Friday 15 June 2012

Why Australia needs fibre and the NBN

Nick Ross looks at a report from Cisco in NBN stats: Australia's broadband future and why the Coalition's alternative 'won't work':
The world's foremost internet traffic study and growth forecast, which historically has been proven very accurate, describes a further explosion of internet traffic around the world and in Australia. The findings illustrate a requirement for fibre optic cable "deep deep into the infrastructure" both for wired and wireless broadband connections.
Ross also writes:
Speaking at a recent VNI announcement was Dr Robert Pepper, Cisco's Vice President of Global Technology Policy. He has sat on the board of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the USA and currently sits on the UK's equivalent, Ofcom. In these roles he briefs governments and network operators from around the world on infrastructure, what to expect from future data requirements and modes of broadband usage based upon traffic stats and growth curves. He is an American based in the USA and has no dealings with Australian politics. Some of the key points he made were:-
  • That all roads point to the requirement of optic fibre being implemented deep into both wired and wireless networks.
  • The future is indeed wireless, but it's mostly WiFi and not 4G.
  • Wireless technologies need to be primarily methods of connecting to nearby fibre networks.
  • That Australian mobile networks will soon have to join the US and UK in offloading data onto local WiFi networks in order to avoid congestion.
  • That a 4G mobile user uses 28x more data than a 3G user.
  • That new wireless spectrum needs to be opened up as quickly as possible to cope with growth.
  • That as much wireless traffic as possible needs to be seamlessly offloaded onto the wired networks to avoid congestion.
  • There is a huge increasing requirement for low-latency data transfer and high upload speeds.
  • That a fibre to the node infrastructure which relies on a 'last mile' premises connection using Australia's current copper infrastructure, current HFC networks or fixed 4G-like wireless won't have the symmetry, contention ratio, bandwidth or latency to keep up with demand by 2016.
  • That fibre needs to be very nearby every internet connection whether wired or wireless.

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