Why is broadband so cheap in australia?!?!

Forums › New Zealand Broadband › Why is broadband so cheap in australia?!?!

1 | 2 | 3 | 4

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#470535 18-May-2011 14:48

Beccara: So either we need someone to fork out the cash to get the nodes in NZ with a decent INT pipe behind them or we need someone to offer $10/mbit to Sydney so we can access them all dirt cheap

$1/mbit would be more realistic.

Which means that we need to get more customers focused on using ISPs that would use such a link.

So anyone who's using a service that's not delivered via Telecom infrastructure.

Promote New Zealand - Get yourself a .kiwi.nz domain name!!!

Check out mine - i.am.a.can.do.kiwi.nz - don@i.am.a.can.do.kiwi.nz

matts231

29 posts

Geek

#470622 18-May-2011 16:34

sbiddle:
matts231: 2) Cabinets are bad.

Huh? Cabinets are fantastic and I doubt you'll find many people sharing your viewpoint.

How else are ADSL distance limitations going to be overcome? Moving people's houses closer to the exchange?

Cabinets are awful and crush competition. People in Australia fall over themselves to avoid cabineted areas. Why? Because half the time there's not enough space in the cabinet/RIM to serve all those who want to get broadband. There's usually no room in the cabinets for other providers to install competing infrastructure. Most people will still agree that having unlimited or very high quota at 3 - 7mbit is better than 20GB or something stupid like that at >10mbit.

Sure, cabinets are good in that you get faster speeds but you also cement the incumbent's position. There will be /no option/ but for customers (through ISPs) to use Telecom Wholesale for DSL - and if there is no choice what incentive do Telecom Wholesale have to lower prices? Unbundling the local loop is essential but it's pointless if you're just going to cabinet everyone up anyway.

Just search "rim port hell" on whirlpool and you'll see just how much australians like cabinets.

richms

28168 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#470627 18-May-2011 16:45

Have any other ISPs attempted negotiation with telecom about putting their gear in cabinets yet? Last I read they were all just crying to the commerce commission about the rates that they were setting.

Richard rich.ms

Ragnor

8218 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#470628 18-May-2011 16:47

RIM cabinets in Australia are entirely different to the Whisper cabinets that have been deployed by Telecom here.

There is space for competitors equipment in the Whisper cabinets and pricing for access and backhaul has been set by the ComCom.

People who like to download the whole internet or in flat situations might prefer un-metered usage at 4Mbit/s - I might have agreed in the past but now having the access to 16Mbit since being connected to a cabinet I would not go back to 4Mbit/s.

So I do indeed prefer to have 80GB at 16Mbit rather than un-metered (lets say fair use would be around 200-250GB) at 4Mbit/s.

The fact of the matter is ISP's in NZ don't offer un-metered because to do so they need to run a ratio of customers to international bandwidth that is just no economically viable at prices consumers are willing to pay.

Talkiet

4792 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#470633 18-May-2011 16:49

matts231:
sbiddle:
matts231: 2) Cabinets are bad.

Huh? Cabinets are fantastic and I doubt you'll find many people sharing your viewpoint.

How else are ADSL distance limitations going to be overcome? Moving people's houses closer to the exchange?

Cabinets are awful and crush competition. People in Australia fall over themselves to avoid cabineted areas. Why? Because half the time there's not enough space in the cabinet/RIM to serve all those who want to get broadband. There's usually no room in the cabinets for other providers to install competing infrastructure. Most people will still agree that having unlimited or very high quota at 3 - 7mbit is better than 20GB or something stupid like that at >10mbit.

Sure, cabinets are good in that you get faster speeds but you also cement the incumbent's position. There will be /no option/ but for customers (through ISPs) to use Telecom Wholesale for DSL - and if there is no choice what incentive do Telecom Wholesale have to lower prices? Unbundling the local loop is essential but it's pointless if you're just going to cabinet everyone up anyway.

Just search "rim port hell" on whirlpool and you'll see just how much australians like cabinets.

Up front, I work for Telecom, and it says that under my name, to the left...

We're not Australia.

How many cabinets here don't have enough ports for their coverage area? I would be staggered if you could find ONE.

While there's a lot of debate which is more important - speed or high quotas - it doesn't take much to look at the historical and current government regulation and direction to figure out what the government thinks NZ needs.

As has been pointed out, there is space in the cabinets here in NZ and there is regulated pricing. As has also been pointed out, Telecom didn't really have a choice but to build the FTTN network and now the business case for anyone else to duplicate infrastructure at that granular a level is challenging to say the least.

It doesn't mean cabinets are bad - they have hugely improved performance for a lot of people, there's no port issue in cabinet land in NZ and there's space for others if they want to pay the regulated price.

Cheers - N

ps. Personal views etc :-)

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

Beccara

1469 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

#470670 18-May-2011 17:28

Last I heard about 4 months ago SeaView in Wellington out the hutt still had port number issues. I'll have to double check but i'm sure I've heard recently of clients in the Whangarei Heads area not being able to get a xDSL port as there are none left.

And lets be fair here, There is no way the cabinets have as much space for other providers at an exchange does. Would their even be enough room to have 5-10 providers in there with gear?

Most problems are the result of previous solutions...

All comment's I make are my own personal opinion and do not in any way, shape or form reflect the views of current or former employers unless specifically stated

matts231

29 posts

Geek

#470697 18-May-2011 18:31

(I can't seem to quote on this iPhone, derp)

Talktiet, that's true what you say - telstra's cabinets were not built for providing broadband, unlike Telecom's. The issue still remains however that cabinets make it far harder for competitors to install their own DSLAMs on a large scale.

Equinox IT

Cloud spending continues to surge globally, but most organisations haven’t made the changes necessary to maximise the value and cost-efficiency benefits of their cloud investments. Download the whitepaper From Overspend to Advantage now.

richms

28168 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#470740 18-May-2011 20:11

Beccara: Last I heard about 4 months ago SeaView in Wellington out the hutt still had port number issues. I'll have to double check but i'm sure I've heard recently of clients in the Whangarei Heads area not being able to get a xDSL port as there are none left.

And lets be fair here, There is no way the cabinets have as much space for other providers at an exchange does. Would their even be enough room to have 5-10 providers in there with gear?

Well the finances would never stack up for putting 5 other ISPs in the cabinet so thats a moot point.

What needs to happen is cooperation between other ISPs to lease a joint space for a joint dslam and prorate the costs out based on numbers of customers on it. Or set up a second wholesale provider to compete with telecom wholesale. Since they have to pay out the same rates as everyone else the figures should stack up. But its easier for ISPs to go crying to mummy commerce commission about telecom then to think and act so that's all that they ever do.

Richard rich.ms

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#470753 18-May-2011 20:27

Beccara: Would their even be enough room to have 5-10 providers in there with gear?

What is stopping 5 to 10 providers from putting a cabinet next to the Whisper cabinet and running a cable between them?

Promote New Zealand - Get yourself a .kiwi.nz domain name!!!

Check out mine - i.am.a.can.do.kiwi.nz - don@i.am.a.can.do.kiwi.nz

Talkiet

4792 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#470759 18-May-2011 20:41

DonGould:
Beccara: Would their even be enough room to have 5-10 providers in there with gear?

What is stopping 5 to 10 providers from putting a cabinet next to the Whisper cabinet and running a cable between them?

Economics mostly. And planning consents.

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

Ragnor

8218 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#471055 19-May-2011 12:41

DonGould:
Beccara: Would their even be enough room to have 5-10 providers in there with gear?

What is stopping 5 to 10 providers from putting a cabinet next to the Whisper cabinet and running a cable between them?

Cheaper to lobby government to force Telecom to let them use their locations/equipment/fibre.

The disruption from digging up the streets laying fibre a 2nd or third time and installing cabinets is also a big factor, average people hate that stuff.

Like it or not this the physical layer stuff is a natural monopoly like water pipes or electricity lines.

Beccara

1469 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

#471063 19-May-2011 12:56

DonGould:
Beccara: So either we need someone to fork out the cash to get the nodes in NZ with a decent INT pipe behind them or we need someone to offer $10/mbit to Sydney so we can access them all dirt cheap

$1/mbit would be more realistic.

Which means that we need to get more customers focused on using ISPs that would use such a link.

So anyone who's using a service that's not delivered via Telecom infrastructure.

What? $1/mbit is a crackden pipe dream. You couldn't get wholesale $1/mbit rates from one end of a street to another. submarine cables cost alot of money

Cymro

283 posts

Ultimate Geek

#471064 19-May-2011 12:56

DonGould:
Beccara: Would their even be enough room to have 5-10 providers in there with gear?

What is stopping 5 to 10 providers from putting a cabinet next to the Whisper cabinet and running a cable between them?

Why not just create a new Wholesale organization between the big independent ISP's and install one set of extra DSLAM's in cabinets?

With SLU/SLES surely there is a business case to then run backhaul from the connected exchanges as well?
Oh wait, it's probably mostly all in place already between various network operators (FX/Citylink et al.)

The answer is that it's easier to eat Telecom's lunch and then blame them for not having enough mayo than it is to take the risk and make their own lunch between them which doesn't have enough mayo and there is nobody else to blame.

and now you have UFB on the horizon, the business case for investing in network yourself just became redundant.

Ragnor

8218 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#471071 19-May-2011 13:07

Many exchanges have vector or fx networks or other fibre, Orcon/Kodia/Odyssey have been building some of their own apparently based on fibre the jointly own with Telstraclear.

Vodafone, Orcon, Compass and Callplus/Slingshot are already a LLU "consortium" wholesaling to each other when one has gear in exchanges that the other doesn't.

They would put gear in cabinets if the economics worked out, maybe once the ComCom revises pricing.

The bottom line is Telecom spent billions on cabinetisation and the pricing for Sub LLU reflects the cost/investment (apparently).

If I remember rightly the major issue is the price of the backhaul from the cabinets, I think in the ComCom STD they split the cost per provider rather than by % of customers. That decision seemed poor to me.

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#471077 19-May-2011 13:18

Beccara: What? $1/mbit is a crackden pipe dream. You couldn't get wholesale $1/mbit rates from one end of a street to another. submarine cables cost alot of money

Capacity in Sydney is 10c/mbit.

Promote New Zealand - Get yourself a .kiwi.nz domain name!!!

Check out mine - i.am.a.can.do.kiwi.nz - don@i.am.a.can.do.kiwi.nz

1 | 2 | 3 | 4