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| Tasmania's Great Internet |
| Written by Dave Burstein |
| Thursday, 04 March 2010 15:33 |
 40,000 homes in Hobart, 30,000 in Launceston and 10,000 in each of Burnie and Devonport will soon have a better Internet than Chicago, Houston, Boston or nearly all of Europe. That's about half the homes on the island, with 90% of Australia soon to follow. It's currently GPON, designed for 200-400 megabits but initially selling as 100 megabit. NBN chief Mike Quigley now tells Commsday a gigabit is so cheap he's ready to switch. “There have been questions: ‘what do you need 100Mbps for?’ But when Google made its announcement... suddenly the questions flipped over to ‘100Mbps isn’t enough!’ I wish we had the kind of power, just with an announcement, to suddenly flip from one phase to another. This network we’re building is quite capable of doing 1Gbps, all you’ve got to do is replace some of the electronics. The big costs are in the passive infrastructure; the fibre, the connectors, and the splitters. That’s where all the money is really going. Upgrading the electronics at the end is relatively trivial, which means we can move from existing PON which will be 100Mbps, to four times that capacity using 10Gbps GPON, and then up to WDM for another four times.” The budget for these 90K homes is about US$1,000/home. Given that everything is new, procedures undeveloped, and people need to be trained, that's consistent with the $600-700 figures from Verizon and France. It should come down significantly. The original estimate of $43B (Australian) was twice as high as the current costs. Australia has decided that 10% of the population is too expensive to reach with fiber, but most of the population is urban and suburban and shouldn't be particularly expensive to reach. |