Hi, it's HandyAndy Tech Tips here, and American internet's been getting some bad publicity
lately.
One of the main issues seems to be net neutrality, which - along with bad customer service - has
plagued certain ISPs.
(You know who I'm talking about.)
But another problem seems to be speed, or rather the lack of it.
Most Americans have a choice of only a couple of companies that will provide a broadband
service to them.
It could be Verizon, TimeWarner or Comcast.
The fact that they operate in such a concentrated market - it's almost like an oligopoly - means
that there's barely any competition for them, and they have no incentive to upgrade to new
technologies - such as fibre optic cable.
So, what's the solution?
Well, some people have suggested a publicly owned network, like the one that's been rolled
out in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Wait a minute, wait, wait before you do that, that might not be such a good idea.
You see, I live in Australia, and here we've got something called the National Broadband
Network - NBN for short.
And its rollout has been a bit of a disaster.
You see, back in 2009, the Australian Government set up NBN Corporation, which was to construct
a $43 billion fibre optic broadband network promising speeds of 100 megabits per second
now, and up to 1 gigabit per second in the future.
At the time, this announcement was remarkable!
I mean, even today the average download speed is only 8.2 megabits per second, mainly due
to our reliance on ADSL2+ from an old copper network, some of which was installed at the
beginning of last century.
And it's not in particularly good shape!
Here are some photos that have been posted on the website Delimiter, and... wow, look
at that, you can see that's a very temporary fix that one.
A lot of this stuff looks like it's just been patched up with garbage bags and whatever
they had lying around, it's quite shocking.
So it's generally agreed that a new network is needed for the future, but just how to
go about implementing it is a bit of a point of contention.
The original plan was to install a fibre line to each home, but this was met with many problems,
from the enormous cost of it to unexpected things, like the disturbance of asbestos in
old phone pits where the new cables were being routed through.
So the entire thing quickly became a political issue, and by the time a new government was
voted in - in 2013 - the new plan called for fibre to the node.
The basic idea is that labour cost - get the pun?
- can be reduced by installing cabinets on street corners, called nodes, running the
fibre to them, and then letting the existing copper infrastructure run the rest of the
way.
But the controversy continues!
Despite the promise of a cheaper and faster rollout, uptake has been sluggish.
And interestingly, so have the speeds!
Even though an 100 megabit per second "theoretical maximum" is often claimed, this has been known
to drop to 8, or 5, or - in one case - even 1 megabit per second in periods of peak usage.
This is mainly the fault of independent ISPs who buy their bandwidth from government owned
NBNCo, and obviously, they haven't been buying enough for the number of customers that they're
supposed to be servicing.
And meanwhile, the cost - which, obviously for a government run project, is incurred
by the taxpayer - keeps increasing.
Originally, our current government's proposal for a multi-technology mix - which includes
some nodes, some fibre, and some wireless - was to cost a total of $29.5 billion.
But then, a little bit later, it was revised to $41 billion, and most recently, it went
up to a grand total of $56 billion.
So, regrettably, this is the story of Australia's NBN.
Overhyped, overpriced and always overly political, it's a perfect example of what happens when
the public sector tries to intervene, and gets it horribly wrong.
Anyway, I'm HandyAndy and I really hope you enjoyed this video.
I hope that you appreciate the broadband service in your own country a little bit more after
watching it, and as always, please subscribe to my channel.