NBN: Political pressure. When facts aren't facts.

I got a long (2200wds), unpleasant letter from a Turnbull staffer objecting to a recent piece I'd written.
If it had cited facts, data or errors-in-logic, you'd be getting a post about that with retractions as necessary.
I'm more than a little concerned at what I read implies: these people are binary - "you're for us or against us" and they can do no wrong, in their own eyes, whilst everybody else is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Do they understand "Democracy" and all that implies? The need for respecting other viewpoints and allowing expression of opposing ideas... Apparently they've met with God, personally, and are transmitting The One True Word, so the rest of us are Infidels, Heritics or Ignorant Savages.

Here's what he thinks of me and what I write, I'm interested in reader opinions and comments as well:

NBN: Noalition Maths - an FTTN can't Break Even.

Using Coalition figures for a VDSL/FTTN, an FTTN won't break-even within 10 years.
It needs to make a profit of $250/year on revenues of $360 and raw costs of at least $125: the Maths fail.

NBN: Turnbulls' Triple Tax - DSL Out of Pocket expenses are the Coalition sting in the tail.

The Coalition has been very silent on one of its biggest and most invasive change to the NBN:

Every DSL-NBN subscriber is going to be saddled with three unavoidable out-of-pocket expenses. All in-house cabling changes have to be done by a registered cabler, it's NOT DIY. You may go on e-Bay and buy a $50 VDSL modem, but it won't work.

NBN: Cost-Effective vs Cost-Efficient. What's what and Who Pays?

Mr Turnbull abhors meaningless terms that are undefined and ambiguous: they can be "spun" and easily manipulated for Political Purposes. Here's what he had to say on the topic in the ZDnet/Our Say Debate with Senator Conroy:

Now as far as the overall issue today is concerned I agree that diversity is absolutely critical.
I don’t agree with a public interest test, it’s interesting to see that Stephen Conroy wants to revive it so that will obviously be a policy going into the next election but I oppose a public interest test because it is completely ambiguous.
It is totally political test, everyone will have a different view on it.

In light of this, why the contradiction in the Coalition NBN rhetoric, liberally peppered with "Cost Effective"?

NBN: When does the NBN Rollout reach "statistically significant" size?

When there's a "statistically significant" sample of households using the NBN, we'll have good data to forecast demand and maybe price-points. We know from the various (political) polling organisations that the demographics of Australian population and householders are very well understood.

With 20,000 households already signed up, are we close now to a 1% error margin?

NBN: The NBN Co business model - who really subsidises others.

There are two counterfactual memes, or wrong Urban Myths, running around:

• Why should I pay for something, like the NBN, that others will get the most benefit from?
• My connection is just fine, why should I care about the NBN, I don't need it?

Early users, especially those signed up for high-speed (100Mbps & 1Gbps), pay higher rates and they subsidise the rest of us, not the other way around.

At 30% growth rate in download volume, the conservative ABS figure used by NBN Co, every 32 months data download doubles. Instead of paying twice as much, users will only pay 14.6% more. That's a really good deal, I wish I could have that for petrol and electricity as well.

NBN Co intends to halve volume use charges every 4 years: for each 30% growth in traffic, they'll drop the price-per-GB by 19%.

It's not been spelled out clearly anywhere I've seen, and is even given prominence, as a negative, in the Coalition NBN policy on the main page of their policy. When it is in fact, exceptional value for money: a three thousand-fold decrease in $$/GB.

NBN: Fibre cheaper than Copper Two-Step when better estimates used.

If better estimates are used, the lower cost of maintaining Fibre makes it cheaper at 8 or 9 years (6 in absolute dollars), making it the preferred solution, financially and technically.

A comparative spreadsheet of Net Present Value (NPV) of Copper (Cu) vs Fibre Optic (FO), using Discount Rates of 0% (raw $ amounts) and 6%,7% & 8% and replacing Copper with Fibre: never, 5 years, 10 years and 15 years.
I don't attempt to model inflation, nor include Revenue. These effects cancel each other out in comparisons. This is meant to be a "first-order", not detailed calculation.

NBN: Noalitionomics - Numbers don't add up

The Coalition NBN Policy fails a simple Maths check: they cannot only invest $20.4 billion.
On their own figures, it's at least $25.25 billion.

This is on top of the "rent not buy" boondoggle that swaps $8.5 billion Telstra payments into rental, not CapEx, taking the whole project cost to $31.25 billion.

If you add unavoidable new householder costs of $450-$1,000/premise, the real Whole Project cost is $3-$6 billion more, $34.5-$37.5 billion.

Pushing costs from "the taxpayer" onto "taxpaying subscribers" isn't just cynical in the extreme, its deliberately "playing semantics".

NBN: Coalition Fine Print - 1.1M houses WONT get 25Mbps.

When is a guarantee not a guarantee? When it's a Political statement.

The "minimum" guaranteed speed excludes one in seven (13%) premises covered by the Coalition's DSL-FTTN: or 1.1M premises will be "NOT happy, Mal!"

While the "target" is 10%, that's across all 11.3M fixed-lines, including the 24% premises served by Fibre. The 1.1M excepted premises will all come from the 8.968M premises covered by FTTN.

NBN: Another cowardly, despicable attack by Turnbull.

Yesterday, James Brotchie joined me as the target of one of Mr Turnbull's obnoxious, unjustified spew-fests. A tirade of vilification and a torrent of abuse.

This cowardly bullying against private citizens who dare express an opinion in public contrary to the Earl of Wentworth is a mark of the man. It's not respectful nor justified. It's two hours of venom-filled writing, lashing out at anyone he deems "an opponent".

Get over yourself, Malcolm. You put your pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us.
You stepped into the ring to play politics, the rest of us haven't. Don't  confuse the players with the crowd, you know, the ones that will vote for you. Or increasingly, not.

The Internet is a democracy, the ultimate "City Hall" meeting. People are going to say stuff you don't like. Get over it. Grow a pair and learn some good rejoinders for the inevitable hecklers.

This is not your precious courtroom where you get to lord it over hapless victims of your razor-sharp tongue and incisive wit. Well, the one you wish you had.

NBN: Decoding Turnbull - We're building this to throw away in 2022.

The ZDnet Comms Debate on Monday (transcript) led by the inestimable Josh Taylor yielded for me two policy points and a separate tirade another:

• The ADSL/VDSL FTTN is PPPoE not direct "layer 2 bitstream" using VLANs and Multicast, important for two reasons:
• While it allows "no visit" conversion, it quite cynically and brutishly pushes a bunch of costs onto the householder: Install VDSL Central Line-splitter (certified cabler), upgrade modem (DIY).
• It denies householders access to the most powerful and interesting NBN feature: Multicast. Necessary for cheap and ubiquitous broadcast Video. If you want that feature that comes included with GPON,Wireless and Satellite, it'll cost you, direct or indirectly, another $400-$1,000 to have the device supplied and installed by a certified cabler, not DIY. Not in a mass, lowest-cost rollout, but the highest-cost alternative: one-off full price retail. 

• The node distance rule is 800m, or close to it, meaning around 68,000 nodes.

• The Coalition NBN Plan is to fully replace the Copper C.A.N. and the FTTN by 2022.
• "But even if you assumed that you needed to upgrade in 10 years time, what you are saving in that intervening 10 years is all of that capital which you’re not going to get a return on. 

NBN: Why I write.

I write these blog entries for myself, to explore and explain topics that don't make sense to me or I think haven't been dealt with elsewhere. I'm not attempting to be a journalist or convince people of any Point of View. I'm not Pro-Fibre or Anti-FTTN, despite what people have read into my pieces. I've written recently that BOTH political options are severely sub-optimal, that the rancourous debate and vilification doesn't just not progress the debate, it starves the real debate of attention: what's the actual demand? What will people pay? What's an optimal change strategy over 10, 20 and 50 years?

I'm not paid, I don't derive income from the blog, I've no political affiliations (in fact, don't have political views that are fixed or easily categorised), I'm not seeking fame, fortune or influence. If others find value in what I write, I'm pleased and flattered. If they disagree, they're welcome to refute my arguments in their own pieces.

NBN: simple stats on debate

Stats of the Comms debate from this transcript, supplied by Turnbull:
If either speaker claims "I wasn't heard" or "not given time".
I didn't look for interruptions, being talked over or "can I have a go".

NBN: Can vectoring work on Turnbull's FTTN?

Turnbull made an important point about his FTTN deployment yesterday:

Your existing ADSL modem is still going to work. [However, to get higher speeds, you'll need to buy a VDSL2 modem.]

 This tells us a whole lot about what the Turnbull-FTTN can and cannot do:

NBN: Gen-Y/Millennials need to step-up and make their voices heard.

Josh Taylor of ZDnet conducted a 45-minute "Communications Debate" between Conroy and Turnbull today. He did a splendid job with a couple of unruly protagonists not out of place in a kindergarden.
My praise and plaudits to Josh: well done, conceiving and carrying out this head-to-head.

The most reported part of the "Debate" was when Conroy got under Turnbull's skin and was called "a grub".

NBN: Multicast - is it the secret sauce for Broadband take-up?

A good piece by Dom Wright about on-Demand TV in Australia, links iTunes, Spotify, Netflix and other live-streaming services with the pirating wars of 10 years ago. When the content gatekeepers dropped the price barriers and gave us "just works, anywhere", very predictably on-line paid usage has soared. Wright argues that he'd like an "all you can eat, infinite choice" (low) fixed price rental service here.

See my previous piece on this topic as well.

NBN: Lies, Damned Lies and Spreadsheets.

The Coalition haven't updated their with the figures recently released by NBN Co. Too busy? No, Turnbull & team released 22 Dorothy Dixer's. What's their game? It's definitively not about being "open & transparent", nor about remotely approaching the truth...

The figure at the heart of the outrageous ~$100 billion prediction has always been bogus, as any competent and straight analyst would know. When does political spin become deliberate deception and falsehoods?

Turnbull/Abbot have had ample time to correct or withdraw their wildly incorrect figures. To leave them, and their bogus spreadsheets, out there at some point "crosses the line" and becomes much more than "spin", it's acting in Bad Faith, directed at bringing the political process into disrepute.

NBN: Both Politically defined solutions are wrong.

It's trivial to show that both NBN designs are sub-optimal: both proposals could be much better, but they each side is locked into "Our Way or Nothing".

There is massive risk, upside and downside, in constructing an NBN stemming from:

• unknown consumer demand and demand elasticity, and
• unknown consumer willingness-to-pay.

To personalise the problem:

What if you threw a massive party, say a wedding, and nobody came, or everybody comes? Either way, you're in big trouble.

NBN: Why Fibre?

In answer to "Why do you think Fibre is better than Copper for 'last mile' connections?"

Short version:

Fibre was born Digital, like Ethernet over cat-5 copper. DSL fakes digital onto low-spec phone wiring with modems.

NBN: Sanity checking the Coalition forecasts. Can't do it.

I've worked on and off for the last 2 weeks on reverse engineering the Coalition spreadsheets on the projected financials for their hybrid FTTP/FTTN NBN.

The spreadsheets finish at 2019 whilst the commentary includes claims until 2021.
Senator Conroy, DBCDE and NBN Co haven't published anything on this, so I'll follow suit.