Landmark Steps Forward For Australia's NBN 66
angry tapir writes "After two years of protracted negotiations Telstra, the Australian Federal Government and the NBN Co have come to definitive agreements on the structural separation of Telstra and the use of its network assets in Australia's 1Gbps National Broadband Network (NBN). Australia's second largest telco, Optus, has also reached an $800m agreement with the NBN Co for the migration of its hybrid coaxial cable (HFC) customers to the fibre-optic-based NBN."
Re:Bye bye copper (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd just like to point out the only reason you will have caps on your FTTH connection is because of the government's absurd pricing scheme that isn't used in any other wholesale network in the world. In addition to the usual $xx/(tier of speed) retail ISPs have to pay NBNCo (known as AVC, ex: $24/12mbit, $36/50 mbit, etc.), there is an additional "contention charge", called the connectivity virtual circuit (CVC). ISPs attempting to provision bandwidth to their customers will have to pay $20/mbit of actual throughput.
There are two points to consider here. One is that this charge is utterly unrelated to the cost or difficulty of transferring data on the new network. The FTTH network will be provisioned extremely well. Charging $20/mbit is ludicrous. Those prices are beyond inflated. Currently international transit data to Australia costs $40/mbit, and drops 50% every year on average. Worst of all is that NBNco's business plan foresees charges dropping only 50% after 10 years. Bandwidth costs around the world drop 35% *annually*.
The second point is that NBNCo is ostensibly using CVC charges to hasten payback on the network. However it absolutely doesn't need a CVC charge, and could instead simply increase each AVC tier by a few dollars/month. Simon Hackett, the founder and private owner of Internode, has relentlessly criticized the NBN over this issue (http://delimiter.com.au/2011/05/20/conroy-has-stuffed-up-nbn-pricing-says-hackett/).
Because of CVC, 90-95% of the FTTH's capacity will go unused. Remember, GPON allocates 2.4 gbit/s to each node of 32 users. FTTH networks like Verizon FIOS deliver virtually 1:1 uncontended bandwidth to their customers. XGPON (10 gbit/s) is already commercially available and NBNCo will no doubt adopt it in a few years. This will mean an even smaller % of the network's will be utilized. Make no mistake: if not for the absurd and unnecessary CVC charges everyone in Australia would have unlimited, uncapped accounts.