The NBN Co has not undertaken any demonstrations to show Australians what kind of speeds are needed to get good response times when streaming videos, because to do so would show the inadequacy of the technology being used, a network expert says.
Mark Gregory (right, below), an associate professor in network engineering at RMIT University, told iTWire in response to queries that he had witnessed a demonstration at Chorus, the company that is building an FttP network in New Zealand.
He said to avoid buffering at the start of a stream, and when fast-forwarding or rewinding, one needed quite fast speeds: about 100Mbps.
The same point was made by former NBN chief Mike Quigley on Tuesday, when he told iTWire during an interview: "Chorus have a neat demonstration that shows that to get good response times for rewind and fast forward when streaming high-definition content, you need quite high peak speeds (around 100Mb/s).
{loadposition sam08}"The Chorus FttN network has a very broad distribution of peak speeds across the different length lines. I have not seen NBN Co provide the distribution of peak speeds achievable on the FttN lines they have so far connected. It would be an interesting plot to see."
Gregory, who visited New Zealand last week along with Quigley, said the kind of speeds needed to avoid buffering - which could prove to be awfully annoying - would be generally available only to those who had FttP connections.
"There are many cases where people who have taken FttN connections are getting just a fifth of the speed for which they have signed up," he said. "This is because of the copper that is carrying the signal for the last so many metres."
Like Quigley, Gregory did not hold out any hope that the Australian rollout could be salvaged. The only solution was to spend enormous sums soon after the rollout was completed — which he said would be in 2020 or 2021 — and then start the process of putting in fibre to the home.
He pointed out that in New Zealand, the programme to roll out the FttN network was supposed to be between 2009 and 2011. "Chorus completed a FttN rollout by December 2012 to towns and cities with more than 500 telephone lines," he said.
Now it was being upgraded to FttP, a logical process. In Australia, the FttN was undertaken at a time when only FttP should have been considered.
Gregory said this could have been avoided if Telstra had been split into wholesale and retail divisions as Telecom was in New Zealand. "So when the wholesale division started out on FttP, they had an income stream from the existing FttN and there was no pressure to build up profits," he said.
He said Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had proved he had no knowledge of technology, "not even the role that technology can play in boosting business. And yet, he is being painted as some kind of technological guru".
Gregory agreed that there could never be a decent broadband network in Australia unless politicians stopped treating it as an ideological issue.