NBN: Why Fibre? What it does better than Copper.

Bits are agnostic, they don't care what medium they travel over: wireless of any kind, HFC, Fibre, ADSL, VDSL, ethernet, infrared, power lines or dial-up modem.

One of the arguments against a direct Fibre to the Premises network is "anything you can do, I can do better, or at least as well", or, restated, if people want 25Mbps and VDSL gives it to them and its cheaper, then why wouldn't they go for the "sooner, cheaper and more affordable option"?

An FTTP means:

• immunity from Thunderstorms and electricity leakage Less damage and danger.
• higher bandwidth per link (forty times), with less excess capacity required to be installed, subscribers won't be denied service from fully utilised infrastructure:
• subscriber don't require extra premise connections for increased bandwidth or multiple connections.
• running out of pairs on the local loop and ports in DSLAMs is common with the copper network. This is extremely expensive to address and often never happens. This is a well-known problem with the copper Customer Access Network
• predictable and guaranteed speeds: if you're connected, you can get the full range of services.
• This is critical for employer or agency supplied networks, e.g. Schools and University.
• guaranteed upload speeds
• guaranteed low latency and network/traffic prioritisation for Real Time services, such as Telephony and high-quality audio or teleconferencing.
• lower congestion without peak-hour latency "traffic jams" due to larger FSAM's with upgradeable uplinks. We know from the Gungahlin Experiment that nodes are particularly susceptible to under-diminsioned uplinks or saturated backplanes, both of which wi
• in-place upgrades to higher speeds with newer technology

and

• lower maintenance and no major upgrade hurdles.

Guaranteed link speeds and uniform subscriber equipment means:

• multicast, necessary for the much cheaper & more efficient broadcast services, works as designed using the NBN Co infrastructure directly.

• A single wholesale pure-digital telephone system, eliminating inefficient & costly equipment and systems duplication.
• This will remove a large deadweight cost from Telephone charges.
• It will allow new, affordable and innovative Telephony products to be sold to businesses and premium phone users:
• internal PABX's won't be needed. All switching can be done more cheaply via the NBN.
• lower call and trunk costs.
• seamless integration of multi-medium calls, especially from a smartphone: You can start a call from home via WiFi. move to the car using 3G/4G, then to a nanocell hotspot, back to 3G/4G, then to the office with WiFi, seamlessly and reliably.

• Off-peak mega-speed plans become possible for home, SOHO and SME backups.
• Backing up servers at 400Mbps (160GB per hour) allows Terrabyte drives to be copied or backed up cheaply & easily overnight without impacting normal operations of the customer network. This is at the lower-end of current demand.
• Compare this to the current Telstra rate-card for 10Mbps (forty times slower) symmetrical services: $7,931/month for 'unlimited' usage or just 2.5TB, maximum. 100GB/mth is $1,870/mth with $8 per GB after that. 850GB per month is the break-over point to 'unlimited'.
• versus ~$100/month for 40Mbps and 1TB currently with ISP NBN services.
• The NBN Co plan is to halve their download volume charges every 3 years, hopefully this will be reflected in ISP/RSP plans. Things will only get better from here, especially for micro and small businesses.

On top of that, the "Bring Your own Device" Coalition policy has very significant downsides for the service providers. It is the worst possible engineering design.

For the Network Operator, NBN Co, and Retail Providers, ISPs/RSPs, a pure-digital network with uniform Network Termination Devices (NTDs) under their full control is essential for properly running their network:

• Remote end-to-end line testing is possible simply and transparently.

• Firmware upgrades can be done securely, efficiently and frequently. This is the minimum necessary for a high reliability and secure, dependable network.

• If all premises have the same networking capabilities, 2-phone and 4-data, the Provisioning and Operations systems are much simpler and less error-prone.
• From the Telstra HFC network, we know that software control systems can and do seriously degrade and become dysfunctional.

• Remote monitoring, control, supervision and administration/provisioning of all network devices, especially end-points (NTDs in Customer Premises) is the minimum now required to run large, complex digital networks.

• IPv6 (version 6 of the IP protocols) can be uniformly & transparently implemented. This will soon become a necessary migration.

• Automatic response against a concerted Network attack is only possible with a single, known network infrastructure.
• An "Internet Kill Switch" can be simply and effectively implemented, allowing rapid response to intentional or accidental network attacks or Denial of Service.
• individual NTDs, or groups of them, can be monitored and controlled in real-time to stop, slow or mitigate the propagation of Worms and malware.
• Post-event replay, necessary for detailed analysis, is possible by collecting NTD log files.

NBN: the business case for 100-1000Mbps symmetric for SOHO & SME

Backups don't just protect you from fire, theft or hardware failure: they are now a critical element of security. If you're business cannot run with its computer systems, you cannot run your business without trusted backups.

Around Christmas 2012, there were reports of Ransomware attacks in Queensland. But it was Old News... "Police knew of 30 attacks" two months earlier. Nigel Phair, author of a book on Cybercrime, was quoted in multiple sources.


Potentially Medical Records are being especially targeted. This is Hacking-for-Cash, not healthcare related hacktivism as seen in the UK. AFR had a story in early December and mentioned AusCERT's posts on ransomware.

Regardless how a system is compromised, the only reason "ransomware" can succeed is simple:

People cannot restore from backups.

As the AusCERT post says, just because you once scheduled backups to run, doesn't mean they are running.

Case 2: Medical centre

The attacker took control of the doctors’ database containing patient records. The attacker provided proof that recovery was possible by safely returning two sample files belonging to the medical centre. The ransom demand was $4,000.

In this case, the attacker had actually infiltrated the medical centre some weeks prior to the ransom demand. During this time the attacker had made numerous strategic changes within the system such as disabling the patient database in the tape backup scheduler. After several weeks of backup tape rotations, recent backups were not available even in the medical centre’s offsite storage location. Additionally the medical centre’s USB hard disk backup device was plugged in to the system, and had therefore already been seized by the attacker.

The cure was to erase and rebuild the server, and recover older data from backup tapes. In this case, the medical centre had good practices such as keeping two different types of backup, applying security patches and maintaining an up-to-date business continuity plan. However, repelling these targeted ransomware attacks requires stronger defenses.

AusCERT advises those affected to not engage with the attackers. There's a simple reason:

They want to make the maximum amount of money from you, they aren't bound by any  code of ethics or morality, as demonstrated by the metaphorical gun to the head of the hostage, they can't be tracked easily and dealing with International cyber-criminals is notoriously difficult.

The initial payment you make will only be the first payment of many, not full and final as they'd like you to believe. Like any good parasite, they'll quickly figure out how much blood they can draw: how much this thing is worth to you and your capacity to pay.

What the "authorities" aren't saying is how far and how fast this particular monetisation of exploits will travel.

We know its not going to double its reach every few seconds like "slammer", because of the manual work involved in identifying targets and setting up the backups.

Even if it doubles just every month, that's a 1000-fold increase in a year. Because the Internet is "born global", what we see in Australia will happen everywhere.

Business Case for High-Speed symmetrical links

Every small business that doesn't want to be shutdown by hackers needs guaranteed, verified off-site backups. Just like fire and theft insurance, you need good backups - and via the NBN is what you want. For this is to be useful in an age of Gigabyte and Terrabyte data storage is at least 100Mbps (gives you 3.6Gb/hour). But it needs to be symmetrical, the same upstream as downstream, to be useful for both backups and restores.

Remember: no user has ever asked for a backup, they only ever ask for restores.

Ideally, Retail Service Providers and ISP's will offer local access off the same PoI (Point of Interconnect, the NBN version of a Telephone Exchange for 100,000 subscribers). This means your data packets won't have to travel down and back the transit/backhaul link from the PoI to the ISP/RSP, uselessly consuming expensive bandwidth and clogging the ISP's network.

Which may need the co-operation of NBN Co for ISP/RSP's to install the appropriate network appliance at the PoI.

In a reasonable world, you'll be able to partner with someone you know in your area and each serve as the off-site backup site for the other. If the hardware fails or fills up, they are close by and you can buy a new disk and dash over there...

But that only works if:

• links are fast (daily backups under and hour, weekly under 10 hours), and
• access is cheap. (not $1,000's/month for 10Mbps, but ~$100/mth for 100Mbps symmetrical).

NBN Internet traffic drivers: STORAGE

STORAGE DRIVES DEMAND FOR INTERNET USE.

Since IBM introduced the first disk (5MB, RAMAC) in 1956, demand for storage has grown relentlessly, as demonstrated by yearly total disk sales. Disk Vendors have collapsed to 2+1 as we enter the end-game.

Storage drives demand for bandwidth, both for data exchange/transfer and backups. Bandwidth demand will track storage sold, lagged by 1-3 years.
The proliferation of smartphones with video has driven the explosion of content on social media, and You-tube's "60 hours of video uploaded every minute" is only set to get higher.

By 2020, the last 10-fold scale-up of disk drives will be complete with 3.5" drives maxxing at 20-40TB: 1-10,000 hrs video [or for 'action' HD, ~500 hours with MPEG-4 variable encoding/bitrates.]
Flash is also in its last 10-fold scale-up and starting to suffer the same scaling problems that began in 2004/5 for DRAM. There are at least 3 candidate technologies to replace Flash and fuel further growth.


The bandwidth driver for domestic Internet will be driven by upload speed (currently 1-40Mbps), not the quote headline rate of '100Mbps' for download.

This has 3 components:

• file backups,
• content sharing and
• real-time low-latency access (telephony, video calling and gaming, ...).

At the mid-range 5Mbps uplink, video uploads will only be 2-3 times faster than their record rate, but only if the link is not otherwise engaged in things like Skype and gaming.

As families realise they've moved to entirely digital records of their lives and that disks fail and/or lose data unpredictably, they will start to subscribe to Digital Preservation services:

every day they will automatically backup masses of documents, images and video to "the Cloud".

Because of the shared uplinks of the 'PON' [Passive Optical Network], even this promised line-access-rate will rarely be achieved. PON Congestion during busy hours will be considerable - exactly the same as the Cable TV (HFC) networks suffer now. This is on top of the ISP's 30-100 times over-subscription rates.

By 2020, there will be huge demand for Gigabit PON to be enabled. Not for the download speed, but for the 50-400Mbit/sec upload speed. As more people opt for the higher upload-rate plans, the "last mile" of the network, the most expensive part to change, will become more stressed.

Simplistic analyses based on "raw access speed" usually contain another two major flaws:

• latency (round-trip delay) and jitter are far more critical for real-time services than raw throughput.
• utility networks need to cater for peak demand, not average demand.

The lesson from the electricity networks is clear.
While homes on average consume under 1kW (20kW-hrs/day) during busy hour" demand rises to 3-5 times that, with instantaneous household consumption 10-20 times the average. Consumers will pay a premium for just 10-hours/week of higher-speed uploads.

For home "power users", Petabyte storage (1 Million Gigabytes) will be within reach well before 2020 - technically and financially. Their needs will drive the industry, just as Gamers and overclockers, not
businesses, have driven PC development since 2005.

This is without considering growth in low-latency interactive services like geo-data and mapping/overlay applications: grown-up versions of Google Earth. "Augmented Reality" devices and games are already being sold - they take latency and bandwidth needs to whole new levels.

The on-going revolutions in use and demand caused by the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010 should alert any planners, especially those doing networks, to the inevitable:

What you don't see will hurt you.

The only constant we've seen in the Internet since the web arrived in 1991 is exponential growth, akin to Moore's Law for CPU's. There is still no sign of it stopping, just easing down to a mere 12-month
doubling period.