Saturday, February 20, 2016

The MTM-NBN rip-off: saving $250 Million costs the taxpayer $125 Billion.

Related links. This was originally a comment on a previous post.

There's a point  related to hidden OpEx costs which makes a nonsense of Cost-Per-Premises of "nbn ltd":
the bulk of maintenance costs will be spent on the Copper Pair network. [50% of all? FTTN 50% higher?]
Where is that in the CPP costings?
That, for me, makes these company documents not 'business' but 'political', they are misleading figures.

Friday, February 19, 2016

MTM: the Road to Nowhere. Waste on a truly grand scale.

The widely reported Feb-2016 Australian Infrastructure Plan, resulted in a piece on The Register ("Calls for sale - in pieces - to promote competition, plus reveal of bush services' costs").

This is a repost of my comment, and a couple of follow-ups (here and here) in response to a comment claiming a 'Fail', copied below.

Two good friends contributed off-line feedback:
  • Just like buying a power tool. A good one last a lifetime and a poor one lasts for a couple of sessions with it.
    • I'd phrase as: Professionals find it cheaper to buy & maintain expensive tools that JFW’s (Just Works), not a throw-away for every job.
  • Sometimes I wonder if anyone actually gets the basics of network design and deployment. So many people think in the ultra-short term rather than in the medium to long term. Every dollar spent now saves potentially hundreds in the future when it comes to network design and deployment.
    • It's the difference between buying a cheap TP-Link router and a Cisco router for business. One might last a year, the other will last a decade.

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Things I don't understand about NBN Economics: how does $1,500/premises become $4,500?

I can’t figure out the basic cost equation of the NBN.

If it’s costing ~$1,500/premise to install new fibre, how does the full cost become $4,500?
What does the extra $3,000 buy us?

The POI’s (Points of Interconnect) and transit network, the network operations centre, the provisioning & billing systems and what else? But these are common costs across all networks, it cannot be them.

FTTP costs: 2017 nbn co Corporate Plan (pg 53) Browfields: $4,411 Greenfields: $2,608. [Aug-2016]
Why does it cost $1,803/premise more for 'Brownfields' connections? It's 50% more than the pre-2013 costs. Where did these new costs come from?

There is a difference between ‘passing’ and connecting premises, so what proportion of the $1,500 is 'passing' and 'connecting'? That's hard to find and doesn't account for a three-fold increase.

Edit: Population Sources added at end, 27-Aug-2016.
Edit: Fibre cost-estimate Sources added at end, 20-Feb-2016.