Re: Private Health loss of Rebate for some
Look I am a dinosaur and really do not understand the way technology is taking us.On the other hand i have been around for a long time and have seen so many new technologies introduced with fanfare that in the end was meaningless.
I assume the "technology" you're referring to above is fibre-optic cable as a method of connecting to the internet, not the internet itself - I'd say it's pretty self-evident the internet isn't a fad
Anyway, I can certainly understand that sort of skepticism - as you point out, the history of IT is littered with plenty of examples of the "latest and greatest" fad that has, in the end, amounted to nothing. This just isn't the case with fibre-optic communication though - and the current government has done a really, really coughpy job cutting through the FUD to communicate this.
Let me provide extra info - this is gonna be a bit wordy, but hopefully you will find this interesting (or at least informative):
Firstly, some history: fibre-optic communication has been in commercial use since 1975 - so it's already been around for over 35 years. Since it was first introduced, right up till now, it has been the way of transmitting large amounts of data over distance - it's been far faster than any competitive technology throughout its commercial history (except for perhaps the very early days of its commercialisation).
Fibre has come a long way over that time too. I'm not sure what the current data-transmission speed record is, but in 2010 it was 72,456,601 Megabits per second, compared to 45 Megabits per second in it's first commercial offering back in 1975. So, due to a variety of technological advancements fibre has gotten roughly 1.5 million times faster over the past 35 years or so, despite the underlying idea - transmitting data by shooting pulses of light down a thin glass/plastic cable - not having changed. (If you're interested, the 2010 record of 72,456,601 Megabits per second was achieved using a single, milli-metre thin, strand of fibre-optic cable over a distance of 240km - that's the equivilant of transmitting ~300 complete copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica, or ~4 full-length Bluray movies, per second.)
I mention the history and speed increases of fibre for two reasons: one, to show it's not a "new" or "faddish" technology, and two, to show how much faster it has gotten over time without changing the underlying idea. This latter point is important as it is what makes the NBN "future proof" - as technology advances the NBN will be able to be upgraded to much higher speeds whilst still using the exact same pieces of fibre-optic cable being laid right now / without making the effort of running fibre-optic all over the country redundant. Most future speed upgrades will require changing the equipment at each end of the cable, but this is a relatively minor cost / simple change compared to the actual fibre-optic cable rollout.
I should mention at this point that the type of fibre technology the NBN is using for residential connections is a bit different to what I've been describing above. Without going into too much detail, it's a system called GPON, which lets multiple houses share one piece of fibre. It's slower than "point to point" fibre (what I've been describing above) can achieve, but still way faster than alternative technologies, and represents a sensible cost/benefit choice for residential deployment (and is being used in many similar deployments worldwide, not just by the NBN). It also offers significant future upgradability - a new standard called 10GPON is currently being finalised, which is 10 times faster than GPON despite using the same physical fibre-optic cables.
Secondly, how it's used: Today, almost all data we send between continents and countries is sent via fibre. Data between states, cities and towns - also fibre. From Telstra / ISPs to the thousands of local telephone exchanges - fibre. From the mobile carriers to their thousands of base stations - fibre. From ISPs to many businesses (historically large businesses, but more-and-more often medium and small busineses too) - again, fibre.
The point I'm making here is that, as I mentioned briefly above, since it's introduction fibre has been the way to move large amounts of data from point A to point B. As the amount of data we need to move has steadily increased, fibre has been creeping closer-and-closer to our homes. With the NBN, it's finally bridging the "last mile" and connecting directly to our homes and businesses - the next step in a logical evolution as our demands for data continue to grow exponentially.
Thirdly, comparison to alternative technologies: there are only really three possible competitors for fibre - wireless, DSL and Hyrid Fibre-coxial ("HFC" - the type of cable used by Foxtel and Optus to deliver their pay TV services).
HFC I won't spend much time on - it's a good technology capable of moving data at very high rates, but it also suffers from the same downside as fibre (need to run a cable to every house) whilst being inferior to fibre in every other way (far slower right now, doesn't offer the same future-upgradability that fibre does, relies on "shared" bandwidth that can lead to slowdowns, etc). If we already had HFC cable covering most of the population it would be a reasonable option (for now), but currently only a limited subset of the population is covered, and if you're going to run new cable you might as well go for the better option (fibre).
DSL is likewise a good technology for moving data around, and as you probably know is currently used to provide most broadband connections in Australia. It's big advantage is that it utilises copper phone lines, which are already laid to the vast majority of homes and businesses.
DSL has significant downsides though: it's range is short (you can't get DSL at all if your phone line is longer than a couple of KM), it gets much slower as the phone lines get longer, and it also gets slower as the quality of the phone line degrades (which is a significant problem in Australia, where much of our copper phone network is very old and hasn't been maintained properly by Telstra in recent times).
More importantly, DSL also doesn't offer nearly the same level of future upgradability as fibre. There are types of DSL - both already in existance, and proposed - that are much faster than what is currently in wide use in Australia (ADSL2+). However, these other variants of DSL rely either in-whole or in-part on the length of the phone line carrying the DSL connection being much shorter than what is normal in Australia. This distance problem can be partially overcome by moving the end-point of our phones lines from the current telephone exchanges to local "nodes" (which is what the NBN originally proposed to do), but this is really just a poor stop-gap solution. Creating this sort of setup would still require very significant re-engineering of the phone network, and would still not come anywhere near offering the same type of speeds / future upgradability as a fibre network - basically, we'd spend less money now, but we'd be back in the same situation in 5-10 years time and would likely then want move to fibre anyway, meaning the money spent now is essentially wasted on a sub-optimal, short-term solution.
Finally, wireless, the technology most often proposed as an alternative to fibre. The fact is that this is viewpoint is simply wrong - wireless is not a viable alternative. Broadband delivered over mobile phone network is a good and very convenient way of transmitting data, but it is a complementary technology to fibre - it's a great way to provide data on the move, and it's usage will continue to increase over time, but is simply is not capable of handling our current data-transmissions needs (if everyone relied 100% upon it) nor does it offer anywhere near the future-upgradability of fibre.
This just comes down to physics: data is transmitted wirelessly by breaking up the electromagnetic frequency spectrum into little chunks, and allocating a chunk (or multiple chunks) to each user (phone / broadband dongle / whatever). Unfortunately, there is only a limited amount of available spectrum, so as you add more and more users (or as each user transmits more and more data) you eat into this available spectrum until you reach the point where you quite simply run out of "space" - all available spectrum is in use, and you can't physically squeeze any more data into it.
There are two possible solutions to this problem of running out of spectrum. The first one is to install more mobile phone towers, because a user connected to one tower can use the same chunk of frequency spectrum as a user connected to another tower. But the question then becomes how many towers do you need? Even based on current data usage by Australians (let alone how it might grow in the future) you would need an incredible amount of towers to provide fast and consistent coverage, to the point where you'd quite literally need a tower at the end of every street. Even ignoring wireless' other flaws (more below), I can't imagine people seeing this as an attractive option (both literally and metaphorically) - not to mention the fact that you'd need to run fibre from each of these towers back to central hubs, so why not keep going the last few hundred metres to people's homes anyway?
The other possible solution to running out of spectrum is to use what is available more efficiently - that is, find smart ways to transmit more data over the same amount of frequency spectrum. This is one of the drivers behind evolving mobile phone standards (2G -> 3G -> 4G/LTE, etc) - these new standards normally deliver a range of benefits, but one of the main ones is more efficient spectrum usage. This may seem like a solution to the wireless-capacity problem, but it's contingent on mobile standards' spectrum efficiency increasing at faster rate than the population's data-transmission needs, and all signs are pointing to this not being the case. Most efficiency gains have already been exploited, and the next generation of mobile standards (LTE/4G) is a perfect demonstration of this: whilst it offers significantly higher speeds than the previous generation (HSPA+), almost all of this extra speed is delivered by allowing each device to use more spectrum, not by using that spectrum more efficiently. Yes, it's possible that a new idea may come along and change this, but given the amount of R&D money already being poured into mobile networks the chances of a revolutionary change do not look strong.
It's probably worth noting at this point that the huge increases in data transmission speeds that fibre has achieved over it's lifetime have actually been achived in the same way I just described. That is, they've been achieved by making more "efficient" use of the piece of fibre-optic cable - so you could mount an argument that it has similar limitations. This would be a false argument, however: in the case of fibre the opportunities to be more "efficient" are much larger (demonstrated by both historical and current progress), and more importantly, if we ever reach the point where we can't make fibre any more "efficient" there is an easy alternative - just lay a second (or third, or fourth, or whatever) piece of fibre and you instantly create more capacity. You don't have this option with wireless as you can't "create" new frequency spectrum.
A final point on wireless: I haven't even touched on many of it's other problems / limitations here, namely it's tendancy to be affected by weather / interference / whatever and drop out, loss of signal strength / speed when indoors, relatively high latency, the fact that whilst current-tech data transmissions speeds are extremely fast on paper those speeds are rarely realised in the real world, and so on. I figure I don't need to explain these issues as everyone has experienced them and should understand why they'd present a problem if you were trying to replace proper broadband (even current tech, let alone fibre) with a wireless solution.
Given I've just written a lot about wireless, to sum up, the simple facts are:
1) Wireless does not have anywhere near the capacity to replace fixed-line broadband at the moment, and to even come close would require a massive investment in infrastructure, a ridiculous number of mobile phone towers, etc.
2) Even if you made this investment you'd end up with a solution that is slower than either point-to-point fibre, or the fibre system the NBN is using (GPON, as mentioned above)
3) Even if you made this investment you'd be running into capacity / speed issues again before too long, without much hope for a viable "upgrade what we have" solution.
4) Even if you made this investment, you'd still have a host of other annoying issues to deal with (dropouts / latency / variable real-world speeds / etc).
And therefore does not offer a viable alternative to fibre.
So, to sum up, there is no doubt amongst experts in technology / the internet / data transmission that fibre-optic cable is currently the best option available, future-proof, and the correct choice for this sort of project. Hopefully the above goes some way to explain this point of view. I'll finish with one practical, local example of this: Telstra recently had to decommission one of their old telephone exchanges (and hence thousands of residential copper phone lines) in Brisbane to make way for the expansion of a hospital (can't remember which one - in central Brisbane). To replace all the affected phone lines, they didn't choose to run new copper, or HFC. They didn't choose wireless, even though this would have been far cheaper for them. Instead, they chose to run fibre-optic cable directly to every affected home and business. I raise this as an example because Telstra, as a commercial entity, could be forgiven with chasing the cheapest option or just continuing on with existing technology - instead they did not, because they recognise that fibre is the right choice, and the way of the future.
Wow, that turned out to be quite an essay - to be honest, in hindsight I'm quite embarrassed about writing so much basically unprompted and technically OT (typical of me), but now that I'm finished I mind as well post it. And I guess if it helps convince even one more person that the NBN is a great idea, I'm happy I spent the time writing it
Then there are also individuals to factor in.Many is the time I have had a patient say to me-Thank goodness you dont have a computer on your desk-I never know if Dr. x is listening to me or not.
As well in some of the places I go patients have the opportunity to have a consultation with the top specialists in the field via IT or coming and seeing a dinosaur like me.Most still choose the dinosaur.And yes i know that will change as us oldies die out but it is not going to be fast(excuse the pun).
Those are fair points, but I don't think anyone is proposing that e-health is going to replace face-time with doctors anytime soon (I'm certainly not) - it's a useful complementary thing, particularly in specialised cases / for remote patients / etc (/ uses we haven't even thought of it), not a replacement. And e-health just happened to be the topic on hand, it's far from the only reason to build the NBN
And I dont doubt that you feel the NBN is the way but i still read some(possibly so called) experts in the field that have a different opinion-I dont bookmark them so can not bring them up at will.
I think "so called" is the key phrase here - or perhaps "conflict of interest".
There are very, very few examples of people speaking purely from a technological point of view who are opposed to the NBN - in fact most are wildly supportive of it. There certainly are plenty of other examples of people against it, but these are almost exclusively:
- people opposed due to economic factors (which are pretty much entirely invalidated by the fact that the NBN is a profit-generating investment)
- people with significant conflicts of interest (e.g. politicians, biased / ignorant journos reporting things that are factually wrong, CEOs of companies which will be disadvanaged by the NBN in some way)
- people with concerns around competition (which is probably one of the few valid counter-arguments, but not a strong one)
Either way, if you come across these sorts of examples in the future I'm more than happy to rebut them ;-)
And as to their business plan-well have contracts been signed yet for the delivery of services?
No, but with the deal the government has struck with Telstra to shut down their copper network the financial sucess of the NBN is pretty much a done-deal.
And to take up-I work a lot in Tasmania and the take up is quite pathetic.
It's low in some areas (TAS), strong in others (Armidale in NSW). Either way, it's very early days and the government is still doing a cough job of communicating with the public about the benefits of the NBN. And probably most importantly, the government / Telstra deal to shutdown Telstra's copper network will make early uptake rates pretty much irrelevant anyway.
As for wireless we have had friends over today.Her new fangled super duper new phone had no signal,my old Samsung had a strong signal.In Tassie I find my Telstra wireless broadband is faster than the hospital's cable-mean anything,almost ceretainly not.
Which is actually a perfect example of why wireless is not an alternative to fibre, and why we need the NBN
