Tuesday, 27 August 2013

NBN: A Need for Speed 3

Tamara Plakalo in the AFR notes that, for her, Turnbull has best phrased why we need fibre:
“speed is only of value to you in so far as you have applications that need it”.
 Only that's not nearly the whole truth, in fact it shows classic Turnbull "upside-down thinking":
Applications don't require speed, people do. When people are allowed to place a dollar value on their time by selecting higher access rates, the vote with their wallet.
The real data is in from a statistically valid (50,000 of 12M) fibre connected households. Take-up rates are running well ahead of forecasts and 31%, not the 18% forecast, have signed up for the current maximum rate.

Part of this must be nearly half ISP connections are "Business or Government" according to the ABS (Dec 2012), up from 28% in Dec 2009.

When people can put a value on their time, they trade more expensive higher speeds against wages.
Even at $2/minute, Fibre's higher access rates provides exceptional returns.

"Who needs Gigabit?" Anyone who values their time at more than nothing!

I've created a spreadsheet showing the break-even points for higher speeds (250, 500, 1000 Mbps) compared to 100/40. In 2040, if you only do uploads, then at current average wages + on-costs ($120/hr) 16G/month is the break-even. 41GB for all downloads. At that time, this will be in the lowest quartile of data consumption.

Previous pieces:

The Path to 1 Gigabit

http://stevej-on-nbn.blogspot.com/2013/08/nbn-need-for-speed-i-path-to-1-gigabit.html

Nobody Needs more than 1Mbps!
http://stevej-on-nbn.blogspot.com/2013/08/nbn-need-for-speed-ii-nobody-needs-more.html



No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.