Fiberoptic broadband in Australia

Are you guys aware of this political debate going on in Australia? Apparently if the Labor party (vs. liberal party -their "republicans") wins a few upcoming elections, there will commence a $43 billion dollar plan to install the world's most advanced fiberoptic broadband system in 93% of Australian homes, resulting in 1GB/s connection, for everyone.

So rather than nodes being placed in certain areas, and split into different homes, there will be a fiberoptic node in EVERY home.

It's pretty fascinating. Can you imagine how the internet might change when everyone is 1GB/s? High definition video conferencing, etc.

I should add that one of the big reasons the Labor party is pushing this government-funded project is because Telstra, the continent's primary (and only?) large telecommunication's company, formally owned by the government and made private (!??!), is making plans to adopt and install the technology into homes. Pushing to be made public before a private company has control. There, however, the intranets are censored by the government in Australia.

If the plan goes through, it will take 7-8 years to develop.

Thought I'd share.

More info:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/australia-to-build-31-billion-fiberoptic-broadband-network/15897

Great, now they can all chat roulette and get HD fapping in each and every home!

That does sound awesome actually!
I have a couple facts to contribute. As you mentioned, the Australian internet is censored and also Testrla has plans to tier their entire internet. So you may have a sweet ass 1gb/s fiber optic hook up in your home, but if you want to access social networking sites, that will be 5 dollars, oh news you say? another 5 dollars. Blogs? 5 dollars. sports? 10 dollars please. you get the picture.

I read an article on the internet and it would seem Japan and south korea already offer 1gb/s transfer speed and at a fraction of the price of the fastest United States ISP.

So we have to slack to pick up in the US.

Also, I read another article which suggested the current transatlantic cables will be insufficient to carry the worlds internet needs soon. Especially now considering Australia will be pumping bandwidth out of em. Essentially our tubes will get clogged
Maybe when they go to lay more tubes, there will be some kind of sweet speed upgrade!

Use of Matt Whetzel sad face - $5.00

Agreed.

haha skydiving whetzel is hilarious. Love the expression on his face

I personally think it's a good idea in some countries for the Government to control their nation's bandwidth (mostly the countries that don't promote censoring). Countries that have their bandwidth controlled by the government instead of private companies generally have much, much higher speeds than ones who let telecom companies rule it.

Cloud computing is really the only revolutionary thing that can come from these sort of upgrades that I can really think of. Yeah, HD video conferencing is cool, but important? Nah, not at all. Cloud computing is the definitive future of the Internet and the way we interact with technology, though I do have many problems with it...

From an IT standpoint, it is going to be a very difficult step to secure these clouds as hacks and breaches will be on a whole other level. It's going to take so much more than a good firewall to keep our information safe and uncorrupted as pretty much all of our information systems will be being sent over Internet to these enormous virtual databases. And if a cloud got corrupted? Eesh, don't even wanna think about that.

It's also going to make it very easy to censor the Internets (not intranets, quite different) if all information available to consumers are held in individual clouds.

Anyways, 1GB/s would be insanely awesome to have, but I read the actual article and it's 100Mb/s which is WAY WAY different. 1GB/s means 1 GigaBYTE per second. 100Mb/s mean 100 MegaBITS per second. There are 8 bits in a byte. And 1000 megas in a giga, sooo... Instead of 8000Mb/s (1GB/s) it's only 100Mb/s. Weaksauce. We use a 1Gb/s fiber at work, it's pretty perfect.

It does strike me as ironic that the only conceivable means to an open unregulated internet with super fast speeds is through government regulation

Yeah, kind of the opposite of what an open market is supposed to achieve, but what company wants to spend SHITLOADS of cash to make the Internet faster when they can still charge whatever the hell they want for it when it's shitty :p

"video conferencing is cool, but important? Nah, not at all."

Yeah, I suppose not.

Oh, except for the massive impact it will have in the fields of education, medicine and health, business, law, media relations, and the general public (including the dramatic benefits for deaf and mute individuals).

Newmantopia wrote:Oh, except for the massive impact it will have in the fields of education, medicine and health, business, law, media relations, and the general public (including the dramatic benefits for deaf and mute individuals).

MINIMAL SNARK IN THE GENTLEMEN'S CLUB, PLEASE.

I actually agreed with him. Then it just dawned on me. It's pretty easy to forget about those segments of our society.

I'd have to agree with Jesse on the video conferencing point. Every sci-fi movie I've ever seen has video conferencing. Even the Zerg can video conference with terran and protoss in the starcraft universe.

Seriously though, in the science field video conferencing can be helpful. We <3 meetings.

FaceTime had been massively helpful with the startup of my company.

Started a production company recently, btw.

DopeMasterJFlow wrote:I'd have to agree with Jesse on the video conferencing point. Every sci-fi movie I've ever seen has video conferencing. Even the Zerg can video conference with terran and protoss in the starcraft universe.

Seriously though, in the science field video conferencing can be helpful. We <3 meetings.

Yeah, video conferencing IS awesome, never said it wasn't. It's just that it's been around and implemented for years already. That's why I don't like people to cut my words short :(

Meow wrote:

DopeMasterJFlow wrote:I'd have to agree with Jesse on the video conferencing point. Every sci-fi movie I've ever seen has video conferencing. Even the Zerg can video conference with terran and protoss in the starcraft universe.

Seriously though, in the science field video conferencing can be helpful. We <3 meetings.

Yeah, video conferencing IS awesome, never said it wasn't. It's just that it's been around and implemented for years already. That's why I don't like people to cut my words short :(

Trust me, we haven't experienced video conferencing the way it will be implemented. Right now skype and other available services are shit.

FaceTime is by far the best in the US at the moment. But when HD conferencing becomes ubiquitous and streamlined, we're going to be using it ALL the time. It will not be at all the way we "use" it now.

Is there a FaceTime as a non-phone application? Is the phone application in HD? Doesn't seem like it since it's so limited by bandwidth and a non-HD front facing camera. If there is a FaceTime for the computer, why is it so much better than other ones? If there isn't, I understand that it being on a phone is a big step in video conferencing.

From what I understand, every telescreen in your home will have facetime with direct connections to miniplenty :p

DopeMasterJFlow wrote:Even the Zerg can video conference with terran and protoss in the starcraft universe.

lol, I can't get enough of you pointing this out Jeff.

Meow wrote:Is there a FaceTime as a non-phone application? Is the phone application in HD? Doesn't seem like it since it's so limited by bandwidth and a non-HD front facing camera. If there is a FaceTime for the computer, why is it so much better than other ones? If there isn't, I understand that it being on a phone is a big step in video conferencing.

All good questions, my friend. And the answer is honestly not easy to explain, because it really is more about the experience than anything.

The audio/video quality/framerate (while not HD) is excellent, and the ease of use of FaceTime is fantastic (just call somebody, then press the "FaceTime" key) just murder the annoyance of the laggy, low-res, unreliable Skype experience.

Also, FaceTime is an open protocol, so when it becomes more widely accepted, other services and phones may adopt it. I'm fairly certain they will because of how popular it will be by the time anyone delivers a competitive protocol. How popular? Well, there is an estimate of approx. 10 million FaceTime devices (including the new iPod touches) projected to be sold by the end of year.

I agree that cloud computing is bar far the most important/exciting thing happening in computers, we already see it happening with google (my company uses google apps and gmail and it has helped greatly with the chain of communication around the office) also has enhanced my life with watch it now netflix and pandora radio. Yes security is the biggest issue now with cloud computing but its also becoming one of the fastest growing areas of IT. As the demand for cloud computing grows so will the demand for network security

its just up to society to meet that demand. (maybe we could hire the zerg as network admins??)



WE REQUIRE MORE BANDWITH!!

FaceTime is DoublePlusGood

You kiddin' me, Dave? You think a Zerg network admin could outdo a Protoss network admin? Poppycock!

Newmantopia wrote:

Meow wrote:Is there a FaceTime as a non-phone application? Is the phone application in HD? Doesn't seem like it since it's so limited by bandwidth and a non-HD front facing camera. If there is a FaceTime for the computer, why is it so much better than other ones? If there isn't, I understand that it being on a phone is a big step in video conferencing.

All good questions, my friend. And the answer is honestly not easy to explain, because it really is more about the experience than anything.

The audio/video quality/framerate (while not HD) is excellent, and the ease of use of FaceTime is fantastic (just call somebody, then press the "FaceTime" key) just murder the annoyance of the laggy, low-res, unreliable Skype experience.

Also, FaceTime is an open protocol, so when it becomes more widely accepted, other services and phones may adopt it. I'm fairly certain they will because of how popular it will be by the time anyone delivers a competitive protocol. How popular? Well, there is an estimate of approx. 10 million FaceTime devices (including the new iPod touches) projected to be sold by the end of year.

That's cool, I still think it's a very minor point in technology's future compared to cloud computing, vm, and the like.

Meow wrote:You kiddin' me, Dave? You think a Zerg network admin could outdo a Protoss network admin? Poppycock!

you would probably have to pay them more, though im sure the quality of work would be better, and i could never trust a zerg, just too ugly