Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Untangling the NBN debate - a few stats

Tonight I wanted to make a brief comment on the Opposition's broadband plan. You will find the details here, including a link through to the main policy document. As it happened, the ABS released the latest data on Australian's internet usage yesterday. You will find that here.

The comments that follow are simply my attempt to understand the issues.

Existing Australian Use of Broadband

According to ABS, as at December 2012, there were 11.879 million Australian broadband connections. These were dominated by:

  • DSL 4.727 Million
  • Mobile wireless 5.995 million!

The mobile number is somewhat misleading and I will come back to that later.

Connection Speeds

Labor's NBN promises connection speeds of up to 100 Mbps for 93% of the population by 2021. The Coalition promises a minimum of 25 Mbps by 2016 rising to a minimum of 50 by 2019.

How does this compare with present broad band connection speeds? The following table sets out the ABS numbers. Note that these are advertised connection speeds, something that I will return to in a moment.

Speed December 2011
'000
June 2012
000
December 2012
000
256kbps to less than 1.5 Mbps 808 980 609
1.5Mbps to less than 8 Mbps 5 115 5 067 4 213
8Mbps to less than 24 Mbps 3 985 4 094 5 406
24 Mbps or greater 1 214 1 458 1 645



You can see the decline in the numbers in the lower connection ranges.

The advertised download speed range that recorded the highest number of subscribers at 31 December 2012 was the 8Mbps to less than 24Mbps range, with 5.4 million subscribers, a 32% increase from the end of June 2012. Subscriber numbers in the 24Mbps or greater range grew by 13% since the end of June 2012 and accounted for over 1.6 million subscribers at 31 December 2012.

We don't know the distribution of speeds within the broad categories.

Advertised vs Real Speeds

I have a DSL broadband  connection that has a technical download speed of 54 Mbps so I am in the last group. In practice, and as I have complained before, I get nowhere near that rated speed. Further, the connection is unreliable, dropping out regularly. Some of the problems appear connected to the wireless router. but even when I have the cable directly connected, my real spees are very low.

Upload vs download

The primary focus on discussion is on download speeds, but for content creators, upload speeds are very important. My upload speeds are pretty dreadful.

Volume Indicators

Now what can we say about the volume of material downloaded?  The next table shows download volumes measures by terabytes. ABS warns that caution should be exercised in interpreting the numbers. Wireless includes mobile downloads.

Broadband downloads

December 2011 TB

June 2012 TB

December 2012 TB
Fixed line

322 280

389 130 526 472
Wireless

23 142

25 301 28 196
Total

345 422

414 431

554 668

The numbers show two things. First, the rapid increase in traffic. Second, the way that traffic growth is being driven by fixed line despite the huge number of mobile connections.

Conclusion

I will follow this analysis up in a later posts. Now, I just wanted to get numbers down.  

Postscript

In a speech reported in IT Wire, Mr Turnbull argued  new technology such as VDSL (very high bit rate DSL) can deliver adequate speeds: “Very, very high speeds are being delivered on VDSL on fibre-to-the-node, especially with vectoring. All the vendors are talking about it, reaching 100Mbps on the so called rotting, degraded, last century copper wires." Mr Turnbull said.

As I sat there this morning with my DSL broadband dropping out or even when working taking almost a minute to load the front page of the SMH, I wasn't convinced! 

Postscript 2

A further report on Mr Tunrbull's belief in the possibilities of copper.

Postscript Three

Thanks to my inveterate commenter and unpaid research assistant kvd, two further links:

In comments on the second article, kvd found a very informative comment from Jonathan in Melbourne that exactly explains some of the problems that I have been experiencing with my notional 54 Mbps connection:

It's not that difficult Mike, but you do have to understand the TCP transport protocol. Basically all download speeds quoted by broadband providers and Telcos is based on line speed. When Turnbull talks about 25Mbps he is quoting line speed. When you download data the real speed that you are actually getting is reduced by distance, number of subscribers sharing the DSLAM and the quality of the line from the DSLAM to the premises. If we take the optimum scenario of a user with a good quality connection who is less than 1000m from the multiplexer and a line speed of 25Mbps the actual amount of data they will receive on their disk is around 3Mbps. If the user has a wireless router and there are several users in the premises the actual data downloaded will halve again (depending on router and number of users) leaving an actual down load speed of around 1.5Mbps. This is a very very long way short of 25Mbps and is the elephant in the room that everyone is ignoring. If you have four users in the premises and they each are downloading HD video you need a minimum of 16Mbps (actual data not line speed). Turnbull quoted BT in the UK as his source of technical advice. BT have been installing FTTN since 2010 and have upgraded their speed requirements three times. They are currently upgrading to an optional service of 330Mbps. Their existing top of line service is currently being offered at 100Mbps. I think the current price is 26 pounds per month, but you can check their website. Incidentally I have a line speed of 16Mbps and because of slow speed due to high traffic in my area, typing this was a bit of a nightmare.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jim I just don't see the sense in the Libs pursuing this area of policy. Mr Abbott has to win the war, not every battle. The Lab proposal is clearly superior, though clearly costlier than the 'magic pudding' wifi option.

The more Abbott promotes this the more technologically illiterate he is shown to be; and clearly Turnbull knows it's a lemon.

They should just move on to more winnable policy differences.

kvd

Jim Belshaw said...

In a political sense, kvd, that may be right, although there is enough positive commentary on the Turnbull option to make it politically useful. But from a policy perspective, its worth trying to understand the differences and maybe affect debate. After all, all Australians will end up using whatever system is adopted.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I suppose you are right. It's just I get quite frustrated at the inability to concede any ground on any policy area. Without getting into depth I still believe the pink batts and school buildings initiatives were good policy for the times, but very poorly executed.

I'd give Abbott more points if he'd just say either "we can't afford the NBN as proposed" or else "we will better manage it" - and then simply move on.

But he just loses me when he insists his proposal is as good.

kvd

Jim Belshaw said...

I agree, kvd.

Anonymous said...

Jim, re your postscript, I speak as an absolutely uninvolved 'outrider' - which is to say I chose where I live, and there will never be FTTN - never mind spagetti to the door.

There was a very good comment on a SMH Tech article this morning which laid out the hard tech facts about all this - I wish I'd kept the reference because it's so much better than anything I could state.

I used the term 'magic pudding' in an earlier comment - because that's really what Turnbull & Co are attempting to sell. He is better than that - I had thought, given his past involvement - and I'm now really losing respect for his quite disingenuous Liberal mantra.

Aside: I'm sure I mentioned being off copper for a month beginning Christmas Eve - my busiest time. Went to the local golf resort today to look at a cabin, possibly to buy. They (all 60+ units) are STILL off the Telstra grid - and what is it now? Nearly four months.

You complain (rightly) of irregular dropouts; try nearly four months with nothing.

kvd

Jim Belshaw said...

Hi kvd. Ben Grubb had a piece yesterday - http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/coalitions-nbn-will-need-ongoing-costly-upgrading-experts-warn-20130410-2hkah.html was this the one?

Anonymous said...

No Jim, but I found what I was referring to. Here's the link:

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/nbn-how-much-speed-do-we-really-need-20130410-2hky4.html

But it was really this specific comment I was thinking of - I think for reference it is worth repeating in full:

It's not that difficult Mike, but you do have to understand the TCP transport protocol. Basically all download speeds quoted by broadband providers and Telcos is based on line speed. When Turnbull talks about 25Mbps he is quoting line speed. When you download data the real speed that you are actually getting is reduced by distance, number of subscribers sharing the DSLAM and the quality of the line from the DSLAM to the premises. If we take the optimum scenario of a user with a good quality connection who is less than 1000m from the multiplexer and a line speed of 25Mbps the actual amount of data they will receive on their disk is around 3Mbps. If the user has a wireless router and there are several users in the premises the actual data downloaded will halve again (depending on router and number of users) leaving an actual down load speed of around 1.5Mbps. This is a very very long way short of 25Mbps and is the elephant in the room that everyone is ignoring. If you have four users in the premises and they each are downloading HD video you need a minimum of 16Mbps (actual data not line speed). Turnbull quoted BT in the UK as his source of technical advice. BT have been installing FTTN since 2010 and have upgraded their speed requirements three times. They are currently upgrading to an optional service of 330Mbps. Their existing top of line service is currently being offered at 100Mbps. I think the current price is 26 pounds per month, but you can check their website. Incidently I have a line speed of 16Mbps and because of slow speed due to high traffic in my area, typing this was a bit of a nightmare.

Commenter Jonathan Melbourne April 10, 2013, 3:31PM


Sorry for length of cut/paste - but some things still need spelling out in detail, and 'Jonathan' did it very well.

kvd
ps his example best case '1000 metres' in my case translates to 6.5km - but then I am also familiar with candles :)

Anonymous said...

On your postscript #2, from Wikipedia:

Second-generation systems (VDSL2; ITU-T G.993.2 approved in February 2006) use frequencies of up to 30 MHz to provide data rates exceeding 100 Mbit/s simultaneously in both the upstream and downstream directions. The maximum available bit rate is achieved at a range of about 300 meters; performance degrades as the loop attenuation increases.

Mr Turnbull is smarter than this. He must absolutely hate being forced into comparing a sow's ear with a silk purse; they should just move on, imo.

kvd

Jim Belshaw said...

David, you are wonderful. Jonathan's comment exactly explains my download problem! Will bring up in main post!