People also frequently don’t realise how inflexible most fibre cables actually are (it’s not that easy to corner with fibre) – and that the cost for a port on a NIC / switch isn’t trivial either!

Having said that there really isn’t much excuse for new developments to be relying on Copper…

So copper is faster than fibre.
But I want fibre!

Bottom line, someone needs to explain what it is that we could do with fibre to the home that we cannot do with ADSL, or with VDSL. I’m in Canberra at the moment, and I get 8Mbps down, 512Kbps up, on my crappy old copper. There isn’t anything that I want to do that can’t be done over that connection. It certainly doesn’t stop me working from home – working from home for me means lots of e-mail and a bit of VOIP. In a pinch some video conferencing.

The argument seems to be “build it because we’ll use it one day in the future – new applications need more bandwidth.” But what we have today meets our needs today, and 5 years ago nobody thought that copper would go as fast as it does today. Maybe those new applications in the future will also be able to be delivered over copper – it seems to get faster about as quickly as we need. Our main bottleneck is actually bandwidth in and out of the country, not the bandwidth to your doorstep. I’m pretty sure that nobody in NZ could afford to run an 8Mbps connection at full speed all the time – that is 3GB per hour (and yes, I did the bits to bytes conversion). If whatever you are working on needs that speed, you’re burning 24GB per 8 hour day, 500GB per 20 day month. I’m not sure what sort of plan you’d be on, but sure as hell that ain’t coming from Telecom.

This is a solution looking for a problem, not a real need. The technology we have can already solve the problems we have.

And let us not forget that it is a quality of life issue for many skilled workers.

ADSL is so unbelievably limiting – I can’t believe people are prepared to settle for it. You’re talking crappy copper vs information travelling at the speed of light!

What is being advocated for fibre is a public private partnership – not a new government department as some contributors would have us believe!

True, but sometime there needs to be things built that won’t realise a return on investment to private industry. It’s called infrastructure which is the role of governments to provide.

There would be practically no infrastructure in New Zealand if building it [infrastructure] had been left to private industry. 100 years ago there was no money in building roads and rail in New Zealand. Yet it had to be built for New Zealand to progress as an economic nation.

I, like Berend, find it hard to see where there are tens of thousands being denied the opportunity to be more productive by the lack of fibre to home. Nor do I see why I should fund their indulgence either. It surely would be much cheaper for us to fund an office in town for them.

They are not building it, so let’s throw taxpayers money at it. There’s enough of that, and if people don’t want to pay, we just hold a gun to their heads.

DPF, maybe you should do a poll at who at this moment is constrained from working at home because he doesn’t have enough bandwidth. Maybe you can find 1 such person. I work from home, I have enough bandwidth (would buy more of course if I could get it).

Is Bernard Hickey prepared to do a bet with me? If this network is build, any productivity boost after that will be negligible, or if there’s a boost he won’t find any economist attributing that to the fibre network but to other factors. $10,000, ready for a real bet Bernard? Or are you not prepared to put your money where your mouth is?

The only people advocating this solution are the people who have something to gain. And it is so easy to advocate something if it isn’t your money.

Blue liberals, urggh.

I am not prepared to pay for more and more capacity than is not necessary.