John Linton's Personal Musings

John Linton

......look like the the political stunt it always was.

I read this earlier this morning:

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/biz-tech/telstra-doubles-next-g-speeds-in-record-upgrade-20100215-o2bt.html

not in the context of anything wonderful but just as the typical technology advance that is associated with any technology - technologies just keep evolving to meet ever more demanding requirements. It always surprises me that the dummies who comment about wireless broadband seem to have come down in my grandmother's "last shower of rain" in making their comments about how "wireless bandwidth will never be enough for ADSL users" and "wireless speeds will never be enough for ADSL users".

Are they really so ignorant of the development of technology generally, and communications technology in particular, that they have forgotten or have no knowledge of the evolution of data over copper? Have they forgotten that in the very early 1970s that the speed of data transmission was 2400 baud (remember that word usage?...used by Emile Baudot when he was pioneering the development of data transmission in the first years of the 20th century). 2400 is close enough to bits per second which began to replace baud as the bit transfer rate leapt to an incredible 4800 bps in around 1972. Of course by the time 'commercial' internet emerged in the early 1990s the rate had doubled again and throughout the dial up internet 'era' it kept increasing until it was a massive 56 kbps!!!! )f course knowledgeable people were aware of the Bell Labs development by two young engineers in Chicago in around 1992 of commercial modems that could deliver 2 mbps x 2mbps over the same copper lines and had been selling those services to business customers in Australia for over a decade before Telstra finally got around to introducing their super fast residential internet service at a massive 512/128 kbps.

So now residential internet can run over copper at 20 mbps down and 2 mbps up in ideal conditions some 40 years after it began to be used in Australia but the dummies (who may well have come down in the last shower) don't either know anything about wireless technology, don't bother to inform themselves before commenting or are, well, just dummies in every aspect of communications technologies. For those with less than total short term memory loss you will remember that it was only an election ago that Krudd thought promising 12 mbps speeds to 'most' Australians  within 5 years was a pretty amazing election winner. I was one of the few really stupid people who said that wireless would deliver those speeds to a lot more Australian users in a lot shorter time and at no cost to the tax payer. Currently there are something like 3 million wireless broadband users, a fair number in rural and regional areas, paying a lot less than the prices mooted for the 'NBN2'  - well BEFORE THE FIRST 'NBN2' USER HAS BEEN ACTIVATED!

Telstra's  'stunt' announcement today/yesterday is irrelevant other than it illustrates how fast wireless broadband technology is moving and, with the testing of LTE in Australia later this year by both Telstra and Optus how quickly it will continue to move. It is not beyond reasonable possibility that there will be more wireless users than their will be ADSL users before the first 'NBN2' mainland user is activated - and that will have been accomplished without a single tax payer dollar being spent....let alone several tens of billions or whatever the current wild estimate is.

For the nay sayers (who have zero knowledge - just a couple of unattributed sould bites) the 'NBN2' has become a reality before anyone has either costed the build and ongoing maintenance or sorted out how enough customers can be found to make a sensible (non-government subsidised) selling price even vaguely attractive. The amount of column inches printed saying positive things about the viability (financial and commercial) of Krudd's face saving stunt would probably reach from Sydney to Alpha Centauri and back - and every one of those column inches have almost certainly been written by a 'journalist' who hasn't got even the basic understanding of communications technologies or Australia's communications user bases and their requirements and their financial limitations.

What would happen if Krudd spends the future of Australia on a pipe dream network that nobody wanted to use?