Here comes the NBN. Whoopidy-Dah

Getting back to my earlier post:

2. High speed, provided you stay on the island. Most people say Australia's current internet backbone isn't adequate, and they're probably right. However, a BIG problem with internet in this country is the links to other content around the world. Australia shares one respectable pipe with NZ through to the U.S. but the pipes up to Asia/Europe are ridiculously outdated. An interesting look at the situation around the world. Perhaps ISPs will invest more in mirroring and proxies but performance to sites and services offshore won't be helped one bit by this huge investment unless they plan laying more cables. This problem is compounded by the introduction of "cloud" services, where already international companies are side-stepping Australia in favour of Singapore.

I decided to do a bit of digging to see just what the NBN had planned for international capacity. It turns out, not a hell of a lot. As far as they're concerned, Australia isn't burning up it's meager international bandwidth resources thanks a lot to the local caching being done. At least according to the people these guys asked.

My favorite element to this was this quote from a pipe-line owner:
"Each of the four networks that will be providing the bulk of international connections for Australia is capable of carrying at least a terabit per second of data. The total international capacity in use for the Australian market in 2009 is estimated to be around 300 gigabits per second. Accordingly, total capacity usage could double, then double again, then double again, and then double yet again before the capabilities of those networks was exhausted. It would therefore be difficult to say that international networks are a capacity bottleneck in the Australian market.”

This has to be one of the most short-sighted statements I've read in a while. The whole basis of the argument is what Australians are perceived to be needing based on information and technologies that were popular two years ago. It doesn't address modern or future trends, and more importantly, it doesn't address the rest of the world's potential demand for services hosted in Australia! Already Australia is being actively bypassed for Cloud-based services by facilities set up in Singapore, Korea, and Japan. Australia is in the middle of a grand-old resource sell-off. Foreign investment is actively sought to essentially strip-mine this country of every valuable resource. But the question has to be, when supply or demand eventually scales back, what will Australia have to move on towards? This is the information age and countries are investing heavily in Internet and communications systems to serve as hubs for regional world markets. Data centres, application and service hosting, development of those applications and services... Australia has the money coming in, but is still behaving like an island with little to no thought of the future. Their answer so far has been to invest in heavy localized infrastructure that will be greatly subsidized to ensure that regional residents have equal access to similar bandwidth as urban connections. However, what will happen when the mining money dries up? We'll be left with an expensive broadband network serving fast, outdated cached content from 2009 around our little island with no external investment wanting to utilize it. Those still in information technology after the resource boom (and the hundreds of thousands of fat-cat Government jobs and contracts feeding off it) dries up will be left trying to compete with India and China building services hosted in Singapore.

Ah well, maybe by then the Government will resurrect plans to import nuclear waste from the U.S./World to fill up the holes left after selling off all of the minerals and coal.