Displaying items by tag: Rod Tucker

The Coalition Government's decision to provide fibre connections to about 75% of homes on the NBN, making a total of eight million in all by the end of 2023, has been welcomed by tech experts, but there have been some reservations about what the policy would actually achieve.

As part of our series on the future of the NBN, iTWire had hoped to round off things with the opinions of Communications Minister Paul Fletcher and Shadow Communications Minister Michelle Rowland, the two people who are in a position to actually decide on what the future of the network will be.

Selling the NBN Co to a private entity as a monopoly would be the worst way to ensure that the network is upgraded, a network expert says, adding that if the definition of insanity is to do the same thing repeatedly and expect different results, then privatising NBN Co as a monopoly would definitely qualify.

An academic, who was part of the advisory panel for the NBN for the Labor Party, says Australia is now in a diabolical position as far as its broadband network goes, despite all the self-congratulatory rhetoric about how the network has been delivered on time and how it is holding up under the strain of extra traffic due to people working from home.

Two experienced commentators on Australia's national broadband network, the NBN, have drawn different conclusions from the broadband speed data by Ookla, the company that provides the online Speedtest application for testing download and upload speeds.

A network expert who was associated with the initial stages of the national broadband network rollout has described the working paper issued by the Department of Communications and the Arts on network speeds as "seriously flawed".

Data centre operator NextDC has announced a rise of 32% in its revenue for the first half of 2018, with revenue up to $77.5 million, compared to $58.7 million in the first half of the previous financial year.

Technical experts who have closely followed the rollout of the NBN say Telstra's HFC network will need considerable work done on it to meet the needs of NBN customers.

Two technology experts have proposed a solution to the current NBN mess, whereby customers would pay about the same as they currently do but avoid the congestion and speed issues that have led to a massive rise in the number of complaints.

The head of a Tasmanian retail service provider has taken issue with statements made by Robin Eckermann, an adjunct professor at Canberra University, about CVC pricing and its impact on prices for NBN packages.

Contention ratios alone would not be enough for consumers to make a judgement as to which ISP would provide sufficient bandwidth for their needs, an academic claims.

Networking veterans have cast doubts on assertions made today that the speed woes experienced by customers on the national broadband network could be eradicated if telecommunications companies paid $9.75 per month for each connection.

An academic who was closely associated with the NBN project at its outset claims that the original fibre-to-the-premises proposal would have stimulated "an active competitive retail marketplace that would have forced RSPs to purchase adequate CVC".

Using fibre-to-the-distribution-point technology for the NBN instead of fibre-to-the-node will enable the Turnbull Government to save face and also provide a better network, a senior academic who was involved with the project at its inception says.

Switching the national broadband network to using fibre-to-the-distribution-point technology is an interim solution; the correct solution, which will cost about the same, is to go full fibre.

National Broadband Network chief Bill Morrow has defended the potential of the NBN to deliver very fast broadband services, hitting back at criticism that fibre-to-the-node technology would consign Australia to becoming an “internet backwater.”

The Coalition’s NBN has come under intense attack from the University of Melbourne's Emeritus Professor Rod Tucker who says the broadband network is so slow it is obsolete before it’s in place and Australia has got a “bad deal”.

The Internet of Things is a growing and pervasive influence on all our lives and, according to one global analyst firm, there are already more than 50 billion globally connected sensors that can track, monitor and feed data to computerised systems over the Internet.