The US has a broadband monopoly. A handful of companies control the market, reducing competition. But would a publicly owned network be better? Not if Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) is anything to go by!
--------
Hey, I'm HandyAndy and thanks for watching this video! If you enjoyed it, then please SUBSCRIBE to my channel for more quality content.
-------
My notes on this topic:
- America's internet has been getting some negative publicity lately. Of course, one of the main issues is net neutrality, which - along with bad customer service - has plagued certain ISPs.
- But another one is perceived speed, or lack thereof. This situation has arisen because of the oligopoly situation over telecom architecture, where fixed line access is offered by a small group of companies - such as Time Warner, Verizon and Comcast - and this lack of competition serves as a disincentive to upgrade copper networks to something more advanced, like fibre optic cable.
- What's the solution? Some have suggested a publicly owned broadband network. But, looking at Australia as an example, this might turn out to be disastrous.
- Back in 2009, the Australian Government set up NBN Corporation, which was to construct a AU$43 billion fibre optic broadband network - promising speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (and up to 1 gbps in the future) to 90 percent of the population.
- At the time, this announcement was remarkable. Even today, the average Australian download speed is a mere 8.2 megabits per second, a far cry from 100. This is mainly due to our reliance on ADSL2+ from an old copper network - some of which was first installed near the beginning of last century.
- So it's generally agreed that a new network is needed - but exactly how to go about installing it is a point of contention. The original plan - fibre to the home/premises (FTTH/FTTP) - had many problems. These ranged from the obvious, such as the enormous cost, to the unexpected - such as disturbance of asbestos in old phone pits where the new cables were being routed through.
- Needless to say, fibre to the home was abandoned following a change of government in 2013, only to be replaced by fibre to the node (FTTN). The basic idea is that the labor cost (pun?) associated with connecting fibre directly into each house - estimated at about $1200 per premises - can be skipped by installing cabinets on street corners, connecting the fibre to them, and then letting the existing copper infrastructure run the rest of the way. The speed gains can thus be achieved using a technology such as Vectored VDSL, which is essentially a noise cancellation system.
- But the controversy continues! Despite the promise of a cheaper and faster rollout, FTTN is technologically inferior to FTTP and uptake is sluggish. Consider that, although a theoretical 100 Mbit/s speed is quoted for FTTN, this figure drops dramatically during peak periods of usage - sometimes to speeds that are lower than those achieved under ADSL.
- These issues have been blamed on ISPs buying insufficient bandwidth from the owner of the network, NBN Co, for the number of subscribers that they have.
- And meanwhile, the cost - which, obviously for a government run project, is incurred by the taxpayer - keeps increasing. Originally, the current government's proposal for a "multi-technology mix" - including some nodes, and some fibre to the premises installations, was to cost a total of $29.5 billion - it was then revised to $41 billion, and, most recently, to a grand total of $56 billion.
