Faster, stronger Seabreeze, here is how -

Sorry, yes the benefits of the NBN, according to the NBN are clearly stated in a meaninful buisness case and are :

'Substantially improved business productivity and global connectivity'

With the specifics listed as :

'Areas to benefit directly include:

E-health - electronic delivery of secure health information and services will result in better and more efficient health care.
E-education - educational institutions will publish materials online, students and teachers will better collaborate, remote students will be more connected and researchers will have the world at their fingertips.
Smart infrastructure - networked infrastructure using sensors and communication technologies to better utilise and sustain resources.
Government - more efficient government processes and online services'

Now, the specifics here bear no relationship to the general. None of the specific benefits have anything to do with business. Great advertising blurb I am sure, but I am not convinced it is great value, and at $43 billion it needs to be good value.

And, remember we are talking faster here, not access vs no access, how is faster internet going to mean more efficient on-line governemnt services ? Why downloading your e-tax in 2 seconds instead of 6 going to be a more efficient tax department ? NBN won't improve tax department computer processing speed. What government on-line service will be more efficient with faster internet, and if any are $4.3 billion more efficent per year just because of faster internet then they must be pretty inefficient at the moment.

$43 billion, the most amount of cash in real terms that has even been spent by the Australian Government on any project.

So, providing the infrastructure for private business to supply fast internet is the most important thing a Government can do for its citizens ?

My internet seems plenty fast enough at the moment and I’m with Mark, Carantoc etc. in terms of how important it is to me to have it faster. But, assuming we do need faster internet I just find it really hard to accept that having a physical connection between virtually every house in Australia is the best way to go about it. Chances are it’s because I don't understand the issue fully so please educate me. My very non-technical understanding of it goes like this...

NBN will give me say 1GB/s. Telstra reckon they can give me 20MB/s via Next G (i.e. wireless). So comparing the as-yet-unavailable NBN to wireless I’m 50 times better off (ignoring latency issues) with fibre.

But, wireless takes nothing more than a little plastic modem that I plug into my PC. Fibre requires people to go around physically laying a cable that joins every house across one of the least densely populated countries in the world. So, if I can get 50MB/s from 1 modem, can’t I get fibre speeds by plugging 50 wireless internet thingos into my PC and running them simultaneously (okay – I realise that wouldn’t actually work as the technology stands, not least of which being the fact that I don’t have 50 USB sockets on my pc, but the point remains valid doesn’t it)?

So, 50 x Next-G modems at today’s money – maybe $5000 if I bought them from my local shop. However if I was the Australian government buying 50 for every person I reckon I could arrange a bulk discount. Even without a bulk-buy discount, the cost of these things is only going to get cheaper (my first 128kb USB memory stick was about $100, I’d struggle to find such a small one these days but assume it would be about $5 if I could). And the technology only ever gets better (so by the time NBN is built won’t wireless be significantly faster than the current 20MB/s). But isn’t the cost of getting fibre installed only going to get more expensive? And for a technology that can’t evolve (or at least not with the certainty that wireless technologies will)?

Even if my theory of using more wireless modems to get more speed is stupid (although I’m standing by it at this stage!!), wouldn’t we be better of investing a 10th of the NBN cost to develop faster wireless with reduced latency that would then be infinitely scaleable and would be IP Australia could sell elsewhere? Then, those that need the extra speed would have access to it at an additional but reasonable cost, while the 95% (I made that stat up) of us that have speeds that are already more than fast enough can continue as we are.

I’m happy to accept that there are probably fundamental flaws in my logic – please educate me.

I'm by no means an expert on this but I have a very basic understanding and I'll attempt to impart what I have learnt in layman terms.

I'm not sure if you guys have ever been to a big rock concert, event or out on New Years Eve, or tried making a call on your mobile during some sort of localised emergency, but if you have, you would know that wireless systems have limited capacity. When the system reaches it's limited capacity the signal dies. Because of this physical limitation, I don't believe wireless could ever become a serious alternative to hard wiring.

The copper system we have now was designed for voice and it does a good job of that, however, it too has bandwidth limitations. Fibre optics has 1000x the capacity of copper at far greater distances. I think that's why Tony Windsor came to his conclusion "you do it once, you do it right and you do it with fibre".

I believe it's both of those things. Although I do understand that during such events Telstra add more access points but in my experience it's a lost cause. Maybe someone else can help me out on this one.

Think of bandwidth as water. Wireless technology is like a garden hose, copper is like a big pipe and fibre is like a tunnel. I don't think adding more taps is as cost effective to just building a big fat tunnel.

10-4 over and out

so we should have the slowest broadband out of the lot. we are the most sparsely populated, and geographically largest and spread out country there is.

The cost of hooking everyone up is huge, and the population isn't there to pay for it. South korea has fast internet - so what. look at how many people there are to how small a country. if you live in the middle of nowhere you should have slow internet.

Building the network now will probably cost more than building a comparable network in the future. However building the network in the future will mean we miss out on the benefits such a network could bring till its built.

I don't think we are disussing a zero sum gain argument here, where spending money on something means there is no money to spend on something else.

The money that would be allocated to build the NBN would not necessarily be spent on roads or hospitals or whatever. Money will be spent on these areas of probably around the same amount if the NBN was to be built or not.

On the other hand if the NBN is not built then its arguable that more money will have to be spent on other government services. If telecommuting is unworkable then more people have to drive to work, thereby requiring more money to be spent on roads and probably more money spent dealing with car accidents.

A similar argument could be put towards health and education. Where the money spent of a fast network will reduce costs for industries using the network.

Its true that a lot of money is proposed to be spent on this network. However the federal government spends a lot of money on other things too, some of which really have little benefit to the community.

A pretty strong argument could be mounted against the need of having our defence forces set up the way they are now, and thereby save billions upon billions of dollars.

A lot of people have mentioned telecommuting. But the reality is that the applications that a faster internet speeds would be put to probably haven't even been thought up yet.

I mentioned VOIP earlier. Just 10 years ago the idea probably didn't even exist. Maybe 5 years ago it was feasible but difficult to do. Now there are companies that exist just to provide that technology. They employ people, pay taxes and so on.

The bottom line is that if we're not in the game then we'll be left behind. Yet again we'll be importing those new technologies, not exporting them.

Yeah, have to agree with you on that one, cisco. Sadly that seems to be the way it works these days.