8 April 2009

The Ruddnet impact on TransACT?

| johnboy
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The Liberal’s Senator Humphries is up in arms that Kevin Rudd is proposing to create a new Telstra just to deliver high speed internet direct to every home.

The problem? Canberra’s own TransACT is also going to be made redundant.

Apparently TransACT are right now in the middle of rolling out more fibre (but only to the node), which is going to look a little silly if this new thing arrives.

However I do love Gary taking a swing at a government assuming the risk of running a data network when he was part of the Carnell Government which kicked off the TransACT data network. Surely they’re just scaling that good idea up?

TransACT in turn have expressed disappointment, and a hope they can still be part of the new plans.

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taninaus said :

The problem is they did the central suburbs and then gave up laying fibre to the house.

Actually, TransACT laid Fibre to their Nodes. (From there, it’s a VDSL tail the last couple of hundred metres to your house – it was Phase One of their rollout.)

The problem is that not only did they only do a few suburbs with it, but as I mentioned in my first discussion, they failed to offer market-leading speeds or pricing.

taninaus said :

when I moved south in 01 they had started piggy backing on Telstra copper lines with FTTN in Monash – so I get phone and internet but no cable speed or TV as an option.

Not FTTN, it’s good old ADSL. IE, TransACT’s DSLAMs are located in Telstra’s exchanges. They called it Phase Two.

peterh – aah, you’re a Mac Salesman. I understand!

peterh said :

what impact does dark have over normal fibre?

Dark fibre IS normal fibre. It’s just not lit up.

I remember when the aranda pilot was established, we sold many apple systems into the pilot program, and it was a roaring success from our perspective. as the other suburbs came on line, it seemed to go backwards. then longreach took up some slack, but it isn’t a transact product, and now we have TWB, bigpond and orion wireless fighting to get in too. 21mb t/fer on wireless is pretty good. and the NBN won’t impact the wireless market, which is where my clients seem to be focusing. I thought that dark fibre was laid throughout the ACT, but I am not sure. what impact does dark have over normal fibre?

Clown Killer said :

We’ve been using TransACT for phone, internet and TV for about five years

The problem is they did the central suburbs and then gave up laying fibre to the house. I was in Wanniassa 10 years ago with a promise they would lay fibre to the house by ’98, then suddenly they stopped, when I moved south in 01 they had started piggy backing on Telstra copper lines with FTTN in Monash – so I get phone and internet but no cable speed or TV as an option.

I have no sympathy for Transact, they had a captured market 10 years ago and decided not to exploit that by laying fibre – business decision or not they can’t winge now!

grrrr, there are plenty of people who cannot. The problem that we currently have is that the technology on offer to many families is not the best for their needs, the greatest form of bloatware currently residing on most pc’s starts with a “W” – I would advocate that they go to linux – open suse if i could, but there are legacy products that don’t currently work in that environment, including edu packages that some kids are using at home.

BTW, i am currently running my production system, an imac 24, with parallels, open suse, winxp, vista, and it resides on leopard, but I still am running on copper, so the node by the linkage on a bdsl connection +-4m/4m.

peterh said :

my pc at home is a duron 850, with 384 mb ram. can it do high speed? with a gigabit ethernet card?

Yes. Yes. Pretty sure I had a P90 with 48M of RAM that could do it (provided I used a PCI rather than ISA card .. and even in Windows.) Even a decade old PC has a much more powerful CPU than a new home router and can therefore send and receive network traffic faster.

Also, what Johnboy said.

If someone can pay ~$100/month for 100mbit internet with a generous download quota, they can spend another $600 on a brand new PC. I’m sorry if you can’t afford that, peterh, but plenty of people currently pay more for less. (Hell, it’s cheaper than TransACT 30/10 FTTH.)

Because we should never build roads taking faster traffic than your steam powered tricycle?

And yes, on the network level your old duron will happily do much higher speeds, at least if you put a linux disty on it.

You’re basically arguing to cripple the whole world to compensate for your own inadequacies.

I think you’ll find we’re going to proceed without you.

Grrrr said :

peterh said :

The problem is that the equipment that you can buy at harveys, ht, dick smith etc, may not support the higher speeds. they might just be an adequate connectivity device.

Just thought I’d point out some real numbers on this: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_chart/Itemid,189/

It’s a chart of throughput of routers – some new, and some more than a few years old. You’ll notice a number of devices (including current popular models like Apple’s Airport Extreme) doing over 100mbit. Lots doing over 50mbit, and almost all of them going faster than TransACT’s 30mbit.

You can see for yourself that any current-gen router (especially if it’s got GigE ports) will be fine for 100mbit.

(Time to take this to Whirlpool, perhaps?)

my pc at home is a duron 850, with 384 mb ram. can it do high speed? with a gigabit ethernet card? the connection is fast, the bottleneck is the pc.

How many people out in the market have a fast computer? how many cannot afford a new computer?

The hardware of the router / modem isn’t the only SPOF. the hardware behind the router – your pc is another. if the router I have isn’t current gen, I won’t have FTTN high speeds. I won’t have 10/1000, I won’t have a fast connection. I mentioned that the wealthy will have access to FTTN, not rich, but able to upgrade the current pc, how many users still have xp running on a very old box?

the problem that i can see is that the current mindset is geared toward making the internet faster. what about making subsidies available to making the equipment more affordable? takeup initially won’t be high. people will only upgrade when they feel that they absolutely need to.

peterh said :

The problem is that the equipment that you can buy at harveys, ht, dick smith etc, may not support the higher speeds. they might just be an adequate connectivity device.

Just thought I’d point out some real numbers on this: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_chart/Itemid,189/

It’s a chart of throughput of routers – some new, and some more than a few years old. You’ll notice a number of devices (including current popular models like Apple’s Airport Extreme) doing over 100mbit. Lots doing over 50mbit, and almost all of them going faster than TransACT’s 30mbit.

You can see for yourself that any current-gen router (especially if it’s got GigE ports) will be fine for 100mbit.

(Time to take this to Whirlpool, perhaps?)

Peter, why would the hardware/OS type matter any more than it does now (ie absolutely not at all unless you need ‘tech support’ from useless ISP drones reading from a ‘how to reboot Microsoft Windows and power cycle your comms gear’ answer card)? You’d be struggling to find a PC that doesn’t have a 100MB NIC *today*, let alone in 5-10 years when Ruddnet is meant to be built.

Fibre -> building -> media converter -> ethernet cable to PC doesn’t really seem any more complicated than Copper -> building -> linefilter, DSL Modem -> ethernet cable to PC.

Not to mention that gigabit ethernet’s been cheap and common for some time now.

Minor correction: Franklin = all FTTH. Half of Forde is FTTH.

peterh said :

I have plenty of networking clue, thanks.
I also am interested in which boxes you are talking about, what is the min spec that you feel will be adequate to take advantage of the new FTTN speeds? will it be better off running vista or linux?

So, I tell you that any PC made in the last few years can push 100mbit throughput .. Then you say you have lots of clue, and proceed to ask “What spec is required, and which OS should it run?” 1) Duh! 2) It’s IP over Ethernet, it doesn’t care which OS you run.

RuddNet isn’t magical future technology stuff. You want to know how it will work? Go over to Forde this weekend and knock on the door of a current user of TransACT (Forde = all FTTH) and they’ll show you. RuddNet won’t be much different.

Get it into your head that whether the FTTH network is delivered to CPE as plain routed IP, or tunneled in PPPoE or similar, performance is not an issue. Unless some very bizarre and unlikely design decisions are made, it will work like other FTTH systems worldwide: Whatever device the RuddNetCo supply will give the customer Ethernet @ 100mbit, or Gig – rate limited to 100mbit. The average user, regardless of their OS will plug-in their PC (or router), perhaps configure PPPoE or similar for auth, and off they go.

TransACT will go direct? They already do, through their ISP Grapevine. Getting rid of the other ISPs on TransACT (who provide a better service) wouldn’t be clever.

I have plenty of networking clue, thanks.
I also am interested in which boxes you are talking about, what is the min spec that you feel will be adequate to take advantage of the new FTTN speeds? will it be better off running vista or linux? the avg home user has no clue about the technology, they are purely point and click. what sort of box will they need for a decent connection? will a user that has a mac suffer from the use of a 3rd party device to allow connection?

The problem is, until the rudd govt releases the specs for the network, we won’t know. traditional FTTN networks were proposed by the NBN respondents, but the govt decided that they weren’t adequate. when the network is opened, which connection to fibre will be available?
and re the comment about 10/100, why not gigabit? would that increase the speed of the service, or will it be capped to cover the other essential services on the pipe, voip, vpn etc?

there is a new telco in town. they are being very quiet. They are used to doing this kind of rollout in the US – and have several large networks in place there already. how long until they fire up and start selling comms and carriage? I will give you a hint re the name: starts with a V…

I do not believe that the ruddnet network will be the only one. i would expect the creation of many new networks, built by organisations that have come from the international markets – where the bandwidth we have been dreaming about is slow in comparison… and we will have competition for our networks.

TransACT isn’t dead, yet. we may see the disappearance of the isp / wholesale system, but TransACT will go direct to the masses…

peterh said :

I don’t think we will see the benefits in the short term. it may aid in bringing the pricing down, but, until the technology can support the speeds discussed, ruddnet won’t be of benefit to most of the population – it will take at least 3 or 4 technology refreshes to allow average users to see the benefits. it will most likely be utilised by corporate or wealthy users.

Rubbish. Plug RuddNet straight into any PC made in the last few years and you’ll instantly be able to take full advantage of the speed offered. You badly need some networking clue.

peterh said :

step back a sec from the view of the carrier. who, at the time in australia was manufacturing devices that could recognise the higher speeds in an ADSL connection? not the carriers, they had the bandwidth, but the endpoint device. I am referring to the modems, switches and routers that were adsl compliant. what was their rating for speed?

cabling can be rated for larger speeds, but if the transceiver isn’t, then the speed you experience won’t be as high as the cable’s rated speed.

Everything was capable of full speed.

Copper pair cabling is not rated for any speed (IE bits/sec.) It’s the protocol that you pass over it that determines the speed.

As one of the first people in Aus to trial ADSL2+ when iiNet switched it on at the Civic and Deakin DSLAMs a little over 4 years ago, I can promise you that I was running a modem capable of talking ADSL2+ (IE syncing at up to 24mbit) and capable of routing 24mbit/sec of traffic between the DSL and 100mbit Ethernet interfaces. (However, to be picky; no-one manufactures DSL hardware in Australia, it’s all made in China/Taiwan.)

Before that, my ADSL1 device was capable of 8mbit, even though my service was limited to a slower speed.

peterh said :

Just because a router has a 100Mbps Ethernet switch doesn’t mean the connection will be at 100mbs. A current NAT router chip can’t handle that throughput as it only been designed for ADSL2+ speeds of up to 24Mbps.

I will assume you’re talking about an ADSL router: One PSTN (ADSL) interface, and 1 LAN interface (possibly in the form of a 4-port switch.) You are wrong – the routing engine is usually capable of routing at more than 24mbit. The line speed of the DSL is the limitation.

Let’s pretend you were talking about an ethernet router. TransACT VDSL (Phase 1) still only offer 8mbit/sec as their fastest consumer connection. Even the crappiest of “Cable modem routers” (IE with Ethernet as it’s WAN interface) have been capable of routing more than 10mbit/sec for a long time.

FTTH will probably be presented as 100mbit Ethernet to the customer. The conversion from optical to electrical will not slow anything down – it’s a simple conversion, done by a telco-owned box on your wall. You either plug that straight into the back of your PC, which has a 100mbit ethernet port capable of working at full speed.. or into a router which has Ethernet for a WAN port. (Of course, you’d purchase one capable of routing 100mbit/sec.)

VDSL has always been capable of offering speeds much faster than TransACT offer. The end-user equipment (CPE), the shelfs in the street cabinets, the backhaul gear. In your words; the transceiver has always been capable of higher speeds than TransACT supply. Note that the supplied speed is performed by limiting (IE lowering) the sync speed on the DSL interface.

dalryk: RuddNet might be the same or similar technologies as TransACT FTTH – but it’s won’t be run by TransACT, and that’s a GREAT thing.

hax: International connections are constantly being upgraded. (International is sometimes cheaper than domestic transit links per megabit!) The duopoly of Reach(Telstra)/SXC(Optus) will soon get competition in the form of the PIPE Guam link which should further lower prices on International.

dalryk said :

I don’t understand – the general consensus seems to be that TransACT are overpriced and poorly run, and generally a bad thing. But Ruddnet, which will be the EXACT SAME THING, just for the whole country, is somehow a good thing?

I don’t think we will see the benefits in the short term. it may aid in bringing the pricing down, but, until the technology can support the speeds discussed, ruddnet won’t be of benefit to most of the population – it will take at least 3 or 4 technology refreshes to allow average users to see the benefits. it will most likely be utilised by corporate or wealthy users.

I don’t understand – the general consensus seems to be that TransACT are overpriced and poorly run, and generally a bad thing. But Ruddnet, which will be the EXACT SAME THING, just for the whole country, is somehow a good thing?

Technology will get better, and the speed of light isn’t getting any faster.

I’m looking forward to the benefit of other people’s connections being up to speed.. There’s no point having an awesome connection, if you’re downloading from elsewhere with slow connections in between.

(maybe they could upgrade out international connection too?)

Just because a router has a 100Mbps Ethernet switch doesn’t mean the connection will be at 100mbs. A current NAT router chip can’t handle that throughput as it only been designed for ADSL2+ speeds of up to 24Mbps. and that is the limitation. the fibre to the home throughput will have a bottleneck somewhere. There has to be a slow point, going from fibre to ethernet. Or, perhaps the fibre connect will be in the home, allowing an end user access to the fibre port… shudder.

Grrrr said :

peterh said :

It isn’t just the carrier’s fault for the connectivity speeds, it was also at the time down to the speeds that the hardware could handle.

Are you talking about TransACT, like Taco is? Taco wasn’t joking when he said TransACT could have offered 10mbit when Telstra were offering 256kbit. (Actually, as best I recall Telstra always offered at least 512kbit DSL, but now I’m nitpicking.)

The TransACT (VDSL) hardware has been capable of the current speeds for years. TransACT only bump up the last-mile speeds when enough people complain that every other ISP is faster, and they want out of their current contract.

VDSL is faster than ADSL, and FTTH is faster than both ADSL and VDSL… unless it’s a TransACT offering!

step back a sec from the view of the carrier. who, at the time in australia was manufacturing devices that could recognise the higher speeds in an ADSL connection? not the carriers, they had the bandwidth, but the endpoint device. I am referring to the modems, switches and routers that were adsl compliant. what was their rating for speed?

cabling can be rated for larger speeds, but if the transceiver isn’t, then the speed you experience won’t be as high as the cable’s rated speed.

The problem is that the equipment that you can buy at harveys, ht, dick smith etc, may not support the higher speeds. they might just be an adequate connectivity device.

The common figure quoted on Whirlpool is that Transact phase 1 (cable) is capable of a good 30mbps, but most of that is reserved for the bloody TV channels…

peterh said :

It isn’t just the carrier’s fault for the connectivity speeds, it was also at the time down to the speeds that the hardware could handle.

Are you talking about TransACT, like Taco is? Taco wasn’t joking when he said TransACT could have offered 10mbit when Telstra were offering 256kbit. (Actually, as best I recall Telstra always offered at least 512kbit DSL, but now I’m nitpicking.)

The TransACT (VDSL) hardware has been capable of the current speeds for years. TransACT only bump up the last-mile speeds when enough people complain that every other ISP is faster, and they want out of their current contract.

TransACT could have been offering market leaders for the last decade, offering a technically superior solution at a competitive price. Let’s compare speed offerings, sorted by download speed and see where TransACT fit in:

Service – Downstream / Upstream speeds
2-way Satellite – 2 / 0.1 (approx)
3G mobile – 4 / 0.5 (from a good provider, worse provider much slower)
TransACT VSDL – 8 / 0.45
TransACT FTTH – 10 / 2
TransACT ADSL – 20 / 1 (real average approx 12/1)
Other ADSL2+ ISP – 24 / 1 (real average approx 12/1)
Optus/Telstra HFC – 20 / 0.25 (approx)
TransACT FTTH – 30 / 10
iiNet FTTB – 80 / 45 (VDSL2, real average slightly lower)
Internode FTTH – 100 / 5
RuddNet FTTH – 100 / ?

VDSL is faster than ADSL, and FTTH is faster than both ADSL and VDSL… unless it’s a TransACT offering!

taco said :

Transact is overpriced, underwhelming and incompetently run.
They could have easily delivered 10mbit as standard back when Telstra only offered 256kbit ADSL.

They have the technology today to deliver over 100mbit to homes, yet still only offer much lower speeds because they are more interested in pushing their shitty payTV over the bandwidth (most of their channels are free to air or free satellite channels) and taking a Telstra like attitude of selling the minimum guaranteed speed instead of what the line can handle, like how ADSL1 was limited to 1.5mbit for years so the people 4km from the exchange could get “full speed” while the majority could have had speeds of up to 8mbit.

So yeah, they can go DIAF as far as I am concerned.

It isn’t just the carrier’s fault for the connectivity speeds, it was also at the time down to the speeds that the hardware could handle. when dialup was at 56K, there was a long period of takeup whilst people transferred from 28.8k. Same occurs with the speeds associated with the new internet. Take NextG, the spectrum is being upgraded to support 21mb, but the hardware currently supports 7mb.

ADSL1, ADSL2, ADSL2+, FTTN are all reliant on the hardware used to connect to these services. the faster the connection, the higher the cost of the equipment. and most home users don’t like paying through the nose for connectivity. it will take a while for the benefits of FTTN to be realised. first, though, the pricing for the associated hardware must come down.

Transact is overpriced, underwhelming and incompetently run.
They could have easily delivered 10mbit as standard back when Telstra only offered 256kbit ADSL.

They have the technology today to deliver over 100mbit to homes, yet still only offer much lower speeds because they are more interested in pushing their shitty payTV over the bandwidth (most of their channels are free to air or free satellite channels) and taking a Telstra like attitude of selling the minimum guaranteed speed instead of what the line can handle, like how ADSL1 was limited to 1.5mbit for years so the people 4km from the exchange could get “full speed” while the majority could have had speeds of up to 8mbit.

So yeah, they can go DIAF as far as I am concerned.

Holden Caulfield said :

TransACT are already redundant aren’t they?

Even then, Internode’s basic ADSL speeds were better than TransACT (IIRC), now with ADSL2+ how does TransACT even compete in the suburbs that can get ADSL2+ (yeah I know there’s not many)?

Sounds like you got old figures from transact.. ‘basic ADSL speeds were better than TransACT’ .. TransACT have only one plan with speeds under 2mbit, and range upto 20mbit. We used to have 512k on transact because it was cheap, theyve now put us on a 2mbit plan for the same rateplan we paid for 512k, since they wanted to migrate everyone off the slower plans.

Clown Killer said :

We’ve been using TransACT for phone, internet and TV for about five years and I coun’t fault them. We get more channels of TV than I could possibly ever watch piped right into the home in an area of town ledgendary for its crappy TV reception, the interwebs is fast enough for anything we do (admitedly we don’t do a lot of on-line gaming or movie downloads), and the phone is, well its a phone.

We’re in a similar situation, using TransACT for about 5 years, with no faults other than once or twice a year when the TV drops out for a minute, and we had a modem fail too, which they replaced within 24hrs, at no expense.

Not to mention the other useful bit, that TransACT will let you watch/record more than 1 TV show, and multicasts TV programs rather than using satellite or other similarly dodgy proprietary technologies (ie. Foxtel IQ).

Then again, Ive been a TransACT customer since before we even had the cable here (long-distance preselection) so maybe they know how to look after long-time customers.

Clown Killer6:42 am 09 Apr 09

We’ve been using TransACT for phone, internet and TV for about five years and I coun’t fault them. We get more channels of TV than I could possibly ever watch piped right into the home in an area of town ledgendary for its crappy TV reception, the interwebs is fast enough for anything we do (admitedly we don’t do a lot of on-line gaming or movie downloads), and the phone is, well its a phone.

You can’t get Transact cable in Gordon. Bring on Ruddnet 🙂

Look, the real problem with Transact is… that dial tone. You ring a Transact number and you get that dial tone. It sounds exactly it’s drunk.

It has to go.

I applaud the Ruddnet plan to abolish the drunken Transact dial tone.

Howard had a far better idea …………… wait he didn’t have any idea at all.

Conspiracies, conspiracies … lol

Ruddnet? Try Rudderless.

Krudd’s internet plan has been a load of bs from the start. The planning for the whole project has been little more than a bright idea that he got while eating his breakfast during the election campaign. We’ve been through some farcical tendering process which would have already cost us tens of millions of dollars, when it was doubtful that they intended actually awarding the tender in the first place. Now that they’ve decided what they were always going to do, we will end up with a multi billion dollar government run white elephant network which they haven’t costed (or been brave enough to release the costings) and will more than likely cost much more than any privately built network. The final outcome will be consumers forced to pay rediculously high prices for an average service. Hell they may as well call the new network Telecom Internet, or just admit it is the new Telstra.

Ruby Wednesday8:51 pm 08 Apr 09

I live in Belconnen, and the TransACT website said they can only provide phone and mobile phone service to my address, so I went with Internode and have fairly decent ADSL2+.

Transact can’t provide internet services to 90% of the ACT. I checked their website again today for a laugh. Bonython doesn’t even exist to them. Every suburb around us can get ADSL2+ but we are invisible it seems. I also had the opportunity of sampling their pay tv on the weekend at a friends house. It was nothing short of pathetic. I hope they take a good look at themselves and realise that what they offer is way below par. I’ll stick with my Foxtel and Telstra internet for now.

peterh said :

good on the government?? I think that you have forgotten who owns Telstra… it is *still* govt owned…

Uh… no it isn’t. The Future Fund has about 15% of shares, the rest is privately held.

peterh said :

good on the government?? I think that you have forgotten who owns Telstra… it is *still* govt owned… and if they have a competing corporation, who wins out of the little players? no-one. it is like a dell / IBM monopoly…

Well if that was the case, why didn’t telstra get the contract ??!! The companies have been bickering and fighting for so long and provided no real reasonable answers. The government steps in and gives em all a kick in the proverbial and there is STILL whingers. Sheesh.

If they do deliver and give us 100mbs, that would be great, that’s like the current home network speed. Besides,I don’t think fibre optic would be the bottle neck here anyways.

If they balls it up…..vote em out. (if you feel that strongly about it)

Steady Eddie said :

Interesting that Ruddnet will offer the Net at 100mpbs speed when in South Korea they already have 400mpbs. Rudd is going to spend all this money setting up something which is already redundant. What happens if a whole new delivery method not involving fibre optics is invented while they’re rolling this out? Actually there already is – wireless. In any case this whole exercise will be a waste of money if Conroy succeeds in bringing in Net censorship. Why have superfast Internet when it will be completely throttled and slowed to a snail’s pace by Net censorship?

I think you’re making up that bit about South Korea having 400mbit broadband. Whilst they do indeed have lots of fast broadband, their technologies are not much different to those used elsewhere in the world, like VDSL and HFC:

VDSL2 can come in a flavour that gives 200mbit total bandwidth – note that needs to be divided between up and downstream. Furthermore, it runs on copper whose maximum bandwidth is more-or-less maxxed out by current technologies. If it’s HFC you’re talking about, well that isn’t a private tail (last mile) either – it’s a shared medium, typically maxxing out at 100mbit received (DOCSIS3)

Fibre is being run at 10 and 100 gigabit, with plenty of room for more. The RuddNet would probably be 100mbit to your house, 1 gigabit or even 10gigabit+ from aggregation point back to core.. Nothing stopping future upgrades to give 1 or 10 gigabit to the house.

Then there’s Wireless. I seem to recall reading that maximum theoretical bandwidth of wireless in bits/sec = 2x analogue bandwidth in Hertz (Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem?) So if your wireless provider has 100MHz to operate on, that gives 200Mbit to play with – between EVERYONE in the area. Wireless just can’t compete with fixed line for speed .. it’s shared nature means it never will.

The net censorship isn’t going to happen. It didn’t get up a decade ago, it won’t now.

Steady Eddie said :

Interesting that Ruddnet will offer the Net at 100mpbs speed when in South Korea they already have 400mpbs. Rudd is going to spend all this money setting up something which is already redundant. What happens if a whole new delivery method not involving fibre optics is invented while they’re rolling this out? Actually there already is – wireless. In any case this whole exercise will be a waste of money if Conroy succeeds in bringing in Net censorship. Why have superfast Internet when it will be completely throttled and slowed to a snail’s pace by Net censorship?

ah, then we will all be buying wireless cards from the US. on mail order, from ebay…

Steady Eddie5:14 pm 08 Apr 09

Interesting that Ruddnet will offer the Net at 100mpbs speed when in South Korea they already have 400mpbs. Rudd is going to spend all this money setting up something which is already redundant. What happens if a whole new delivery method not involving fibre optics is invented while they’re rolling this out? Actually there already is – wireless. In any case this whole exercise will be a waste of money if Conroy succeeds in bringing in Net censorship. Why have superfast Internet when it will be completely throttled and slowed to a snail’s pace by Net censorship?

Spideydog said :

I considered TRANSAct for about 1/2 a second when choosing my ISP. I don’t like the idea of paying for their service and then paying for the “other” services. It just seemed stupid. Price competitiveness not all that flash either. Going on some of the sentiment here, my choice was validated.

Bring on “Ruddnet” the other offers must have been pretty crap for all of them to be canned. Good on the government for taking up the slack and doing what the other companies seem not able to deliver (well time will tell anyways !!!! )

good on the government?? I think that you have forgotten who owns Telstra… it is *still* govt owned… and if they have a competing corporation, who wins out of the little players? no-one. it is like a dell / IBM monopoly…

johnboy said :

Much easier to impose a government filter if the government’s controlling all the infrastructure.

Maybe, but it is just as easy to vote em out ……

I considered TRANSAct for about 1/2 a second when choosing my ISP. I don’t like the idea of paying for their service and then paying for the “other” services. It just seemed stupid. Price competitiveness not all that flash either. Going on some of the sentiment here, my choice was validated.

Bring on “Ruddnet” the other offers must have been pretty crap for all of them to be canned. Good on the government for taking up the slack and doing what the other companies seem not able to deliver (well time will tell anyways !!!! )

Keep watching the gambling revenue… that’s the no fooling issue with web filtering.

But we’re getting offtopic now… back to transact and the ruddnet.

The government company controlling the fibre is probably only going to be working at layer 2 at the highest. They won’t be able to filter (which means working at layer 4/7) even if they wanted to.

Hell, half the ISPs in this country aren’t interested in TransProxying (IE, working above layer 3) on web traffic. The ISPs of Australia aren’t lying when they say it’s too hard/expensive to filter.

FYI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model for defintion of “layer”

My theory is this Internet Filter rubbish is so that Labour can say to Family First, well, you promised us preferences at the last election and we promised you something to protect kids on the web. We tried our hardest, we ran a whole filtering trial and all, but it didn’t work.

Much easier to impose a government filter if the government’s controlling all the infrastructure.

But then, what’s the point of creating a super-fast broadband network if you then impose a mandatory filtering system that slows it all back down again? 😛

“Apparently TransACT are right now in the middle of rolling out more fibre (but only to the node)” – not true. New suburbs are getting FTTP.

..

dosomethinguseful said :

would you rather jump on the brand new 100kmph mutli-lane highway?

I will definatley be jumping on that highway (even if it has a toll)

As someone looking to live in Forde in a few months, I can tell you the toll for TransACT FTTH (FTTP, if you like) is rather high. It’s probably due to the fact that there is no copper in the suburb, leaving your choices as TransACT FTTH .. or wireless. TransACT want $55 for ADSL2 speeds, with NO data and a choice of meh ISPs (not including iiNet, who funnily enough have rather expensive TransACT plans – even compared to their ADSL2 plans.) $123 if you’d actually like to be faster than ADSL2+ .. eek!

TransACT are uncompetitive. For the second time in their history, they have already rolled out a technology that the rest of the country is way behind on. For the second time, they’re failing to use that to become market leaders. I’m looking forward to them selling off their fibre, or having a competitor in the street. I’d rather the former, but either way has to be better than today.

TansACT is understandably pissed off that the Govt shifted the gaol posts after TransACT had spent a bucket of money on the tender for a FTTN network, which would probably be a lot like the majority of TransACT’s network. If they wanted FTTP why didn’t they ask for it?

The government didn’t want FTTN or FTTP. What brought the NBN bid on was Telstra declaring they were going to turn the copper network into FTTN, disconnecting maybe 80% of lines from exchanges and connecting them to Telstra-only Nodes. This means that Telstra’s ADSL competitors would lose access to all but 20% of their customers. Which the competitors got upset about and demanded the govt do something.

So, the last govt issued the NBN tender .. and now the current govt has finally realised that FTTH is vastly superior to Fibre-to-400m-from-your-house, and a much better way forward. The FTTH will cost a lot more than the NBN people had in mind, but the bandwidth of Fibre is several orders of magnitude higher than an old copper pair, so it’s worth it.

johnboy said :

In my experience the latency in those japanese connections is quite high though.

For a lot of internet use well configured dial up was actually snappier.

But once you start streaming audio and video it’s out of sight.

You’re saying Japan has high latency, but high throughput (good streaming video.) That doesn’t really make sense .. one usually precludes the other.

Japanese broadband is mostly FTTB – Fibre to the Basement of apartment buildings, or FTTN in less-dense areas. Then from the end of the fibre it’s Japan’s own proprietary flavour of VDSL to the home. VDSL is what TransACT use in Phase 1 areas – it’s just like ADSL, but faster, and has a shorter reach. The latency is just as low, or lower – approx 2 orders of magnitude less latency than dial-up.

Japan is just as physically close to the rest of the internet as Australia, so speed-of-light considerations would have little to do with any latency issues you saw. They’re also better connected with International links than Australia.

My own 1st (and 2nd) hand experiences of Japanese broadband are of low latency and high speed – absolutely nothing like dialup in any regard. I can only suggest you were visiting busy web sites, or using a slow PC. Japan’s broadband is great. Australia’s will be better than Japan’s is now. Hopefully we don’t implement with too many delays or poor quality solution, or theirs might still be way ahead of ours once the FTTH is in!

As far as I’m concerned nothing was set in stone for TransACT. You go to tender knowing it may not be you who wins it. At all stages of the game there was a chance that the contract could have been awarded to Optus (or Telstra) only and that would have caused them the same problems as they now have.

If I where them I’d be more pissed that the government went to Tender, and yet changed their mind to build Ruddnet (BTW Love the name) themselves.

dosomethinguseful2:10 pm 08 Apr 09

Sammy said :

It’s a bit like rolling out a new single-lane road from Canberra to Nelligen, and then the Government comes along and builds a new multi-lane highway from Canberra to Batemans Bay.

Exactly. Would you rather continue driving on that 24kmph(if you’re lucky) single-lane road that was built 20years ago that gets a slight upgrade every now and then?

Or would you rather jump on the brand new 100kmph mutli-lane highway?

I will definatley be jumping on that highway (even if it has a toll)

In my experience the latency in those japanese connections is quite high though.

For a lot of internet use well configured dial up was actually snappier.

But once you start streaming audio and video it’s out of sight.

TransACT are already redundant aren’t they?

Not to those of us trapped in the ADSL black hole that is the north, thanks to Telstra cutting corners when setting up the Crace exchange all those years ago. Transact is the only realistic broadband we can get…

I love the name “Ruddnet”, by the way. Even if I think the whole thing is a farce and will be stuffed up beyond belief. Bringing Australia into line with places like Japan, were they practically give away 50mbps connections? Hah…

I don’t believe the costing of this scheme. It will end up as a huge money pit. Australian governments have trouble running themselves, let alone businesses.

When it is up and running will it be able to compete with existing infrastructure that will be able to cherry pick customers and provide services to those not needing high speed? Will it be carrying the extra burden of providing services to country areas or will the taxpayer be expected to pick that up?

Holden Caulfield1:24 pm 08 Apr 09

TransACT are already redundant aren’t they?

I remember looking into them a few years ago when we moved to inner North. They sent someone out, who expected me to sign on the spot. Assuming I did sign up, it was going to take a further six weeks for someone to come and see if they actually could connect our house to their service (non-existant roof access, solid internal walls were posing some problems). If they could, they advised it would be another 3-4 weeks to have us connected.

Three days later Internode had sent me an ADSL modem and I was online.

Even then, Internode’s basic ADSL speeds were better than TransACT (IIRC), now with ADSL2+ how does TransACT even compete in the suburbs that can get ADSL2+ (yeah I know there’s not many)?

It’s a bit like rolling out a new single-lane road from Canberra to Nelligen, and then the Government comes along and builds a new multi-lane highway from Canberra to Batemans Bay.

dosomethinguseful said :

TransACT should just sell their current fibre to Rudd to be part of his NBN with the condition that get paid to complete the full FTTH rollout to the ACT.

Something very similar to that is exactly what will happen

dosomethinguseful12:59 pm 08 Apr 09

TransACT should just sell their current fibre to Rudd to be part of his NBN with the condition that get paid to complete the full FTTH rollout to the ACT.

I don’t think TransACT will be redundant – as the infrastructure they already have in place will be able to do the same job….won’t it?

It just means that they can bid to roll it out in the ‘burbs that they haven’t already got to…

V twin venom12:29 pm 08 Apr 09

Perhaps the new Ruddnet will be able to provide what TransACT can’t. Service.

Good riddance I say. Their business model doesn’t work, they’re plans are uncompetitive, they certainly can’t run an ISP (Grapevine).

Bring on the Ruddernet.

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