Making Sense Of Information For National Broadband Network

The Coalition’s Plan

Discuss about the Making Sense of Information for National Broadband Network.

The National Broadband Network (NBN) has issued some of the public policy and few of them were subject to very complex nature and confounding. However, to understand the viewpoint from which this issue evolved it is necessary to have a look at the historical framework of the country. It first started with the creation of the idea of high speed internet that was first came into the picture on 2007 before the election (Beltrán 2013). It was considered that the project will cost around $15 billion and less than one third of the total projected cost will come from the government. There were six bidders who expressed their interest in building up the network and put forward their proposals as well. However, the government rejected the proposal of Telstra and later cancelled the request for proposal process entirely. After certain time in the year 2009 the government of Australia decided to build this high speed internet network on its own and thereby abandon the traditional copper internet network (Costa and Miller 2013). The new network will be built base on the optical fibre technologies. In has also been projected that more than 90 percent of the houses and business buildings will have these fibres to the premises cables (FTTP) which will be directly connected to their home. The implementation of fibre to the premises cables will allow the users to use internet with speed up to 100 Mbps. At this point of time a government based corporation was set up that is the NBN Co and by the end of the year the estimated cost of the cable was $43 billion (Daly 2016). The construction of the national broadband network at the national level and the project can be scaled as a project of freeways and railways. As the government initially stated that most of the homes will have the fibres to the premises network however after election this plan just changed and the new coalition government planned to establish a new fibre network that will be cheaper and can be built more rapidly and also be able to provide high speed internet with the existing framework (Darling et al. 2013)

The coalitional plan as implemented by the government of Australia, stipulates that it will establish a fibre to node in most of the regions of the country while also use the copper telephone cables as ADSL is being used nowadays or to use TV hybrid coaxial cables for connecting internet to the houses (Dias et al. 2014).

The Labor’s Plan

Here arises a political issue that is the course of Malcolm Turnbull that uses a perfect combination of technologies that will help the economy as well as the government to save costs although this plan has been criticized on various grounds, such as it may provide inferior results and it has also been observed that the plan is very short sighted (Iannone et al. 2013).

On the other hand, if the labour wins the government they have promised that they will definitely revert back to the original model as it was proposed originally by the party. The original model was based on the principle that it will connect houses and businesses to the internet by running fibre optic cables to them (Madden and Ahmad 2015). The plan as proposed by the labour was though will provide higher bandwidth with higher speed it is extremely labour intensive and at the same time it is quite expensive as well. However, the party of Mr Shorten has proposed to provide optical fibre connection to more than two million extra houses at the same cost in the coalition’s network.

The labour party first came into the scene in the year 2009, then the party proposed to implement fibre to the premises framework to 93 percent of the houses and businesses in Australia and the party hoped that this will provide the country with a strong technological support. It has been observed that the fibre to the premises framework provides download speed of 100 megabites per second and it can reach up to 1 gigabyte per second. However, the average speed of internet in Australia in 43 megabites per second and it has lead the country to rank 56^th in the world in the context of internet speed. Kevin Rudd came up with the proposal to implement this plan to the NBN and the proposed price of the project was 19 billion dollar (Middleton and Park 2014). However, for such a project this price tag was quite surprising and at the end costs increased and the price tag ballooned to 43 billion dollars. Coalition won in the election of 2013 as a communication minister. After coming to power Malcolm Turnbull promised to complete this project as soon as possible and that too at the cost 15 billion lower than the price projected (Morsillo and Barr 2013).

Now, the new government compelled the National Broadband Network to withdraw the fibre to the premises network and instead they used a cheaper “multi technology mix”. This framework was more dependent over the hybrid fibre coaxial and copper networks, this was owned by Telstra and Optus. These companies were ordered to make connection to the home finally (Park et al. 2015).

Summarizing the Discussion

The coalition was aimed at providing broadband internet to the houses and the businesses at a lower cost such as at the price of telephone. The main difference between the plan of Colaition and the Labor is that the Labor’s plan was more expensive. These costs will be accrued from the users and this in turn will raise the price of internet (Ranaweera et al. 2013). Under the plan of Coalition the more efficient and effective investments will keep the prices always at a lower level and it also ensures that the regular users will definitely be able to save nearly 300 dollars in a year by the year 2021 on their bill for broadband when compared with the plan proposed by Labor (Tucker 2013).

In the Coalition plan there will be no rental for the line of National Broadband Network irrespective of the type of connection. It may be fibres to the node or fibres to the premises in all the cases there will be no rental (Watkins and Lillingstone-Hall 2014). However, there was a rumour that Australians will have to pay 5000 dollars for the internet connection, but this was another lie told by the Labor about the broadband in the claim the Labor claimed that connecting to the Labor NBN is completely free (Wilken et al. 2015). The basic fact is that whether it is a Labor NBN or a more effectively and efficiently managed and more sophisticatedly designed Coalition NBN, in both the cases the consumers will have to pay a rental to the service provider, in order to have an active connection to the National Broadband Network (Wilken et al. 2013).

As per the Coalition NBN, it ensures that the residents of Australia will be provided with a high speed internet by the year 2016 and everybody will be able to access at least 25 megabites per second. The 25 megabites per second will be the fixed speed for satellite and the static wireless services, it will serve as the floor speed for the Coalition’s plan and then most people will be able to access speed of 50 megabites per second or more (Wilken et al. 2015).

This decision taken by the party and the National Broadband Network is termed as the colossal mistake. The copper network in action comes out to be a far worse network than it was predicted to be and there were certain need to upgrade this framework. The fibres to the node model (FTTN) that connects the copper wires with the fibres at the boxes which are positioned at the street corners were also criticized.

Speech

Now in order to summarize the discussion it can be said that the debate between the Coalition and the Labor is a legitimate one. However, the fibre to the premises framework is far more better that that of the fibre to the node framework (Wilson 2014). The FTTP network though expensive it will provide a very high speed and this will ensure that the schools, educational institutions, hospitals and other business houses along with the residential buildings will be able to access high speed internet. On the other hand, the paying for a connection as pointed out by the Labor party is a classic spin. When it is anticipated that the areas in the country which will be served by FTTN the speed of internet on those areas will be more than adequate. However, there is a possibility to run the fibre networks in the areas where there are connections served by node technology. However, the framework proposed by Coalition is more users friendly as it will cost lower and the cost associated with this network will also be lower. Hence the proposals put forward by the Coalition is somehow seem to be more acceptable to the users and the speed provided by this network can also expected to improve in near future.

I have been quite humbled to receive this particular responsibility of writing a brief, albeit important report regarding the Fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) policy of government. I have been designated to detail the challenges as well as benefits of the current policy through the respective report. I have been focused on finding out the necessary evidence for the effectiveness of this particular agenda. In the context of approaching this particular issue, I have acquired basic idea of FTTP technology as well as its various applications. Next, I have been focused on defining the exact nature of government policy along with its expectations. This way I have been able to identify the exact expectation from me and eventually attempted to analysis the policy with critical precision.

In the beginning, I have been highly uncertain if I would be able to provide the report within the time. I also started to doubt my ability to produce the report effectively that will suffice governments’ expectation. The sheer responsibility began to stress me, as the effectiveness of the report would define the future of the entire policy. In this context, I contemplated whether I could find out the most important benefits and specifically the challenges so that the coalition party would be able to properly design the policy. However, in order to start the report I started to study the technological function of the FTTP so that I can identify the intricate benefits and challenges. This studying helped to overcome my confusion and doubt regarding my abilities. With the increasing understanding, I started to gain greater confidence and pathway to complete the report impressively.

During the study, I came to know that major framework for analyzing any policies is narrative model. This framework consisted of several steps, which are collecting the information of FTTP, reviewing the application of the FTTP from the past, discussing with the knowledgeable person effectively assisted me to identify the major benefits as well as challenges of the policy. I have extensively collected the information from various published literature on the topic of FTTP. The information has been highly helpful as it provided a greater knowledge and skills for analyzing the policies with a greater efficiency. Moreover, I have been able to review the application of FTTP from the past and their results. The past experience effectively point out various effective FTTP activities and major strong points of the policy. I have also consulted with various knowledgeable people in order to crosscheck my understanding regarding the benefits and challenges regarding the FTTP policies.

The project has been highly significant for my career as I have been able to learn a lot from this particular report construction. This particular project has been able to provide an evaluated understanding regarding the FTTP policy. In addition to that, the project has been able to provide a clear depth in my ability to use various tools in policy analysis properly. In this context, my confidence as well as communication skills have been significantly improved that would immensely help me in the future. 

Reference List:

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Costa, J. and Miller, M., 2013. Another great wonder of the world? Early experience with high speed broadband. Telecommunications Journal of Australia, 63(1).

Daly, A., 2016. Net Neutrality in Australia: The Debate Continues, But No Policy in Sight. In Net Neutrality Compendium (pp. 141-155). Springer International Publishing.

Darling, P., An, N.B.N., Newell, C. and Tasmania’s, N.B.N., 2013. A flexible upgrade path for the Australian National Broadband Network. NSW, 2013, pp.10-23.

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Park, S., Freeman, J., Middleton, C., Allen, M., Eckermann, R. and Everson, R., 2015, January. The multi-layers of digital exclusion in rural Australia. In System Sciences (HICSS), 2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 3631-3640). IEEE.

Ranaweera, C., Resende, M.G., Reichmann, K., Iannone, P., Henry, P., Kim, B.J., Magill, P., Oikonomou, K.N., Sinha, R.K. and Woodward, S., 2013. Design and optimization of fiber optic small-cell backhaul based on an existing fiber-to-the-node residential access network. IEEE Communications Magazine, 51(9), pp.62-69.

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