy, there is not a telco in the world that builds for >10 year capacity, because they simply don't know what it will be. But what has been proven is that technology always improves, and it can be adopted incrementally, and while you can't turn copper into fibre, you can get more out of a hybrid fibre/copper network over time. Tech vendors build that stuff because they know it's what telcos need.
Sure - we don't know what future applications will be. Sure - the government (Blue and Red) have made a meal of it. And sure - the pollies don't really understand what they are talking about most of the time. But let's get a network in place quickly that services everyone with tech that works for the next 5 years. That will have a greater impact than building something that takes longer to get in place, and leaves more people out of the fast BB loop for longer. Just offset the incremental difference uprating from 50Mbps will make (very little for the next 5 or so years), against the the extra costs of the build, and the extra time required to build it. Then look at the MTM that we now have - everyone still argues like it's copper everywhere but big chunks of it are DOCSIS 3 HFC, FTTB, and FTTP for greenfields. And put in a thought for the regions and remotes, where FTTP was never going to be possible anyway.
In short, get real. And no I don't work for NBN and I'm not a LIB.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
