NBN: FTTN in Australia - the Gungahlin Experiment

In 1995, Telstra announced that the new Town Centre in Northern Canberra, Gungahlin, would be a testbed for "broadband", with a $20-$30MM project announced laying "Fibre to the Kerb", which many people like me interpreted as "Fibre to the Home".

What Telstra deployed was RIM's, Remote Integrated Multiplexors, designed initially as an 'integrated' extension of the local Telephone Exchange. ADSL broadband was not supported. Instead of a world-class demonstration of the application and utility of fast broadband, Gungahlin residents were locked in a battle for even minimal access speeds.

For the rest of Australia, we have very clear demonstration of two things from this nearly two decade 'experiment':

• Fibre-to-the-Node, even 15 years ago when it was a much, much cheaper technology than Fibre-to-the-Premises, is fraught for consumers.
• Even when the subscribers thought they were out of the woods with high-speed ADSL 2+ available, the sting-in-the-tail of FTTN became apparent: congestion on the node "backhaul" makes line access rate irrelevant.
• The Coalition, during the Howard government from 1996 to 2007, did not prioritise, nor apparently see the need for, a National Broadband Network.
• It is only since the Telstra SSU agreements early 2012 that the Coalition has become committed to an NBN of any flavour.

RIM's, and later CMUX's, were an important commercial move by Telstra. They prevented other carriers and ISP's from taking over subscriber lines, ULL (Unbundled Local Loop) or ISP's installing their own DSLAM's, Digital Subscriber-Loop Access Module, necessary to support ADSL. Gungahlin residents have only had the Telecomms infrastructure available that Telstra saw fit to provide. Although other ISP's later sold ADSL services in Gungahlin, it was provided through the Telstra RIM's and CMUX's. This experience might have been behind the limited (5 city) 12Mbps ADSL 2 FTTN network proposed by Telstra in 2005: they'd own both the voice and digital subscriber loops and force competitors to use their infrastructure at prices advantageous to Telstra.

The TransAct "phase 1" rollout around 2002 to 55,000 premises skipped Gungahlin because they had underground power and TransAct ran aerial cable strung from the Electricity Utility, ACTEW, poles. ACTEW was a major shareholder of TransAct.

Gungahlin was chosen for early release in the NBN Fibre rollout. (2009?)

An overview of the technology is available at ACT Broadband.

The local ALP Senator, Kate Lundy, took an early and continuing interest in having Telstra address the Gungahlin broadband access problems. Lists of Media Releases back to 1996 are on the Senators' website for Gungahlin Broadband and Telstra.

Senator Lundy has a 2010 page, with video interviews, of "the History and Issues around broadband in the Gungahlin area" that is concise and worth reading.

There is a larger story. Senator Lundy was involved with the 2004 Senate Inquiry into Australian Telecommunications Network,  noted on her 2009 Pair Gain Update page. Specifically, Telstra had installed 1.2M pair-gain services by 2004, two-thirds on RIM's and all without ADSL access.

Although Politically Partisan, this 2003 (?) page of Senator Lundy's, "Truth about Broadband", does document the long-term indifference of the Coalition to broadband and the ALP policy. Includes the use of the term "National Broadband Network". At the time the ALP were spruiking Fibre-to-the-Node, which was continued until 2009 and the Rudd/Conroy ~$5B tender, which was abandoned with the FTTP NBN announced instead.

A conclusion foreshadowed in 2007 by business journalist and one-time editor of the Melbourne Age, Alan Kohler:

In my view we should at least try to skip the halfway house of FTTN and go straight to FTTH. And the Government should see who else is out there.

A 2010 piece on ITnews "Canberrans confront Telstra over broadband hell" gives an overview similar to the 2010 History and Issues page of Senator Lundy.

The critical point is that by 2009, the ADSL/broadband problems that had started in 1996 were far from over: the RIM's and CMUX's may have provided adequate access line rates (up to 8Mbps), but the nodes suffered acute congestion on their digital link back to the exchange, the "backhaul".  Telstra introduced 'shaping' then reduced line-speed to 2Mbps.

The ITnews article attributes the long-standing problems as due to "underinvestment" by Telstra, the incumbent supplier, unmotivated to win new customers or pay more than scant heed to unhappy customers.

NBN, TLS: Media Report Transcript, 31-Aug-1995. "Gungahlin, ACT, interactive multimedia testing ground"

This transcript seemed to have disappeared from the ABC website in 2004: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/mediarpt/mstories/mr310801.htm

This copy comes from Achive.Org:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040906175620/http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/mediarpt/mstories/mr310801.htm

I find this piece important because a Telstra manager lays out their plans for a $20-$30MM project for broadband to the new Town of Gungahlin. What the residents got instead was more than a decade of misery as Telstra installed RIM's and CMUX's.
Other links: Senator Lundy's History in 2010 and the ACT Broadband site.

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Radio National Transcripts:
The Media Report         Thursday, 31st August 1995

Gungahlin, ACT, interactive multimedia testing ground

Agnes Warren: Today we're off to Gungahlin, a new housing development in Canberra. Gungahlin is above the national average in terms of education, income, and home computer ownership, and has become a playground for multimedia groupies.
In the next five years this community is to be a testing ground. For those who are keen to know, it will say just how Australians will use the information superhighway. Gungahlin is the sort of the place where the school, Palmerston Primary, has its own song.

Children singing:

Where the rolling hills meet the limestone plains,

The Ngunnawal people lived,

Then the farmers came to farm the land,

The hills now echo with a different sound...

Agnes Warren: So, have you all got a computer at home?

Children: Yeah, yep, yes, two... We've got three... We've got Sega Megadrive and Nintendo... We've got two laptops... We've got Bluechip I think... I've got Macintosh and IBM...

Child: My brother is sort of my computer because he's smart.

Child: What, Brad?

Child: No, Lionel.

Agnes Warren: Welcome to Gungahlin, fifteen kilometres out of Canberra on the road to Sydney. It's also the road to the future.

Houses are going up here at a rapid rate. But it's what's going on underground - the laying of high-speed high-volume information cables that makes Gungahlin special.

It's the largest trial in Australia of new technologies, and one of the largest in the world. It's the brainchild of Dr Mark Balnaves, from the University of Canberra.

Mark Bulnaves: I'm Director of the Centre for Communication Policy Research at the University of Canberra, and I'm in charge of the longitudinal evaluation of the impact of the new technologies in Gungahlin.

Agnes Warren: So what does longitudinal evaluation mean?

Mark Bulnaves: It means we're going to be studying the people over five years, and how they use the technologies in their home.

Agnes Warren: And so why Gungahlin? What's so exciting about this place for you?

Mark Bulnaves: Well, Gungahlin has a very high diffusion of computers, televisions, modems, faxes, and multimedia equipment, compared with the rest of Australia. It's also a new residential suburb, so it's a good opportunity to model future communication communities - which is what we're doing.

Agnes Warren: What do you know about this place so far?

Mark Bulnaves: We've conducted a survey of all the houses to date. There are about 3,000 households, 9-10,000 people, and we've got a good idea of the kinds of telecommunications and media they're using now. 60% of households have one or more computers, compared with the national average of 20%, and higher than the Canberra average at the same time.

Agnes Warren: It looks a very wealthy, very posh sort of suburb around here.

Mark Bulnaves: We're in Nicholls at the moment, and it is the wealthier of the suburbs. But there are a range of demographics in Gungahlin. While it's the high end with income, education and some of the occupations, it still has a range of occupations, a range of ethnic groups and languages.

Agnes Warren: So, it's really just a bit of a playground for all of you, to have a good look at it and find out what life's going to be like in the future?

Mark Bulnaves: Well, of benefit to the community, of course - both locally and for Australia, as a window to the future.

Male advertising voice, with ethereal singing in the background:

Today, five years is a lifetime. Ten years ago, ancient times. It seems the world is moving fast forward. Who knows where we're going? Who knows what we'll find?

Agnes Warren: Interact, the Interactive Services Consortium of government, business, and social interest groups, wants to know how new technologies will be used, and their impact on people's lives. Telstra is spending between $20-30 million in Gungahlin to find out. Anthony Goonan is General Manager for Strategic Marketing for Telstra in Canberra.

Anthony Goonan: Well where we are actually at present at the top of Telstra tower here at Black Mountain in Canberra. It's some seventy metres above the top of Black Mountain.

Agnes Warren: Absolutely wonderful, beautiful view.

Anthony Goonan: It's a wonderful view today. Yeah, it's about 23 degrees today, and in the distance we can actually see Gungahlin.

Agnes Warren: Now, why is Telstra so keen on Gungahlin?

Anthony Goonan: From a Telstra point of view, three to four years ago Gungahlin was literally sheep grazing paddocks and mainly farming orientated. But with the way Canberra suburbs are developed, Gungahlin and the suburbs contained within Gungahlin was to be where most of the residential development would occur over the next ten years.

And so we knew that over a period of three to five years there would be something like 2-4,000 houses or premises built in the Gungahlin environs. And as you can see today, there are approximately two and a half thousand houses out there. So that was very attractive from our point of view. There was no pre-existing infrastructure in Gungahlin, and in terms of choosing Gungahlin we were able to try out various infrastructure opportunities.

Agnes Warren: So what do you mean by that? What are you doing out there?

Anthony Goonan: Well, okay. There will be many services provided. But the main thrust of Gungahlin from the Telstra point of view is to trial commercially services. So we expect that some will succeed and some will ultimately fail.

Services like on-line Yellow Pages, travel, tourism, banking - the traditional applications that have been talked about in terms of being available on the superhighway. What we do need though are the willing content providers, and certainly we have a very great deal of interest from Federal government agencies wanting to pilot applications in Gungahlin before rolling them out to other parts of Australia. And also financial institutions, also wanting to do home banking and shopping, those style services.

Agnes Warren: So they're guinea pigs, those people we can see from here out in Gungahlin?

Anthony Goonan: Yes, but they're very willing guinea pigs! And I suppose I don't like using the term 'guinea pigs' - they are very happy to be part of this particular pilot. We would expect a very rapid take-up, especially in the Gungahlin area, to multimedia services that are provided by what we call an 'on-line environment', connecting into the cable and on into the network.

Male advertising voice:

All the interactive services! Straight into people's living rooms! Yes! Movies on demand... games... banking... home shopping... It was all science fiction not that long ago. A lot of people still reckon it is.

Male advertising voice: Yeah? Well it's now a lot closer than they think!

Child: Soon, they say, that they're gonna make, like on the computer they're gonna have this shop market, and you don't need to go to like shopping. I wouldn't do that, because I wanna, I wanna get out, like you don't wanna stay in the house all the time?

Agnes Warren: Now what about Big Brother? Do any of you know what Big Brother means?

Boy: Yeah, a person who punches your head in.

Girl: He's on the computer all the time.

Agnes Warren: So, how much of your life do you think is going to be controlled by computers in the future?

Children: All of it, most of it, most of it, lots, etc. etc.

Agnes Warren: So you'll get up in the morning and you'll read your newspaper on the computer?

Children (in chorus): Yes.

Child: If you don't have to pay for it, that is.

Agnes Warren: And then if you want to go shopping, you dial up what you need on the computer and...

Children (together): No.

Child: No, that's stupid, because they probably wouldn't have Jeans West on there or something.

Child: Yeah, and then you'd get the wrong size pants, and it comes through your computer and you say, 'Oh, no!'.

Agnes Warren: Maybe you wouldn't even have to go to school, you would just dial up the classroom on the computer and...

Child: No, because you couldn't see your friends...

Child: They might have a picture on there, of your friend.

Child: And you wouldn't be able to do your hobbies, like riding motorbikes.

Agnes Warren: And if your Mum and Dad are a bit busy, then they can just write you a letter of the computer.

Child: Yeah, and when we get the computers that come in the pods, I'll be able to e-mail my Dad, and talk to him?

Children: (General hubbub and racket)

Agnes Warren: Palmerston Primary is the newest school in the ACT. It will be on-line 24 hours a day. Communications between home and school will never be the same. Principal, John Griffin:

Agnes Warren: Now, you're smack bang in the middle of this multimedia project. How is the school involved in this?

John Griffin: Well we're very much involved with the Interact project, with the Canberra University and Telstra. And we're aiming to provide a facility here which will enable the school to develop home-school communications in a way that we've never considered possible in the past.

Agnes Warren: So what sort of services are we talking about? How do you connect the school with the home?

John Griffin: Well, technically, it has involved connecting each of our buildings with optical fibre, using a hub and router system to connect the school then into the university's file server and to acnet, and from there students will be able to, from their classrooms, access not only the home scene and other schools but also the World Wide Web and Internet.

Agnes Warren: So what sort of an environment will it make for kids? Can you give me a practical example of how they are going to put this into operation?

John Griffin: Yes. For example, when a child goes home of an afternoon, they'll be able to say to their parents they have no homework...

Agnes Warren: Now there's the school bell. They're all heading back into class.

John Griffin: That's right, yes. It's time to get underway again. But when they go home of an afternoon they'll be able to dial up the school and see what the teacher or other students have written with regard to the day's work that's been completed, or what's being expected in the coming days. So that they'll be able to really interface with what's happening in the classroom from the home.

Agnes Warren: Well that's okay for the parents, but what's in it for the kids?

John Griffin: Well, kids will have a much higher level of connectivity, I suppose, with other schools. Not only in Canberra, but throughout Australia and indeed around the world. They'll be able to talk to children their own age in Canada, the United States and Japan, and this of course is happening in some schools now. What is different at Palmerston is that that facility will be available really to every student in their home classroom. We won't have to go to one point in the school, or there won't be just one computer which has those facilities. The school will be networked so that that will be as easy as turning on a light.

Agnes Warren: Sue Amos is Palmerston's teacher/librarian.

Sue Amos: Some schools do some of these aspects, but we're hoping to take it to a multimedia perspective so it's a broad-band type trial.

Agnes Warren: And what do you mean by that? Multimedia and broad-band?

Sue Amos: Well, it simply means using all the senses, using sound as well as the visual, as well as text. So they have it on three different levels, not just text-based information. We also of course have the library software, and we have CD ROM, so we have electronic encyclopedia, as well as problem-solving games for the students to use. And of course the Internet, which we're looking forward to having in the future - which will be a terrific resource.

Agnes Warren: So it's all bells and whistles!

Sue Amos: Yes, absolutely. Right into the future - future communications, we hope to be a model for that.

Agnes Warren: The most willing participants in the trial all seem to be under one metre high.

Agnes Warren: Now, it seems that this is going to be a sort of computer village. Do you know about this?

Child: Intercom.

Agnes Warren: What's that, do you know?

Children: Internet!

Child: That's Internet. Internet you speak to other people from all parts of the world.

Child: Campbell only had about two or three computers! It was boring!

Agnes Warren: And they tell me people of my age, old people, are a bit frightened of computers.

Children: No! No!

Child: Just because if we get into the teacher's things we can just move around, huh.

Child: See what our profile and our reports are going to be.

Child: The teachers have fun, too.

Child: The computers are our life, basically.

Agnes Warren: They're your life??!!

Child: Yeah!

Agnes Warren: What about footy?

Child: I don't like footy.

Agnes Warren: So what do computers mean to you?

Child: A lot.

Child: Games.

Child: They basically help us...

Child: Fun!

Child: They basically help us with homework and they're fun.

Child: Projects.

Children: Yeah, projects.

Child: Printing...

Agnes Warren: What about just going to the library and looking up a book?

Child: That's getting, that's getting...

Child: That's boring.

Children: We're in the future, and... That's too ordinary... It's almost the year 2000 so... ROM is so easy, you just like look at the words and then you print it.

Agnes Warren: What else do you improve?

Child: Your reading skills.

Child: Yeah, reading, and writing.

Child: And computer skills.

Agnes Warren: Would you know how to go into a library and look up a book?

Children (in chorus): Yes!

Child: We do, but that's too boring.

Child: We've got new technology, so...

Child: We go to into Belconnen library and we run around looking for the books, we don't go to the computer.

Agnes Warren: You can't take a computer to bed with you at night and put it...

Child: Yes you can!

Children: Of course you can! A laptop!

Child: My dad always bring a laptop from work and I just play all night.

Mark Bulnaves: Well, we're coming into Ngunnawal now, which is one of the suburbs built after Palmerston, and it has 5-600 households in it. And then past Ngunnawal we have Amaroo, which is still being built up. So as you can see it's becoming quite a large area.

Agnes Warren: Beautiful blue skies, full of gum trees, it looks idyllic in a way.

Mark Bulnaves: Yes, it's idyllic - both from a research perspective to look at model communities, and as a place to live in.

Agnes Warren: And so what sort of a reaction have you had from the people who live around here?

Mark Bulnaves: Well I'm not a fan of conducting questionnaires, and I think most... a lot of people just chuck questionnaires into the bin when they get them. I certainly do, sometimes. It's been extraordinary - we've had people e-mailing to ensure that their questionnaires are being handed in, we've had them brought into the Dean of the Faculty to make sure they're passed on to us. And that sort of enthusiasm is very good. Initially we just wanted to find out who they were - income, education, and normal demographic questions, and what computers, televisions, radio, income, education, usage.

Agnes Warren: And from there? Where do you go?

Mark Bulnaves: Our next step is to select, for research purposes, a smaller number of people, perhaps about 300 households, and see how they deal with the technologies over time, over five years.

Agnes Warren: The ACT government has been telling people how to register their dogs or when to put the rubbish out, through press-button screens in shopping malls.

Public information voice: Touch the button next to the topic you want to view. If you're new to Austouch, choose 'How to Use Austouch Tutorial'.

Agnes Warren: Now it plans to put this information into homes, through the Internet. Ian Hubbard:

Ian Hubbard: What we do is, we basically present information on a whole range of things like where can you license your dog, how do you actually go about getting involved in the recycling system in Canberra, how do you manage your waste, what times are the libraries open - all those sort of basic, almost transactional bits of information where you've got a very simple question and you want a very simple answer. All of our electronic services are presented in that manner.

Agnes Warren: So you can find that out from the Internet, or you can go down to what you call the local 'kiosk'? And press a few buttons there and work that out as well?

Ian Hubbard: That's right. We present it in both of those ways, because we find that there are some people who do have the Net connections at home. You could probably comfortably classify those people as the 'information-rich'. We also have a whole bunch of people who, for whatever reason, won't get access to the necessary computing gear to be able to connect to the Net. So what we do is, we provide access to this information at a touch-screen terminal which we place in places like shopping malls, and places where you get high pedestrian traffic. And we've attempted to make the way that people access the information as easy as possible.

Public information voice: Electricity and water: services that should be used in the most economical and...

Agnes Warren: Now what about the good folk of Gungahlin? How are they helping you out in all of this?

Ian Hubbard: What that Gungahlin experiment is, is delivering all sorts of electronic services into the home.

One thing that we've found is that using the bombardment method of trying to get our information to people's homes, the messages often get mixed up with a vast array of information that's actually delivered on any one day.

Our aim is to actually deliver this information, again at a single point, into the home, because that will enable us to put the right amount of information in front of people when they need it.

Agnes Warren: Are you tired of newspapers piling up around the house? The problems of recycling, distribution, and the skyrocketing costs of newsprint, which have risen 25% in the past year make on-line newspapers an attractive idea. Mike Johnson, from The Canberra Times:

Mike Johnson: The electronic newspaper, where it drops onto your screen, is still in a printable format. The text that sits there and the graphics that come down with it, you can send to your laser printer.

Agnes Warren: But there's no way that you could ever sit there with copies of The New York Times, The Irish Times, The London Times and The Canberra Times, all on your breakfast table in the morning. And yet here you've got it through the computer screen.

Mike Johnson: Here you could have it.

Agnes Warren: Now we've got some classified ads here. How are they going to work, if we're talking about on-line services?

Mike Johnson: The idea with classified ads on-line is, if you could imagine you wanted to find something that you would conventionally find in a hard copy newspaper.

Let's take for example, you want to rent a house or buy a house. Let's keep this to Canberra at the moment, Ainslie, which is a suburb, three bedroom for $180 a week. You could type in Ainslie, 3 bedroom, $180, and send off the on-line search, and back to your screen would come, let's say for example, ten hits.

The potential with the on-line facility is that the actual ads themselves could carry further pointers. So, for the case of a house sale, you could click on the actual ad itself and be taken to a video-clip of the house, or a plan of the house, or additional information.

Agnes Warren: And if it hasn't got a garden you go to the next one!

Mike Johnson: Quite. But it also gives the advertiser then the potential of having a link from the virtual newspaper, if you like, to his or her... the agency itself could have its own home page. The ad could carry a pop-up window which would enable you to instantly e-mail the estate agent: 'Look, I've just seen your ad, can you meet me at five o'clock this afternoon, I'd love to see the place.'

Agnes Warren: Do you know kids without computers? Is there a whole group of kids out there that don't...

Child: Yeah. The Somalians don't have computers. And the Ethiopians.

Agnes Warren: Don't they? What do they do?

Child: They, they use their brains, mostly.

Child: Kids aren't allowed to use their parents' computer, because they won't let them.

Child: Yeah, and some people buy computers and they never use them.

Child: My dad never lets me use his computers.

Child: With our computer, we've played every game...

Child: And they're so expensive!

Child: We borrow them from next door.

Child: But you can never get sick of a Nintendo, though.

Child: Some people might think school is like all work but you have friends, so it's fun. It's not just all work.

Child: Well I reckon roller blading is the best thing to do. Roller blading and trail bike riding.

The Media Report is broadcast every Thursday at 8.30am and 8.00pm on Radio National, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's national radio network of ideas.
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NBN: Mr Turnbull's "fact-checking" - still poor?

Mr Turnbull's CommsDay 2012 address is punctuated with statements labelled as "fact".

What happens when you track down just one of the odd-sounding "facts" - that the most robust, best protected and best engineered parts of the cable-plant are the most fault prone, hence replacing them will drastically reduce maintenance costs?

It isn't true, something quite different was said: "faults" aren't just broken cables or joints, they can be cable-plant that can't support numerous ADSL services.

It would seem that Mr Turnbull learnt very little from the 2009 Godwin Grech email fabrication that cost him the Liberal Leadership (and the rest of us an early Carbon price). He seems to still not enquire after odd-sounding "facts", but goes public with them.

Here are Mr Turnbull's words, citing Graeme Lynch, the CommsDay editor, as an authority:

A third example of fantasy triumphing over fact is the tired refrain we constantly hear from the pro-NBN participants in the debate that by utilizing parts of the copper network, the Coalition’s proposed changes to the NBN will ‘lock in’ high copper maintenance costs.

As I’ve pointed out countless times, Senator Conroy has already locked in a fair chunk of these costs in – for the next 20 years at least, thanks to the contract for the USO he signed with Telstra earlier this year.

Let me quote Grahame Lynch on this matter:

“Witness this week’s debate about the allegedly high maintenance costs of FTTN compared to FTTH, sparked by BIS Schrapnel and fanned by business commentator Alan Kohler. Under the current NBN plan, the most expensive part of the copper network—that in rural and remote Australia—will be retained and funded by industry levies amounting to nearly $300m annually—nearly half the alleged cost of maintaining the entire national copper network today.

And of course, under FTTN, the most fault prone parts of the copper network—the bundles of copper that feed into exchanges, not individual access lines—would be replaced by fibre.” [7]

I have never seen this point acknowleged by the likes of David Braue, Nick Ross, Renai Le May or the other so called specialist commentators in this space.  Or by Alan Kohler or John Durie.

Below is my traceback to the original source: Dr Paul Brooks quoted in an ABC piece earlier this year.

Dr Brooks, ex-CTO of TransACT, the only group I know of in Australia to actually deploy a large-scale (55,000 premises) VDSL FTTN, is not hard to track down and it turns out, is very approachable and happy to explain what he said and how it was mis-interpreted.

How did an expert opinion on the esoteric performance characteristics of cross-talk and mutual interference of ADSL/VDSL signals, where the "worst" interference occurs in the bundles near the exchanges, get translated by Mr Turnbull into "the most fault prone parts" being the most expensive to maintain, and being avoided in a FTTN network?" How did Mr Turnbull start referring to cable faults and maintenance costs, when the source article never mentioned cable faults?

Because issues affecting Telco networks are subtle and unintended interpretation of sentences, edited down for publication, can result when read by a wider audience, less aware of the complexities.

The key misunderstanding came from Graeme Lynch at Comms Day, who somehow read the term "worst" in the original article and translated it to "the most fault-prone", when it wasn't referring to faults at all. It referred to the degree of natural cross-talk interference between wires. Lynch mis-read the original piece creating a "fact" about cable faults and cost of maintenance where there was none. Mr Turnbull then repeated this incorrect "fact" in his speech - ironically, at the CommsDay conference.

To DSL experts, the target audience of CommsDay, the word "fault" has multiple meanings, they would not necessarily have jumped to the conclusion "physical wiring or joint fault" when reading "worst".

Dr Brooks directed me to look at the original piece by Richard Chirgwin and read it more closely.

The piece clearly discussed "poor-quality" in terms of "radio frequency transmission properties", especially mutual interference of excessive numbers of xDSL circuits in large cable bundles, NOT "poor physical condition" or "poorly jointed".

 This was always known to be a problem with large-scale deployments: ADSL/VDSL is a 'hack' based on a number of "best-case" assumptions that don't scale up. That is fundamental to its design. It's OK as long as just a few people use it, but if everyone wants it, then it not only fails to perform, but cannot perform.

Graeme Lynch is correct when he describes the high-density cable sections as "fault prone": ADSL services are adversely affected.
I was puzzled by the comment and read it as "physical problem needing correction" - in exactly the same way as Mr Lynch and later Mr Turnbull seemed to understand it.

Dr Brooks, as cited by both Richard Chirgwin and Graeme Lynch is exactly correct:

In an FTTN with short-distance rules, the amount of mutual interference, and hence performance as speed and errors (a.k.a. 'service quality'), of the smaller cable bundles is massively better than our current 5-8km ADSL 1/2, with 75% at least over large cable bundles.

An FTTN network with an 800m rule will not use the large cables that are causing ADSL users cascading problems as more people connect with ADSL. This does not affect the maintenance costs of the copper Customer Access Network, unless ADSL faults requiring circuit rerouting or compensation are included.

In a short-distance FTTN, Radio Frequency transmission problems will still exist, but most of the least suitable cable will be eliminated and replaced with the fibre backhaul.

Nobody I asked knew of any breakdowns of physical cable-plant maintenance costs. Telstra may have them internally or only be aware of the aggregate amount. With the copper Customer Access Network slated for decommissioning, they have little or no incentive to identify frequent faults and undertaking remedial action, including installing new cables.

The mutual interference and line compensation problems don't evaporate when using 10- and 25-pair cables, especially when every pair carries VDSL signals and many of those cables are co-routed, and/or connect on "street pillars". The Radio Frequency transmission and coupling around the inside of the closed metal tube that is a pillar connecting 50 or more pairs will be pretty spectacular.

In summary, responding to Mr Turnbull's question:

It's of no consequence that many NBN/FTTN commentators don't "acknowledge" this point on old cable-plant being bypassed because it doesn't matter, on the data we have, it doesn't change maintenance costs materially.

Everyone who talks about short-distance FTTN deployments specifically headlines "Conditioning the copper network" as a major work-item and discusses achievable stable data-rates possible with saturated xDSL use. The TransACT solution was to run new, unjointed "Cat 5" cable to premises.

Many problems in long-distance ADSL are irrelevant in these short-distance deployments: but who cares, it's a moot point because nobody is doing it in Australia.

---

http://www.commsday.com/commsday/2012/comment-knowledge-bad-broadband-debate/
[Graeme Lynch, 22-Aug-2012]

And of course, under FTTN, the most fault prone parts of the copper network—the bundles of copper that feed into exchanges, not individual access lines—would be replaced by fibre.

http://www.abc.net.au/technology/articles/2012/07/26/3554003.htm
[Richard Chirgwin, 26-Jul-2012]]

Copper quality

I took some VDSL questions to an acknowledged expert, Dr Paul Brooks, a consultant who is a member of several Communications Alliance working groups. Among other things, Dr Brooks helped craft the deployment rules that govern how ADSL2+ services are offered today.

Many people criticize VDSL2 FTTN because it depends on poor-quality Telstra copper, but having analysed the tests that helped formulate the ADSL2+ deployment rules, Dr Brooks gave the issue less emphasis than many others I've spoken to.

His reason is this: much of the "worst" of the copper network isn't in the one-or-two cable runs that connect individual premises. It's in the very large bundles of 100-plus copper pairs exiting Telstra exchanges - and these would be replaced by fibre.

An FTTN could eliminate the estimated billion-dollar annual bill spent on maintaining the copper - but only if it really did eliminate those copper bundles. Doing so would create a new set of problems relating to stranded infrastructure, regulation and competition, which I'll deal with now.

,

NBN: Costing the Coalition FTTN. It's not Good News.

Mr Turnbull, in his CommsDay address, seemed to be proposing the Paul Fletcher, "Wired Brown Land" FTTN:

• 25Mbps guaranteed, VDSL2
• 800m max wiring (approx. 500m road distance)
• we can infer 40-60 subs per node, consistent with the 160 subs/node of the first Telstra FTTN.
• The "golden screwdriver" is "Multi-Service Nodes": field upgradable from copper to Fibre.

So, what's it going to cost to roll this out to 12M subs, the 93% of premises addressed by NBN Co?

Will Mr Turnbull achieve the Coalition tagline, "Better Broadband, Cheaper, Sooner, More Affordable"?

Mr Turnbull would like to have us believe his FTTN is "three to four times cheaper", as he started saying to Leigh Sales on the 7:30 Report Interview.

Which is an ambiguous statement: is that of the full $37.4B project, the $26.7B "fibre and transit network" or the widely estimated $12B construction cost of the Fibre Customer Access Network?

In 2009, one of the seven person review panel that rejected the FTTN tender bids, Prof. Reg Coutts summed the economics up:

“Essentially to go down the FTTN road would mean something in the order of, greater than 50 per cent of the capital being put into digital cabinets in the suburbs," he said. "They then become an obstacle to the final solution… fibre-to-the-premise. Fibre-to-the-node was not a stepping stone to fibre-to-the-premise. In fact, if anything it would put it backwards. The second reason, of course, is in no other market have people proceeded with fibre-to-the-node other than an incumbent. It is a solution that is the right solution for an incumbent that has a copper infrastructure.”

In the CommsDay piece, Mr Turnbull says on the topic of costing an FTTN:

After all, we know the approximate budget and timetable such a strategy entails, because a nationwide Fibre to the Node upgrade has been painstakingly costed, and the logistics of rolling it out carefully analyzed, no less than eight times during the past eight years.

Only, we don't.

I've looked at both the Telstra Aug-2005 and the G9/FANOC proposals: the public versions are very approximate and roughly similar.

The Telstra proposal was only for five major metro areas and then of the 5.4M premises, they cherry-picked just 4M, 12Mbps, 1.5km max, ADSL2 supporting two-thirds with 20,000 nodes and the remainder directly from 450 exchanges. Nodes handled ~160 subs. Build time was forecast at 3 years, cost vaguely set around $3-5B.

The NBN Implementation Study provides much more detail and better estimates. In Exhibit 1.3, they layout the variable cost of deploying fibre to premises: it's not a fixed cost, but a complex curve starting low and with a steep 'knee' after the 80th percentile. This same cost curve is going to apply to an FTTN network, but much worse in lower-density housing areas. It's uneconomic to build a node with 5 ports.

Estiamting from the Telstra proposal with 30,000 nodes (10,000 are in exchanges) and a 1.5km rule:
Halving the distance to 0.8km, and using simplistic geometry, increases the number of nodes four-fold to cover the same area, or 120,000 nodes total, and 110,000 nodes in the field, with 40 subs/node.

That's only for one-third of the NBN: lets scale that up to 12M subs, simplistically assuming it's all linear, which we know for the edges of all networks is untrue and in rural/regional areas with lower housing density is massively optimistic.

We now need three times more nodes: 360,000 with 30,000 subs directly connected from ~1,500 exchanges.

We can check sanity check that figure with NBN Co's rollout plan: 148,000 km "road distance" with 25% aerial (and a total of 206,000 km of GPON). So 110,000 km of cable trenching (at $55/m, $6B)
To pass 12M subs, there are 81 subs/km, or 12.3m per sub. Streets are dual-sided, this might be closer to 25m. Backtracking is also not needed with GPON.

An 800m wire-rule is roughly equivalent to 500m "road distance" because of hierarchical wiring distribution, with our 12.3m/sub, we have 40.5 subs/node. That's close agreement.

The 2002 TransAct network was VDSL1, 100Mbps and 300m. They spent $80M passing 55,000 premises, for an average $1,500/premise. This included new aerial copper ('cat 5') as well as 2 types of node: Analogue Phone and VDSL.

Extrapolating from the 12.3m/premise, we can guess 25 subs/node (VDSL) and 2250 nodes.
If the customer network accounted for 75% ($60M) of the deployment and central office equipment the rest, and nodes 40% of the cost, then they paid $24M for the nodes: $10,000 each ($400/port - half for the line card, half for the cabinet). Which sounds in the ballpark.

Scale that up to 40 port nodes, say $200/port-card and $7,500 for cabinet, $15,000/node and $5,000 to install. $20,000/node or $500/port.

For 12M ports, that's $6B. Half the cost of the GPON Customer Access Network on a most optimistic estimate for the same coverage.

But what we're missing there is the cost headlined in the Telstra-2005 proposal: remediating ('conditioning') the copper lines... And also the $200 boxes, the copper versions of the ONT, attached to every house.

We're past $9B and closing in on the Fibre GPON price. Where is that "three or four times" lower price? You can't achieve that with real-world electronics and labour, unless you're going to provide something else entirely to most people: like fixed wireless.

And rollout-time: Telstra thought 3 years for the 4M easiest subs, 10 years for 12M subs might be realistic. Surprisingly close to the GPON schedule.

There are other concerns that must be factored in:

• We have a 30-year design life for the network: maintenance dominates the operational cost of an FTTN.
• For the copper network, we're starting with a degraded and old asset, well past its prime.
• It will need a lot of maintenance, increasing over time.
• The GPON network starts new and has lower inherent maintenance costs.
• Running fibre those last 800m in an Ad-hoc manner is going to be the most costly, inefficient and slow way to do it.
• Plus there's a triple upgrade cost: the Node card, the fibre run and replacing the Customer Premises Equipment, the ONT. Unless that was over-engineered initially with dual Fibre and Copper interfaces.
• Copper does catastrophically fail, the conductors can wear out. Think of the 1998 Auckland CBD power crisis. Despite four-way redundancy, the city was shutdown for 5 weeks when all the cables failed together. The lesson - copper conductors can wear out "just sitting there".

• We start the FTTN with VDSL2, at the end of the DSL product lifecyle:
• 25Mbps at 800m is possible now, it may increase four-fold in the next decade or two: 100Mbps on ageing, decayed copper, might be possible, but that's pushing it.
• Compared to 1Gbps out-of-the-box for the GPON network, with an available four-fold upgrade available now.
• For a 25% cheaper network, you get one that goes 40-times slower. Hmmmm, not a good value proposition.

• The operating environment for GPON is much better for electronics and people:
• Would you rather maintain the electronics for 12M ports in 2,500 secure, environmentally controlled exchange buildings with racking designed for ergonomic access, 
• or in 350,000 nodes sat at ground level and exposed to plants, pests, insects, vandals and climate extremes?
• FTTN technicians will literally spend most of their time driving around, not fixing faults.
• The failure rate of electronic components doubles with every 5-degree celcius rise in junction temperate. Unless those nodes are air-conditioned, the service life of the electronics will be severely impacted. The cost and complexity of adding environmental controls, and remote monitoring to all nodes would be astronomical: TransAct uses passive cooling and puts up with shorter service life.
• What's the cost of providing clean, filtered and stable power, with good backup, in a small box (using ~200W), versus powering 10,000 GPON lines and other equipment?
• The per-port cost difference is 10:1 to 100:1.

• Fibre GPON works for many kilometers, VDSL doesn't. GPON can scale to low-density areas, such as regional and rural environments, especially if you have key stakeholders willing to pay the initial connection fee.
• NBN Co allows "out of area" connection to subscribers if they pay the full cost for it.
• This initial connection can be shared between a group of subscribers,
• later on, additional subs can connect and the initial sub is proportionately reimbursed.

Voters and subscribers in regional areas will want Fibre GPON, not an FTTN "with a promise to upgrade". Almost every regional town has a long history of some necessary infrastructure that politicians promise to provide every election, but never have.

Infrastructure Upgrade Promises fly very badly in the country: that dimension alone has the potential to lose the Coalition the election.

If the plan is to move subs over to Fibre within the 30-year service life of the FTTN, why not just do it right from the start?

There are solid technical reasons to build a Fibre GPON NBN from the beginning.
Yes, the initial capital expenditure is higher, but not by very much.

Within a decade, the additional, and increasing, costs of maintaining and replacing/upgrading copper will make it a much more expensive proposition.

Fibre GPON is not a "gold plated" solution, its the only sensible solution both operationally and economically for a new network. It's new technology at the beginning of its product lifecycle, funnily enough like iPads and PC's versus Mainframes, the new technology will do more things, faster and eventually cheaper.

Unless of course, the Coalition plans to scrap the NBN ("pause it") or rollout fixed wireless to 50% of the population. None of which will make the voters happy.

NBN: Turnbull asks some good questions at CommsDay Conf.

Mr Turnbull, in his Commsday address, does raise a number of good question around the NBN Implementation and Accountability, problem is, he's so busy heckling and hectoring, that anything good he says is lost in the noise. The Oppositions' main role is to hold the Government, and by inference NBN Co, accountable: asking the hard questions

This is an attempt to not lose those questions amidst noise and irrelevancies.

... But if we simply divide through the $2.2 billion in accumulated capital expenditure on the FTTP local and transit network projected by mid-2013 by the 341,000 premises passed by fibre projected by mid-2013, the cost per premise is $6,400. ...

Is this metric unfair, given it lumps together transit and local access capital expenditure? Possibly.

But if you don’t like it, then here is a suggestion: tell me precisely how we should instead measure NBN Co’s performance and cost structure. 

Potentially good questions: where's the money going?
The Accounting and Commercial reality that Mr Turnbull has ignored is: costs cannot be known or reported before the fact, only afterwards.
This is exactly why we know exact costs/premise of completed deployments overseas.

It seems reasonable to ask NBN Co to release per-premise metrics after deployment milestones are finished. They need only report premises passed, not active, as that will take 2-3 years to stabilise. NBN Co, to be transparent, should release two sets of costs: overheads not directly attributable to services in a deployment and direct costs related to per-premises deployment.

Still, Senator Conroy might take note and address this.

.. questions about selection of CEO, Board and their seeming lack of Telco experience. [not quoted, too long]

Seemingly good questions, but I think not useful.

Mr Turnbull criticises the NBN Co CEO for "only" having Vendor experience and never responsibility for a large deployment. And the Board for only having one member who's ever been involved in Infrastructure companies.

The Opposition should be holding the Government and NBN Co accountable for Governance, competence and selection of key individuals: a richly deserved question.

In the start-up phase, the NBN project has nothing to do with operating Infrastructure, even building it. Initially their job was only about "doing the numbers", letting tenders and negotiating contracts with vendors and the regulator. Seems the Board was perfectly chosen for that.

As we move into a deployment and operational phase, then relevant experience within large Infrastructure businesses is increasingly important. We have precisely zero local enterprises with large-scale Fibre Broadband rollout or operational experience, so candidates with non-Telco backgrounds are needed. One board member has been appointed with experience in Water Infrastructure.

Seems a good move to me, and that over time we should see more appointees like this.

As for Telco experience, we just have to cast our minds back a couple of years to Sol and his three mates... That went well for Telstra, didn't it? The share price collapsed, employee relations became toxic and customer service became worse than useless. From the promises unfulfilled and the damage left behind, you'd wonder why the four were ever imported and allowed to carry on... They did leave very happy men with outrageous pay-packets and terrific line-items on their CV's, but with no friends amongst the shareholders, possibly within the Industry, but I'm not privy to that circle.

I think any Australian Telecommunications Minister whom chose to repeat this decision in the next twenty years would be on very thin ice with the electorate. How can Mr Turnbull forget that?

And of course, under FTTN, the most fault prone parts of the copper network—the bundles of copper that feed into exchanges, not individual access lines—would be replaced by fibre. Grahame Lynch, Commsday, 22 Aug 2012. (attributed by Richard Chirgwin to Dr Paul Brooks, ex-CTO TransAct).

I have never seen this point acknowleged by the likes of David Braue, Nick Ross, Renai Le May or the other so called specialist commentators in this space. Or by Alan Kohler or John Durie.

It's a good point if true, but sounds wrong... Changes the economics of his FTTN proposal a little.
He's saying the big bundles in the most protected environments are the most fault prone.

I'd have thought the smallest cables with least protection, literally the last mile, would be the most fault prone. I've only my personal experience to go on and that's hardly representative or definitive.

These would be very good points to confirm or refute:

• Is copper-line fault data available?
• Preferably current, but even historical.
• Summary data is better than nothing.
• 75% of subscribers are over 2.5km from the Exchange,
• or for 15,000 out of 20,000 subs on a Local Exchange, there are more than 2.5 kms of "big bundle" cables (100-500 pair).
• What's the maximum distance from Exchange to Endpoint? 8Km max?
• What's kind of cable-plant reduction for an 0.8km rule are we talking?
• Are there good Telstra ducts leading back for the cheap deployment of Fibre to replace the large cable bundles?
• There's no significant cost advantage if many km of trenches have to be dug to lay new fibre for all those nodes. 

Perhaps Senator Conroy and David Thodey could jointly release this data. It is quite pertinent to the debate.

NBN: "Trouble at Mill" for subs transitioning to Coalition's FTTN

What's a transition to an FTTN going to looklike? This could be the achilles heel of the Coalition plan.
Is this why Telstra declared it was "spectacularly agnostic" about the two NBN proposals?

Previously I've written about the inevitable, but orderly, voice-to-NBN transition: Telstra will be keen to hasten it along to reduce maintenance costs (and crystallise payments), whilst many voice-only customers will want to "drag the chain", to not do anything for as long as they can. Telstra could even transparently deploy compact small-scale VoIP (voice over IP) equipment in exchanges for the last 5-10% of local users to enable them to literally clear the floors and migrate early to a single network: full IP voice services.

There's a few points that seem problematic with an FTTN-NBN:

• Who owns and maintains the remaining 800m of Copper: Telstra or NBN Co?
• What triggers the Coalition's "when economic" upgrade of a copper service to fibre?
• Will there be any fibre at the beginning or only after some years?
• How do you cut consumer lines and install a node without affecting existing voice services?
• Will customers still be forced to transition to the NBN for voice-only services?
• Will Telstra agree to that, forcing it to leave all copper in place and maintained?
• What happens if the old copper can't support VDSL2 @ 25Mbps?
• Is new "cat 5" copper going to be run like the Transact rollout in Canberra?
• Will fixed wireless be the only option available to subscribers?
• Or will fibre be run in the first-deploy but only "when economic"?

The key difference to the Fibre-NBN and Coalition FTTN plan is this: the two can run in parallel and there is no equipment in common outside the subscriber premises.

These clear-cut boundaries are good technically and contractually. Everyone, engineers, accountants and subscribers, can tell where the work is up to, can easily name and identify what equipment is installed and in use and not be confused as to what services are in use.

Telstra's SSU is very clear about when payments are made (the service is transferred to the NBN) and what obligations Telstra has (migrate all voice and special services starting 18 months after an area is declaring "available for service").

The NBN agreements presume two separate infrastructures with a clear-cut, orderly migration between them: copper to fibre. The Telstra payment, and the end of their maintenance obligations, triggers when a subscriber is disconnected and transferred to the fibre-NBN. The Coalition must now negotiate with Telstra for an additional fee: ownership of the final 800m of copper and NBN Co, because of the new, higher, maintenance costs, will need to create and have approved by the regulator, the ACCC, new wholesale pricing. Telstra are renowned for being tough negotiators and the ACCC for their close scrutiny: both will cause significant delays in the project and increase deployment costs.

The reality for fibre-NBN probably will be, because Number Portability is supported, a subscriber will for a short time have both an NBN-fibre phone service and a POTS copper service. When the new voice service is working, tested and accepted by the subscriber as "OK", their existing number will be ported to the fibre-NBN automatically triggering disconnection of the POTS copper service. With the best planning, skill and will in the world, all 12 Million services to be migrated will not go flawlessly. Subscribers will have available at all times a working voice service, and hopefully a digital service as well.

I expect the same style of transition will be supported for same-ISP ADSL-to-NBN transitions. Two notionally working services at one time, with a cut-over and test period. Config changes for subscriber equipment will be simpler for ADSL customers because they will not be able to use their current firewall/routers: NBN-ONT's (Optical Network Terminations) provide the subscriber a direct Ethernet input, not ADSL. The ISP can disconnect the ADSL service once the subscriber accepts the NBN service as "OK". ISP's will need to co-ordinate with Telstra to ensure the copper circuit is not prematurely cut: I'd expect many people will first migrate voice then ADSL.

Subscribers that choose to change ISP's when migrating from ADSL/HFC to NBN will, as now, have to manage the transition themselves to ensure gap-free Internet connectivity.

For an FTTN-NBN, there are two important differences in the subscriber transition:

• subscribers cannot have two working services at once, voice or Internet, it's either/or, plus both services must transition together.
• ADSL services will fail immediately the node connected. There is no grace period.
• there is no safe, trivial fall-back available when the inevitable problems arise.
• There's an essential design and contractual difference: because copper is still in place, subscribers could still have a POTS voice service wired back to an exchange. Telstra won't want this and the Coalition will need to sell this to the 10-15% of the public who resist a forced change.

I'll assume that since large-scale FTTN rollouts, like BT's "Infinity" in the UK, good processes exist for inserting nodes into the subscriber wiring loop without interrupting service. From personal experience, both professionally within a Telco and as a subscriber, I know that large-scale cut/re-join activities are highly prone to human error. With 12M services to migrate, there are going to be 500,000 or more of these problems. Usually with mass-jointing solutions, multiple errors are introduced with off-by-one errors, meaning the whole joint has to be redone, with the possibility of creating further errors/problems.

A Coalition FTTN will cause NBN Co grief: significant cost and effort in defining new processes, selecting and training staff and in equipment specification, tendering and selection: as an independent for-profit company, the Coalition cannot direct their choice of vendor, nor will the choice for another country, e.g. the UK, be appropriate for the wide range of extreme conditions in Australia.

Telstra is going to cause the Coalition grief if an FTTN-NBN is pursued: there need to be contracts agreed to transfer ownership and responsibility for the last 800m of subscriber copper - Telstra shareholders will not let their managers give it away for free (~10,000,000 km of copper, ~70,000 tonnes @ $5,000+/tonne is $350MM in scrap, less cost of retrieval). Telstra also wants the $1B/year copper network maintenance off its books as soon as possible.

The Coalition will need to deal with significant pushback, delays and additional costs from all players: subscribers, ACCC, Telstra and NBN Co.

Dealing with the remaining headline items:

• Who owns and maintains the remaining 800m of Copper: Telstra or NBN Co?
• What triggers the Coalition's "when economic" upgrade of a copper service to fibre?
• Will there be any fibre at the beginning or only after some years?

As the Coalition's tagline is "Better Broadband, cheaper, sooner and more affordably", price minimisation, hence lowest possible costs, will be the new directives issued to NBN Co.

The inevitable response by the Coalition to an NBN Co "FTTN will be more expensive" judgement, already foreshadowed by Mr Abbot, will be to "pause" the rollout. This is political-speak for "we'll scrap the plan". Again, Telstra, the ACCC, and subscribers (voters) will be very unhappy with that. Telstra may be able to sue for breach of contract and its forced continued maintenance costs, above the $209MM cancellation fee.

Mr Turnbull's "when economic" line is a nonsense. In the last 25 years no fully commercial Telco has ever judged it "economic" to install fibre instead of copper for simple residential services: it's a matter of ARPU and ROI. (Average Revenue Per User and Return on Investment). Telco's want an ROI far greater than NBN Co's ~7%/year and that new investment has to beat a copper network that is fully depreciated and now only consumes operating expenses.

This is the real breakthrough thinking of the fibre-NBN: it allows Telstra and Optus to move to a fibre subscriber loop without needing to meet shareholder ROI/ROCE (Return on Capital Employed) demands, or using any of their own capital.

I'm not sure if NBN Co would find situations where initial FTTN copper-loop replacement would be "economic", when the whole point of the exercise is to beat a GPON price (Gigabit Passive Optical Network).

• How do you cut consumer lines and install a node without affecting existing voice services?
• Will customers still be forced to transition to the NBN for voice-only services?
• Will Telstra agree to that, forcing it to leave all copper in place and maintained?

Mr Turnbull has yet to make clear if the Coalition policy is to follow the current model and force everyone onto fully digital telephony, or require Telstra to maintain the existing analogue POTS over copper. Telstra will argue that'd prevent it removing copper cables and exchange equipment, as well as old and creaking I.T. systems, plus the exponentially increasing copper maintenance costs spread over a very few users: they'll argue for quite punitive payments to continue the POTS telephone network for 30 years or more.

• What happens if the old copper can't support VDSL2 @ 25Mbps?
• Is new "cat 5" copper going to be run like the Transact rollout in Canberra?
• Will fixed wireless be the only option available to subscribers?
• Or will fibre be run in the first-deploy but only "when economic"?

Because the Coalition promise is all about price, their only options are:

• aerial "cat 5" in short-distance, high-density areas with low payments to Power Distribution companies that own the Poles.
• Fixed wireless (4G).

In Summary: A copper-to-copper network transition is going to be messy and expensive. It's a poor substitute for the clean copper-to-fibre transition.

NBN: changing-over to Fibre isn't compulsory, but inevitable. What's in store for Telstra and customers?

People don't have to convert immediately from the Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS), but it's in their immediate future when the NBN is turned on in their area: Telstra is allowed and expected to decommission their copper network and supporting voice-only exchanges (making a lot of rack-space available in exchanges and creating tonnes of scrap copper).

So what's in store for both the long-term phone service supplier and voice-only customers?


It's in Telstra's interests to remove equipment from its exchanges as quickly as possibly, opening up the floor-space for other uses, including commercial leasing, not that they appear to be going there. They also gain by reducing maintenance on copper early, not to mention pulling out what they can for scrap.

Telstra could transition from exchanges early by replacing selected exchanges with modern VoIP equipment. They'll be doing this for 10+ years, so why not move to an all Internet infrastructure early?

As a bonus, Telstra gets to turn off competitor ADSL equipment, removing some competition.
It'd be expected that Telstra will attempt to move POTS customers to NBN as early as it can, presumably with incentives, extras and bundled deals: they will have the best 4G network to leverage.

The turn-off is documented in the NBN and Telstra agreements roughly as "people can choose to keep their old copper-line phone for as long as Telstra supports them".
 (SSU: Structural Separation Undertaking, SAU: Special Access Undertaking and TUSMA: Telecommunications Universal Service Management Agency managing the USO: Universal Service Obligation).

It isn't stated that way (below). This Departmental media release talks about it.

The universal service arrangements will commence on 1 July, 2012.The TUSMA will ensure:

• all Australians have reasonable access to a standard telephone service (the Universal Service Obligation for voice telephony services);
• payphones are reasonably accessible to all Australians (the Universal Service Obligation for payphones);
• the ongoing delivery of the Emergency Call Service by Telstra (calls to Triple Zero '000' and '112');
• the ongoing delivery of the National Relay Service;
• that appropriate safety net arrangements are in place that will assist the migration of voice-only customers to an NBN fibre service as Telstra’s copper customer access network is decommissioned; and
• technological solutions will be developed as necessary to support continuity of public interest services (i.e. public alarm systems and traffic lights).

Which explicitly says:

• Telstra will be decommissioning it's copper network some time (piece-by-piece as the NBN fully services a region).
• voice-only and special-service customers must be looked after.
• but exactly when can Telstra turn off the copper network isn't scheduled. The Telstra Migration Plan associated with the SSU has details: the copper network is turned off 18 months after an NBN area is "available for service", i.e. 90% of premises are passed with fibre or served with fixed wireless.

From the Telstra site:

The highlights of Telstra’s Migration Plan include:

Business as usual processes apply to the maximum extent possible

As far as possible, Telstra has committed to using its existing ‘business as usual’ processes, systems and interfaces for disconnecting premises. Telstra will also continue to use existing industry processes, such as Local Number Portability and offering call diversion facilities, to allow the migration of services. This will streamline the disconnection process for both wholesale and retail customers.

Wholesale customers retain control over disconnection timing until the final disconnection date for each region

Wholesale customers are able to lodge orders to cancel services at any time (including ‘future dating’ orders) before the disconnection date. This will allow wholesale customers to maximise service continuity for end users by aligning disconnection processes with NBN new connection orders.

Managed disconnection of all remaining ordinary services will occur at the disconnection date for each rollout region

After the NBN rollout has occurred in a particular region, Telstra has an obligation to disconnect the copper lines in that region, usually 18 months after the region has been identified by NBN Co as ‘ready for service’ (i.e. fibre passes 90% of premises). At this time, there will be a managed disconnection of remaining voice and broadband services at premises in the relevant region that have been passed by the NBN and have not already migrated.

If a service has not been migrated prior to disconnection, Telstra is required to keep soft dial tone in place for up to 20 Business Days after the disconnection date to enable continued access to emergency services while a replacement NBN service is arranged.

No new orders for copper services once a premises becomes NBN Serviceable

The Migration Plan prohibits Telstra from supplying a new copper service to a premises where the NBN service qualification process shows that it is capable of being connected to the NBN (except for special services in the early period of the NBN rollout).

Separate Process for the Disconnection of ‘Special Services’

The Migration Plan specifies a list of ‘special services’ (ie services delivered using the copper CAN other than voice or broadband) that will be disconnected in accordance with a separate process. Disconnection for these services will occur 36 months following NBN Co publishing a White Paper specifying an NBN substitute for a particular class of special services.

It's going to be an interested ride with Telstra under a new, possibly enlightened management.

NBN: Is this the Coalition's NBN proposal?

Mr Turnbull recently published two pieces, a response to Graeme Samuel and his address to the CommsDay Conference [2012], which appear to give us our best detailed view of the Coalition NBN policy.

To Mr Samuel, he addresses "Multi-Service Access Nodes" as a technology solution: FTTN Nodes with VDSL line cards that can be swapped for Fibre Optic line cards.

Mr Turnbull rails against the co-opting of the term "NBN" (National Broadband Network) by the Government to mean both NBN Co and their national FTTP network. One of the commenters suggests the name "NPN", I presume National Premises Network, as an alternative name for "product differentiation". Better than National Narrowband Network.

In his CommsDay address, Mr Turnbull quotes the Liberal member Paul Fletcher, once on Richard Alstons' staff, an ex-executive of Optus and author of "Wired Brown Land", a 2009 commentary on Telstra.

After all, we know the approximate budget and timetable such a strategy entails, because a nationwide Fibre to the Node upgrade has been painstakingly costed, and the logistics of rolling it out carefully analyzed, no less than eight times during the past eight years.

A series of evolving designs for such an upgrade were presented by Telstra to the Howard Government in November 2005, August 2006 and August 2007.

My colleague Paul Fletcher’s book ‘Wired Brown Land?’ describes the last of these plans in some detail:

The Telstra submission revealed that it now planned for an FTTN network which used VDSL, not ADSL2+…It could deliver a target downstream speed of 25 Mbps and a maximum downstream speed of 100 Mbps, much faster than its original proposal. The copper lengths would be a maximum of 800 metres (not the 1.5 kilometres of its November 2005 proposal)…”

So, is this the Coalition NBN Policy?

• FTTN with VDSL2,
• 25Mbps guaranteed,
• 800m max. wire-run.
• no announcement on supporting existing analogue phones or compulsory transition to full digital network, including Voice over IP.

It's consistent with his "7:30 Report" interview where he talks about "under 1,000 metres" and speeds of "25-80Mbps".

That design could fit in with the current NBN-POI design.

Mr Turnbull also suggests that he'd rollout his NPN in priority need: i.e. those who most need better connections first, citing his 13,000 survey responses as the driver.

He also criticises the NBN Co rollout, which priorities construction on cost-effective issues like contracts and availability of staff/resources, for not addressing subscriber need first. Which appears contradictory: NBN Co is executing the roll-out in the most cost-effecive manner whilst the Coalition has criticised them for wasting money. Can't have it both ways.

Mr Turnbull has consistently claimed his FTTN proposal would be a savings "of about three quarters".
But that can only be on the fibre construction, not the whole network.

In the NBN Implementation study, there's a figure of $9.9 billion for the fibre construction, more recently $12 billion is widely quoted.

So is Mr Turnbull claiming the edge network, the FTTN, could be built for $3 billion?
The "fibre and transit" component of the $37.4B Aug-2012 budget is $26.4B.
That changes the edge network from $26.4B to $17.4B, or the total project under $30B, a savings of 25%. Mr Turnbull cannot be claiming he can reduce the whole project ($37.4B) by 3-4 times, i.e. to $10-12B, because of the cost of satellite, fixed wireless, transit/backhaul and current contracts. The FTTN component would need to be zero cost: not possible.

I find the $3B estimate for 12M subscribers (93% premises) hard to justify.
The August 2005 FTTN presentation by Telstra had some interesting aspects:

• Only 5 major cities with a total of 5.4M premises
• but only 4M premises would be served by their FTTN
• the maximum wire-run distance was 1.5km, ADSL2+ at 12Mbps
• They estimated 20,000 nodes needed to cover 66% (2.7M) premises
• the other 1.3M premises would be directly connected to 450 exchanges
• One of the 4 major project headlines was remediating the copper lines to subscribers.
• No estimated cost was given, but named components were $5.5B
• rollout timetable was 3 years
• the rest of Australia, including Canberra and Hobart and all regional centres would be ignored.

That counts out at least one of the eight FTTN proposals - this was anything but a precise estimate.

Simple scaling to 12M serviced premises would suggest at least 3 times the cost.
As the NBN Implementation study points out: the cost of supplying services is far from identical. The 90th percentile for fibre costs 1.6 times the 50th percentile, with the 93rd percentile 4-5 times the cost.

As premises density drops, the savings from FTTN drop exponentially: very quickly you get to 1 premise per node. When it's much better and cheaper to run fibre directly to the premise...

On top of the three-fold increase of the Telstra 2005 proposal, is the halving of the maximum run. Simplistically, you'd need four times the number of nodes in the same area.

Did we just define a network of 275,000 nodes taking around 10 years to roll out to get 93% of premises connected?

The catch-all is Fixed Wireless (fixed 3G mobile phone access): when the incremental cost of premises on a node is more than the higher Fixed Wireless cost, the network build would use wireless, with all its problems.

NBN: Big Builds take Time.

A friend with decades of Telco planning experience thought to plot the NBN POI Rollout Schedule as "premises served by month" [at end].

In around 2 years, 9M+ premises will be served by a Point of Interconnect (POI), but that doesn't mean we can all connect on that day. There are many more steps in the process, the last of which is running a fibre up your street.

I love my friends' graph. Just as you'd expect, its a "linear" rollout: means they have a fixed size workforce that just keep pegging away at the build for two years.

It strikes me that most commentators don't realise, or don't talk about, the layered ("inside to outside") approach necessary for reinventing basic infrastructure:

• Design, Contracts/Suppliers, Funding, Approvals [more?]
• Backhaul [national, long-haul] and central facilities & systems [fulfilment, NOC, faults, billing, ...]
• POI's [equivalent of 'central exchanges']
• Fibre Serving Areas (FSA) [equivalent of customer exchanges]
• Fibre Distribution Areas (FDA) [equivalent of copper distribution 'pillars']
• Lastly, running "pits and pipes" up streets, pulling Fibre and installing connection points in every premise passed.

Whilst the NBN will have POI's and backhaul in-place for all premises in ~2 years, it will take until ~2020 for the FDA's, FSA's and pits-n-pipes to be rolled out...

You don't start a freeway "everywhere at once", but from one or both ends. Similarly the NBN must be implemented sequentially, building out from the core to the edge with no cheap shortcuts possible.

People have complained about the NBN's decade+ roll-out, but I think this is a task more than 10 times greater than duplicating the whole East Coast Highway [route "1"], linking Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

That little project has been going more than 20 years with no clear end in sight, but nobody complains and gets national media attention for it.

For the Coalition to complain and criticise NBN Co for being tardy and worse is at least unwarranted, at best disingenuous. It plays well to an uninformed public, but is Political Grandstanding that will backfire.

Mr Turnbull's central problem with his "Better Broadband: Sooner, Cheaper, More Affordably" is: which parts can be tinker with to improve things?? Will they forever abandon FTTP for (nearly) Everyone, if not, when do they plan to rollout a pure Fibre network? That's important Politically and economically.

The Design, Contracts and Regulator Approval all have to be redone if the Coalition dumps the "only Fibre" policy. That's a delay of 12-24 months right there. Unless you just sell NBN Co and remove the Customer Access Network as a service regulated by the ACCC. Nobody, not even Telstra, would be daft enough to buy a prematurely privatised NBN Co. Starting with the rate of return being deemed "non-commercial" at 350 basis points above the Reserve Banks' reference rate. That's a great return for Joe Public, but not nearly enough for Big Business or a large Telco.

The backhaul and central facilities and systems are mainly completed or will be built/extended on-Demand. No delays there.

The POI's, the equivalent to central non-customer telephone exchanges, must be completed, no matter what technologies are employed between them and the customer. No delays there. We'll know by a mid-2013 election if NBN Co and their contractors are on-target or not. There is nothing, in time or money, to be saved by changing the ACCC agreed POI list.

The next 2 levels: FSA and FDA, can't be tinkered with much either.
You can have "pure fibre" or "pure FTTN/Cable" FSA's and FDA's or hybrid FSA's with some FDA's and FTTP/FTTN/Cable Distribution Areas.

For the same reason that when you build a road system in built-up areas, the rights-of-way, once laid down, are fixed. You can add kerbs, pave or concrete roads, adding lighting, new lanes and road dividers iff you've first allowed yourself the space to expand into. Creating a pure Fibre NBN allows us as a Nation to cheaply and easily upgrade our common asset, whilst pure or mixed Copper/Cable NBN is extremely limited in its capabilities. Out-of-the-box, it's running as fast as it ever can. Exactly what you don't want in a  high-demand, high-growth developing technology.

The Big Savings must then come at the street level: the pits-pipes, cable, lead-ins and Fibre Network Termination Units. An easy saving would be aerial cables with high maintenance and low-reliability, already ruled out by NBN Co in the 5-year life design process.

At $55/m (guess) for trenching, some money can be saved by reusing the existing, often badly degraded, copper access network, but almost all money sunk into an FTTN that will be replaced by pure Fibre is being thrown away. Not a good look for a Political Party wanting to be known for "thrift" and "efficiency".

Will Mr Turnbull allow fibre to be run for consumers in an FTTN/Cable Distribution Area wanting a connection faster than 12Mbps, increasing the rollout costs above pure Fibre because of the multiple services? That a social justice and equitable access, as well as economic, issue. We will be creating a very strong Geographic Digital Divide, a legacy not in keeping with Mr Turnbull's own modest beginnings in a single parent household.

If the mantra is "Better, Cheaper", then Mr Turnbull has to lay down strict guidelines segregating the Have and Have-Not Broadband Areas. This isn't a trivial matter: both FTTP and FTTN networks have economic design lives of 30+ years. The decision, like Gungahlin's poor Internet service, will cause unrest and dissension for decades.

I'm wondering if the electors going to the Coalition's "Broadband Survey" site, www.fasterbroadband.com.au, will be thinking they are committing themselves and their great-grandkids to a 12 Mbps FTTN as well...

Does Mr Turnbull have a rabbit he can pull out of the hat that trumps this reasoning and allows the creaking and groaning Copper Customer Access Network to be leveraged cheaply and reliably until 2050? I'd love that to be true and for me to stand corrected. I don't believe the recent Australian research multiplying bandwidths over copper many fold will lead to viable FTTN improvements: the copper, in the main, won't be up to it.

Mr Turnbull is smart, informed, well-connected and a proven innovator: any other Politician I'd  write-off as engaging in mere Political Puffery.

Whilst the saying goes, there's no fury like a woman scorned, Australian Electors are second. The sudden, unexpected popularity of Pauline Hansen's One Nation party and the slow demise of the Australian Democrats in response to passing the GST should inform Political Parties to tread softly around important decisions: not only do they sometimes completely miss important trends in the electorate, voters remember dashed expectations and major betrayals.

If the Coalition is playing "say anything beforehand and renege later" with their NBN Policy, not only will they be a one-term government, they'll later suffer a voter backlash the like we've never seen.

NBN Planned POI rollout by Premises Served, 2012.

NBN: Mr Turnbull has but one opinion - Ethernet "Standard Guage"

Two details in the NBN rollout will force the Coalitions' "Better, cheaper, sooner" NBN to conform with the existing standards and roll-out plan:

• The NBN Access standard for a layer 2 VLAN-in-VLAN ethernet bitstream, and
• The deployment of Points of Interconnect (PoI).

NBN Co has moved into high-gear in deploying the core of the NBN access network: PoI's and the supporting Transit Networks linking them back to customers. They plan to be mostly finished in 2 years, around the end of 2014.

While there are 7 active PoI's today, by the end of June 2013, around half of the final 121 agreed by the regulator, the ACCC, will be up and running and works for the rest will be well advanced.

By the time we have an election, NBN Co will be too far advanced in deploying PoI's to do anything but be allowed to finish the job. At the very least, the independent regulator would have to be presented a convincing case by a new Coalition government to vary the number of PoI's and/or their location. Considering how long it took to access and agree the list the first time, its unlikely that a review could agree variations before the existing rollout plan was finished in 2014.

There is sound basis for the selection of PoI's: ~100,000 premises per PoI.

The technical implications of coalescing the last, say 25-40, PoI's into just a few are large. Each PoI now won't be exactly identical, but they will be very similar and the backhaul 'pipes' for ISP's and the volume of traffic will be similar. Introducing a few, very non-standard PoI's, and not in major metro areas, will increase capital costs and operating costs for RSPs/ISPs. A really poor idea that Telcos and ISPs will push back on very hard.

So Mr Turnbull has to allow NBN Co to finish its PoI rollout: they are central to the whole design working.

Then there's the small matter of "Standard Gauge" for customer access: the layer 2 ethernet bitstream.

The cornerstone of the NBN is "open access Customer Access Network", which requires a single, standard means for RSPs/ISPs to connect with it. This has been defined by NBN Co and I assume enshrined in the legislation. Good luck changing that legislation!

There's a standard for good reason: we need to avoid the current confusion, similar to the multiple incompatible railway gauges built around Australia in the 1890's.

Infrastructure standards decisions live for a very long time. Australia isn't going to change electricity voltage or frequency anytime soon, nor will we ever do the far easier change, drive on the right side of the road.

Mr Turnbull has to mandate that all his "cheaper, sooner" local Access Networks comply with the existing NBN layer 2 standard and connect to the existing regulator approved PoI's.

Yes, the Coalition may be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat and actually build a cheaper mixed media network: Fibre for the privileged, 12Mbps ADSL, HFC and perhaps WiFi or WiMax for the second- and third-class citizens.

But this mixed media network will have to conform to the existing Network Plan based around 121 PoI's and support the current layer 2 ethernet bitstream standard. It can't be a free-for-all or the whole thing reverts to the expensive mess that Railways turned into. This means creating versions of the standard Client Premises interface, the ONT (Optical Network Terminator), for each media type. That's an expensive hardware development project.

Given the history and the countless decades to partially rectify the confusion of Railway Gauges, I can't see any Government being elected on a platform that might lead to the same mess.

"Albury, All change" isn't going to cut it on the Information Superhighway. Mr Turnbull take note.