Media deaf to electricity price increases slugging families

I blame global warming.

The media has become so used to being told that electricity prices will have to rise to pay for carbon offsets and so on, it is blind to the pain that these increases inflict on working families.

Government-owned EnergyAustralia, Integral Energy and Country Energy have sought weekly rises - ranging from $1.80 to $2.50 - a week to fund the huge capital works program which will take five years.

The SMH tells us more:

The five-point plan also includes an $18 billion investment in electricity infrastructure across the state, the $800 million CityGrid project, a multi-million spend on protection equipment for the four main cables into the northern part of Sydney's CBD and a requirement for government buildings to make sure back-up power systems are working. Mr Macdonald said a third of the state's electricity infrastructure would be upgraded, replaced or renewed over the next five years under the plan.

The SMH, in their usual bloody-minded fashion, spun this story as the government getting tough on people that damage power cables! The bit about price rises that will slug the public was buried towards the end. They really have become the mouth piece of government.

Only News seem awake to this idea:

Increasing electricity prices to pay for infrastructure maintenance will raise controversy because the Government strips more than $1 billion a year from its energy companies in dividends and taxes.

Let's look at an audit report for 2008 on Integral Energy, one of the three government owned companies seeking a price rise.

Network reliability measures the number of minutes that customers on average are without electricity each year. Reliability has been steady over the last three years and remains within Integral’s target. Integral advised that factors affecting network reliability performance are largely external to the network and beyond mitigation through network management practices. Supply failure can result from adverse environmental conditions such as wind, lightning, rain, bushfires, defective equipment, loss of transmission supply, and vegetation coming into contact with powerlines and other assets.

Let me get this straight - the government is saying that $18 billion needs to be spent to improve network reliability, yet the latest audit report on Integral Energy says that reliability is within target and the factors affecting reliability are beyond mitigation!

More from the same report:

Earnings before interest and tax:
2007 - $346.8m,
2008 - $336.1m

Total distributions to Government:
2007 - $193.0m,
2008 - $182.3m

Capital expenditure
2007 - $381.7,
2008 - $373.5m

Total distributions to Government were better than target due to higher net profit. The decline in capital expenditure was primarily driven by expenditure on the network being $66.3 million below target.

Contributing factors to this included increased pressure on suppliers to meet demand from the New South Wales electricity industry and time delays resulting from increased community expectations with respect to environmental due diligence and consultation.

How much has the government extracted from Integral Energy via dividends over the last decade? Perhaps $1.5 billion or more? I can't be bothered sifting through all the past annual reports. If these capital works had to be performed, why has Treasury spent the last decade taking money out of this company instead of allowing it to re-invest it?

I suspect that most of this $18 billion spend that they announced is hot air - it has either been announced before, or is already part of the planned capital works for these companies. All the government is trying to do is to protect or increase its dividend (because it is broke) and using the "failed" network as an excuse to gouge more funds from the public.

Note the problems Integral had with spending last years capital program - nearly 20% of it was unspent due to environmental NIMBYS and other hangers-on slowing things down. So how are they to accelerate their capital program when the enviro-tards currently have one foot on the brake?

Let's have a look at the same report for EnergyAustralia:

Earnings before interest and tax:
2005: $378.9m
2006: $527.2m
2007: $594.1m
2008: $574.4m

Total distributions to government
2005: $144.2m
2006: $304.0m
2007: $277.7m
2008: $272.1m

Capital expenditure
2005: $483.7m
2006: $603.9m
2007: $783.5m
2008: $951.1m

EnergyAustralia reported no problems with spending their capital works budget, and notice how it has nearly doubled between 2005 and 2008 - they are already spending like gangbusters. EnergyAustralia have just over $7 billion in assets - I take it that is their valuation for the network. As they are spending just under $1 billion a year on capital works, either they are expanding their network like crazy (new homes and more capacity to existing suburbs) or they are replacing existing parts of the network like crazy.

Given that many of their assets probably have a life of 30 or 40 years, you'd expect their capital works program to assets ratio to be something in the order of 1:20, yet it is more like 1:7.

I thought that because of global warming, we were supposed to be using less electricity rather than more of it. If we are supposed to be using less, why are we spending so much money to upgrade the network so that it can carry more? Am I the only one to sense a disconnect here in government policy?

The TransGrid audit report offers an answer:

Energy use in New South Wales has increased at about 1,380 gigawatt hours (GWh) per annum over the past ten years. New South Wales has the largest summer peak demand in the National Electricity Market (NEM), with maximum summer demands forecast to increase by some 440 megawatts a year. In January 2008, TransGrid recorded a peak summer demand of 12,954 megawatts (13,458 megawatts in 2006-07). TransGrid has a $1.3 billion capital works program over its current five year regulatory period to 30 June 2009, to help it meet increasing demand. TransGrid expects to achieve its program.

We see the same pattern in TransGrid's dividend payments to government and capital works expenditure:

Dividends to government
2006: $69.5m
2007: $71.5m
2008: $105.9m

Capital expenditure
2006: $158.6m
2007: $218.2m
2008: $355.0m

Another audit paper on the overview of the NSW electricity industry tells us this:

Electricity entities accrued distributions to the Government were $1.4 billion ($1.2 billion in 2005-06), comprising $541 million ($490 million) of tax and $818 million ($758 million) of dividends.

and:

The 2007-08 Budget Papers show the Government is expecting annual revenue of around $1.1 billion over the next few years from electricity entities.

If you really want to know how hollow all the rhetoric about global warming is, have a look at this table (I could only grab a small section of it) - this shows all the new power plants that were proposed or being built at the time this report was written:



Then consider this quote on the next page:

the New South Wales Government’s Energy Savings Fund was established to provide $200 million over five years to fund projects that encourage energy savings, address peak demand, and increase public awareness and acceptance of the importance of energy saving measures. From September to October 2005 the Fund provided $15.0 million to 20 projects, saving an estimated 75,000 MWhs of electricity.

The second round of applications was held from September to November 2006 and a total of $13.0 million was allocated to 29 energy generation, efficiency and education projects, estimated to save 64,401 MWhs of electricity a year

75,000MWhs sounds like a lot, doesn't it?

Well, consider that the smallest new plant being proposed in the table above is 40MW. How many hours are there in a year? 24 x 365 = 8760 hours.

8760 hours time 40MW equals 350,400MWhs, assuming this plant runs at 100% capacity all year round.

In other words, these two rounds of "energy saving" projects, which "estimated" savings of 139,401MWhs only saved less than half of the potential output of the smallest power plant currently on the planning board.

All those proposed plants add up to 5771MW of power. Multiply that by 8760 hours in the year and we get 50,553,960MWhs.

So if all of them get built, we will be adding a potential of 50,553,960MWhs of electricity production to the network. Balance that against savings so far of 139,401MWhs. If you divide the 139,401 by 50,533,960 you get 0.00275. What's that? Two and three quarter poofteenths of fuck-all? It's not even 1%. It is a fraction of 1%, and it cost $28 million.

Another way in how our money is sacrificed on the alter of green nihilism and feel-goodery.

The SMH - a byword for accuracy

On a happy note, at the rate this cyclepath is being funded, our great-grand children may be able to ride from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea:

'Death strip' becomes cycling trail

Twenty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, a project to convert the former "death strip" into a cycling path is picking up speed. The new cycle trail, which will run 7000 km from the Barents Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, is aimed at promoting eco-tourism along the former militarized zone and tapping into booming interest in cycling holidays. Michael Cramer, a German Green party member of the European parliament, is spearheading the project to complete the trail, which is supported by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Given that this strip used to be sown with land-mines that blew up quite a few desperate easterners seeking to escape the dastardly clutches of communism, I think "booming" is not the best term to use to describe it. Unless the SMH also wants to describe the recent boat explosion off our north coast as a symbol of a "booming" trade in illegals.

Just one small problem with this story, which became obvious after visiting Michael Cramer's website:

"The Iron Curtain divided Europe for several decades. The memory of the separation of our continent – and the way it was overcome – can be preserved for future generations by the introduction of an 'Iron Curtain Trail', stretching in a 6,800 km 'green ribbon' from the Artic Sea to the Black Sea."

I even worked out the gist of that by looking at in Austrian:

Entlang des ehemaligen Grenzstreifens wird auf 6800 km ein Radweg geschaffen, der europäische Kultur, Geschichte und nachhaltigen Tourismus verbindet und so einen Beitrag zum Zusammenwachsen Europas leistet.

My Austrian is a bit rusty - I'm sure that says something about being a jelly donut.

So where did the SMH find the extra 200km? Do they know something that the European Parliament doesn't know? Or did they just decide to alter the facts because '7000' sounds better than '6800'?

All the news that's fit to wrap fish in, and facts we just know we can trust.

The penguins of Blairtopia

A spin-off series based on the spin-off cartoon "The penguins of Madagascar" - which is a hoot.



Andrew Bolt must feel very left out at times like this.

Impersonating 1.618

Grown up photography.

Monkey photography:



See if you can guess what the first one is. I know what it is. Got no idea what number 2 is though, but I am sure I could make money exhibiting it somewhere as "Dreams of my ancestors: Part IV".

Comment of the week

I am reading "Spitfire: portrait of a legend" at present. There is a story of how Douglas Bader was finally convinced many years after the war ended to attend a Luftwaffe reunion in Germany (on the understanding that he was not expected to be polite).

Bader arrived, and after a while, made his way up to a balcony where he could look down on the thousand or more ex-Luftwaffe pilots that had assembled.

He turned to his companion and said, "I didn't realise we left so many of the bastards alive".

He was known for being a tad aggressive when it came to prosecuting the war in the air.

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PS - absolute ripsnorter of a book.

How to turn $43 billion into $100 billion

Now for my next magic trick......

The mortgage calculation that I did yesterday on a $43 billion debt with a 30 year repayment horizon spat out annual repayments of $3.4 billion.

Now, if you multiply $3.4 billion by 30 years you get ..... not $43 billion but $102 billion. As anyone with a mortgage knows, you pay the bank more in interest than you initially borrow. In this case, you borrow $43 billion and end up repaying just a shade under $60 billion in interest.

Have any of these morons in Treasury done their numbers?

I'm over fibre - back to food

We narrowly avoided a culinary disaster today - I pulled out some old-fashioned pork snaggers to defrost for dinner and remembered that we were out of onion jam. Onion jam - onion relish: call it what you will. It is the only accompaniment worth putting on a good sausage or including in a steak sandwich.

If you ever indulge in some proper bangers and mash at a good pub, you'll know what good onion jam/relish should look and taste like. Cheap and nasty pubs slap on awful, grey gravy; but a proper chef will make up a tasty onion jam in advance and dollop it on at the last moment.

I am including this here as a recipe for manly men because this stuff is magic with BBQ's, and men are the natural masters of the BBQ. If you can cook chops and snags and onions on the BBQ, then you can cook this. This is really just a slightly more advanced version of onions done on the BBQ.

What I do with this stuff is that I cook the chops/steaks/snags on the BBQ and just after I remove them from the hot plate, I take the pre-made onion jam out of the fridge and add a big dollop of it to the hot plate. It only needs to swizzle around on the hot plate long enough to reheat and to absorb some of those lovely-chubbly sausage and chop and steak flavours - then off it comes, to be served alongside the snaggers and so forth.

So, to the shops! We returned with 4kg of onions. In the end, I only peeled 3kg of them - and that was only because I figured that the 4th kilo would not fit into my rather large pot. From past experience, I now know to do the peeling and slicing outside on a windy day. The onions are shown here with some of the sage that I will be using a bit later on.


After slicing and dicing, I weighed both the sliced onions and the peel - because I am that sort of a guy. The sliced onion came in at 2.4kg, and the skins at 0.7kg. This is still more onion than the recipe calls for, but J and me like this stuff, so there is no point in under-catering with the onion.


After taking the above photo, I took the onions inside to weigh them. Once I had weighed them, I took them straight back outside - the vapour from this lot was so powerful, my eyes immediarely started watering. I only took them back in when the oil in the pot was hot enough to tip them straight in and then put on the lid.

Here is a selection of onion jam recipes from Donna Hay. I have made 3 of these - all are very good.


Right - big pot on top of stove, heat turned to medium/high.

Half a cup of olive oil added and allowed to heat up.

Onions added and lid replaced. Notice at this point how much room the onions take up. This looks like a huge amount, but onions are all water. This will cook down to about 1/4 of what you see now.


Once the lid goes on, I set the kitchen timer for 10 minutes and go busy myself somewhere else.

Every 10 minutes, I take the lid off and give them a stir. At each 10 minute mark, more and more onions have gone deliciously brown. After 30 minutes, I start stirring every 5 minutes.

This is not for the faint-hearted. I know that you want to go back much more regularly than that and give them a stir, worried that they will stick to the bottom and burn. Do not despair - with this many onions, a huge amount of water is given off, and that prevents most of them burning. A few will still stick and burn, but nowhere near the amount you are worried about. If you only cook say 1kg of onions, sticking and burning will be an issue. The more you chuck in, the less you have to stir.

Besides, you want as many as possibly to go a rich, dark brown colour. You will not get the desired flavour if the bloody things don't cook properly. Don't fiddle with the damned things - just let them cook. Find something else to occupy your time. Resist the urge to lift the lid and stir things around! Let them go brown. A nice, dark brown. Pale onions are useless - you have to risk a bit of burning to get the right colour.

The basic recipe is as follows:

2kg onions
1/3 cup olive oil
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup red wine vinegar
salt and pepper

You cook the onions in the oil for 40 minutes over medium/high heat. When they are nice and brown, you throw in the sugar, vinegar, salt and pepper and cook for another 10 minutes, or until it reaches your desired thickness.

1 cup of sugar is too rich for me, so I usually reduce it by 25% or so.

I once made the mistake of washing the onions to reduce the vapour output, and they simply soaked up even more water. I had to boil and boil and boil the onions to then get rid of the excess water. Don't do that.

My favourite variations are:

• Sage and apple
• Tomato

What I have done tonight is to take half of the onion out of the pot and set it aside with a pile of chopped baby tomatoes. With the remaining half in the pot, I have thrown in one chopped apple, a big handful of chopped sage and the remains of a bag of dried cranberries. Into that has gone cider vinegar and castor sugar.

In five minutes time, after that has cooked some more, I will put that in some takeaway containers and then put the other half back in the pot, whereupon I will cook the onion some more with about half a kilo of the punnet tomatoes, brown sugar and vinegar.

Don't forget to add salt. And pepper, if you like it.

Apart from being just utterly fantastic with almost any form of cooked meat, you can also make great little pasty rollup things where you mix the onion jam with goats cheese and bake them as scrolls. I'll let J do that recipe one day.

I've also made a pizza base and then smeared onion jam on top and quickly baked it in the oven - that makes a magnificent nibbly.

So there you have it - another recipe for manly men who like meat (with something tasty).

It's a dog's life

Sydney Harbour, this AM.

Don't get me wrong

Don't get me wrong - I am not bashing OneTel Mk II because I think a fibre network is a silly idea. I am bashing it because the economics don't add up.

Over the last 7 years, I've put in a number of fibre networks. The first one I put in linked a number of sites in a regional city - the company I was working for had hundreds of staff and several server rooms scattered over a dozen sites in the city in question. I discovered that many of the sites had dark fibre running along their boundaries, and I arranged to replace a whole bunch of expensive 2MB Telstra frame relay links with a 100MB fibre network. We consolidated over a dozen servers in 6 locations down to three servers in one location, and improved the IT setup for all the staff working in that city. I even managed to tap into another fibre going back to Sydney, and finangled a 30MB link from the regional centre back to the Sydney CBD.

That fibre network paid for itself within a year - that company replaced servers every 3 to 4 years, and they cost a minimum of $10,000 each. Simply reducing the number that needed replacing from 12 down to 3 realised a cost saving of $90,000 - a saving that would be repeated from thereon every 3 to 4 years. Due to the then hideous cost of frame relay, renting a dark fibre and installing our own switches and fibre drivers ended up costing no more than the frame relay links, even though we got 50 times more bandwidth.

A year after we installed that 100MB network, the backbone was upgraded to 1GB - the cost of the fibre drivers had declined to the point where it was economic to buy them instead. We were still stuck with a 30MB link to Sydney, as that link required a pair of $50,000 repeaters half way down, and it didn't make sense to spend that much on a link we didn't need.

After that, I helped rollout another fibre ring around Sydney, linking dozens of offices on a 1GB backbone. Again, the economics made sense because we eliminated over 50 servers and 10 server rooms in the process. The 1GB backbone allowed us to consolidate lots of scattered servers (and support staff) back into a central data centre, and to replace lots of piddly servers with a small number of bigger units. I also tried to organise renting dark fibre from Trans Grid to another regional city where we had a presence, but nothing came of that.

Not a sod was turned until I had written a water tight business case that included a mass of cost/benefit calculations. I'm pretty tight with spending company money, so the business case had to be convincing enough to convince me first of all. I wasn't going to try and sell a crock of shit to my boss if it didn't add up.

At the time of that rollout, I was frustrated that we didn't use that network to do more - we could have saved even more money, but internal politics prevented that from happening. I was even more frustrated that we were unable to use that network to offer savings to other companies in our group - intra company politics got in the way there as well. However, that fibre network still did a lot of good, and I am proud that I had a part in getting it installed.

I put in another fibre network for another company last year, linking various sites around Sydney at 1GB. If their financial situation allows it, next year they are going to increase that network to 10GB. Putting that network in allowed that company to make some major changes to how it runs its IT shop, and it saved quite a lot of money in some areas.

I also put a huge amount of fibre into a data centre last year - that site had over 4000 fibre end points, and I personally installed nearly 1500 fibre patch leads as part of the job. You could say I am a bit over fibre. Just the fibre alone for that job came in at $750,000 and took two months to install, and it was connected up to $5 million worth of switches. I finished another smaller site in the new year - I spent days on my guts under the floor sorting out fibre cabling. In the end though, the result was good.

The thing is though that all this work was expensive. Hideously expensive. Back in the late 1990s, I had to link two buildings in the CBD via fibre - they had a microwave link between them, but it was unreliable and not fat enough. It took months of negotiation with Energy Australia (to get access to the ducts under the street), the landlords of both buildings (to get access to the basement and the risers) and the Council (to allow the fibre to be laid). Even though the buildings were only a few blocks apart, and were in line of sight, it still cost $70,000 to lay that fibre end to end, and the monthly rental on the duct space was expensive.

You don't have to convince me that fibre is a good thing. Putting in that first 100MB network was a huge leap forward for the company concerned. However, it cost a lot, and I see no point in spending big dollars unless you are going to reap even bigger returns. I'm simply not convinced that most households have deep enough pockets to pay for it, and that they will achieve any worthwhile gains at all.

Just one thing about that fibre......

It looks like they're hot for fibre to the home in the UK as well, although BT (British Telecom) don't want to do it because the economics suck.

I read today that the assumption is that the existing copper network in the UK will eventually be phased out and everyone will be forced onto the fibre.

So we have a bright, rosy future where if we want some sort of landline at home, we will have to move to VOIP. I like using something with a cable attached from time to time - I don't want to irradiate my head all day long with a wireless or mobile system.

Anyway, here's one small flaw in the fibre.

With the existing copper network, your phone at home (assuming you still have one) is powered from the exchange. If your house loses power, your landline will still function - assuming the generator and UPS down at the exchange are routinely tested and working, and the generator doesn't run out of diesel before the power comes back on.

With fibre, you need to provide power at your end to whatever network device that lights up your end of the fibre (the small unit I have linked to costs $472 ex-GST too). So if you want to have a VOIP service that still works when you are sitting in darkness, you will need a UPS and perhaps even a small generator at home.

Now you could of course say that you will be happy to fall back on your mobile phone if there is an emergency, but it's a bit hard to call an ambulance in a black out if your phone goes flat.... and how are you going to charge it then? You're also assuming that the mobile network will remain uncongested during a blackout when everyone else has also lost their landlines - which is an assumption likely to make an ass out of U and me (assume = ass-u-me).

I'm wondering how the emergency services will react to that small fly in the ointment - if they've even thought of it. The other thing is that your ISP will have no offer you a VOIP service (which the likes of iiNet already do), but I don't think the ISP's are currently offering VOIP with the same level of uptime as the Telstra landline network. It's amazing how big a gap there is in reliability between something that offers 99.999% reliability and 99.9%. Do the sums yourself.

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In Bournemouth in the UK:

The fibre broadband is being delivered to the homes through the sewer network which is how the costs are being kept lower as there is 90% less digging and the fibre optic network can be laid much faster. The total cost is expected to be around £30 million.

Using the sewers? So now they will have crap flowing in and out of the house via the same pipes.

Now I have seen everything

Your nipple covers.com

Applying a mortgage calculator to OneTel Mark II

Krudd thinks OneTel Mark II is going to cost up to $43 billion to blow, I mean build. Most of that money will be borrowed in the form of bonds.

Assuming a 30 year bond and a market interest rate, how much will OneTel Mk II have to repay each year to the bondholders? Let's think of it along the same lines as a mortgage. Yes, I know that the repayment milestones will be different and so on, but this is a nice simple way of looking at it. In a way, this is my version of a climate change computer model - I've made some wild assumptions, used some dodgy numbers and produced a scary result.

I asked the Westpac mortgage calculator to do the numbers on a 30 year loan that was fixed for 10 years with an interest rate of 6.99%. We can argue about what the coupon on the bonds would be, but let's just go with 6.99% because I can't reprogram this online calculator.


The result is a monthly repayment of $2858, or $34,286 per year. If we multiply that by 100,000, we find that OneTel Mk II will need to generate $3,428,600,000 per year just to make the capital and interest payments.


They'll need more money of course to run the network - to supply electricity, offices for all the managers, nice looking reception areas and of course - a fountain in the foyer.

But $3.4 billion a year is the minimum that they have to generate to stave off liquidiation.

Let's see, assuming that 4 million households sign on, that comes to $850 of revenue each household has to generate each year, or $70 per month.

That is $70 per billable household just to cover the repayments on the debt. There is nothing in here for depreciation (which will be another $3 billion or so per year), salaries, cars, offices and so on.

I can easily foresee a $200 bill per month for the cheapest level of service.

Basil!

I can't even think of the word "basil" without Fawlty Towers popping into my head.

Today was P-Day for this year's basil crop: Pesto Day. I made my first real attempt to grow basil three years ago - that was an abject failure. The following year was no different. I would visit friends and wander around their gardens and marvel at the height and luxuriousness of their basil plants, and curse the pale, stunted, yellowish creatures that poked through the soil at our place. I'd be lucky to score one or two leaves large enough to drape over a single sliced tomato, and that would be it.

This year, things changed. I have no idea what I did differently, but wherever and whenever I planted basil, it flourished. In some locations, it flourished too much - instead of only 1 in 10 seeds germinating, they all did, and my failure to ruthlessly cull the plants at an early stage led to much unhealthy competition later on - and a seriously diminished crop.

The trigger for Pesto Day was the Dawn of the Slugs. Or perhaps even the Flight of the Caterpillars. I have, sorry, had basil in three locations in the garden until today. Two went untouched, whilst the third crop gave a good impression of having been chewed on by a goat. Not waiting for the slugs and bugs to make their way down to the other crops, and with the cold weather approaching, it was time to act.

First, strip the basil leaves and check for bugs and slugs. Only one caterpillar was detected. I prefer to get my protein via steaks and roasts, so he went down the sink. One third of my crop consists of one enormous plant on its own - the other two crops consisted of a dozen or more plants placed too closely together. Over half the leaves here came from half the enormous and lonely plant - the remainder came from chopping down 90% of the other two dozen plants. The big plant also had much larger and greener leaves, and the aroma it gave off when stripping the leaves was much more powerful.


The recipe in my Stephanie Alexander cookbook called for one cup of basil leaves and 2 cloves of garlic. As I had a lot more than a cup of leaves, I went with three cloves. The effect was rather.... mindblowing. The first sample collided with the back of my mouth like an out of control semi-trailer with a Mini. Once I got over the shock of the initial jolt, I found it was quite good. Potent and overpowering, but good. Certainly enough to bring tears to your eyes.


I didn't get to use proper parmigiana, as the local wog deli was strangely out of it. That almost never happens. I went with a close approximation which was still very good - not as bitey and tangy as your normal robust Parmesan, but nothing to sneeze at. Certainly 87 bazillion times better than that white powdery crap you can buy in a can.


We now have enough pesto to last us a week, and the remaining plants could probably produce about the same amount before they kark it. It's certainly nothing like the anaemic stuff you get in the supermarket - although next time, I think I will stick to two small cloves of garlic, rather than 3 massive ones. I think I have burned holes in my cheeks.

OneTel Mark II - some more comments

Let us be philosophical for a moment. When you use the internet, what is actually happening? Think about the following things that you may or may not do each week:

• Send and receive emails
• Watch some Youtube movies
• Do a few Google searches
• Read some blogs
• Read a few deadtree newspapers online
• Watch some snippets from the Channel 7 news
• Listen to TripleJ online
• Download some "privacy" movies and music
• Upload photos to FacePlant
• Chat via Skype
• Twitter

What happens when you read a web page, even one as boringly static as mine with no video, no dancing icons and pop-up ads and very few photos?

Well, when you click on something, your browser makes a "request" to a far away "server" for information. The data that you are looking for, whether it be text, photos, porn, music, movies or pizza recipes will probably reside on something like this - a bank of servers in a rack in a data centre. Each of those black, slab-like things is a separate server. The ones at the bottom, due to their shape, are commonly called "pizza boxes", because they are as thick as a pizza box, and can be stacked up like empty pizza boxes.


If you put lots of these racks together, you get a "data centre", or a "server farm", or a very expensive, noisy, fairly cold room. The real estate that you are looking at below can rent for thousands of dollars per square metre. Per month. With electricity billed separately.


Things don't have to be this fancy though. You can do it on the cheap. An associate of mine once saw how Fairfax delivers its web content, like the SMH. They described a room in the Fairfax offices with old PCs stacked up on shelves. We're talking about those old white PCs that were all the rage in 1999. There's nothing wrong with that approach - that's how Google does it. However, I think Google know what they are doing, whereas Fairfax were just being cheap.

In reality, most servers are little more than souped-up PCs. They might have 2 processes or 4 processes rather than 1, and they are quite likely to have a lot more memory than the thing sitting on your desk. They might also be attached to a lot more storage. But the main thing that generally differentiates a server from a PC is that it has redundancy built into it - if something fails at 2am, like a power supply, the second power supply takes over so your web site or mail server does not come to a screaming halt. That's it really.

Now, these servers have a network connection in the back, just like your PC. Whilst your PC or laptop will be connected to a dinky little router somewhere in your house, these servers are more likely to be attached to a big switch - like the one shown in my last post. Unlike your PC, which is running a 100MB connection, these things will have a 1GB connection. If the IT staff are fancy, they might even plug in two 1GB connections and duplex them to create a 2GB pipe into the server.

Wow.

So if I get a 100MB connection at home, I'll be able to download porn lots faster?

No. Not necessarily.

For starters, let's assume the server you are collecting your porn from has a 1GB connection to the data centre network. What if that data centre only has a 1GB connection to the Internet, and that link is being shared by 500 servers in the data centre? Do you think that you are going to get a nice, clean 100MB link direct to your server?

Not a hope in hell.

Then you have to consider all the other hairy-palmed miscreants sitting at home doing the same thing. If 100 of them all decide to hit that server at the same time, you are all contesting for the 1GB network pipe that the server has (assuming all the other servers in the data centre are powered down). At most, you are going to be given a theoretically maximum slice of 10MB - and you won't get that, because 1GB links never run anywhere near 1GB - past a certain limit, congestion kicks in and that is that. Things won't go any faster.

Then you have to consider things like file sizes, disk speeds and all sorts of other hardware issues. If you try to download lots of small files that add up to say 100MB, they will take a lot longer to download than one big file of 100MB. Trust me on that.

You also have to consider the hard disks that hold the file you are after. They can only throw off data so quickly - if lots of you are seeking files that are held in lots of different locations on the hard drive, you are going to have to wait for those files to be delivered.

So you see kiddies, in many cases, a faster network may do nothing to speed things up. The limitations may all be at the other end, where the data is being delivered from. The pipe in the middle may have little or no influence on how quickly your stuff is delivered.

Yes, there are lots of tricks that you can pull to speed up data delivery, and companies like Google and other huge concerns use them all the time. You can spread the data across lots of servers, you can use cache servers, you can copy that data to data centres spread all around the world so that your request doesn't have to travel to Timbuktu in order to get the file you want. But for many sites, such tricks are not possible.

Why don't site owners just buy more bandwidth?

Because it is expensive. ISPs and data centres charge you a lot for bandwidth. Unless your site is producing a lot of revenue, it does not make economic sense to put in a huge pipe. You put in the bare minimum that makes your site acceptably fast for most users, and nothing more. Only government agencies, who are spending our money, are silly enough to buy excess bandwidth that may never be used. They get given a budget for bandwidth, and they spend it regardless of whether the traffic warrants it or not.

What's on the other end of this network?

A journo posed a question to one of Kevni's flunkies the other day that went along the lines of, "What is at the other end of the fibre?" The flunky had no idea.

I'll see if I can explain that.

A bit of fibre is useless unless you've got little pulses of light zooming up and down it at high speed. In order to crank up that light, you need a switch that contains a GBIC - a fancy name for a nifty little laser pointer.

Let's say your suburb is being cabled up. Each house has a pair of fibres pulled to a point somewhere in the house. At the other end, all those pairs are aggregated in a building like an Exchange, and at that point, they are connected to a big fuck-off switch like this one from Cisco - the 6513.



This thing is the size of a big bar fridge, and it costs more than a small apartment. I will go into that in a second.

Here is one cabled up with copper cabling - it wouldn't look much different with a great mass of fibre attached. I won't bore you with all the rigmarole of fibre terminations, patching cross frames and the like.

In order to price one up, I visited the Express Data web site. All prices are quote at retail and include GST. I'd expect OneTel Mark II will get a 50% discount due to the volume of gear they will be buying, but lets go through the cost of just one of these switches:

• 6513 chassis - $34,000
• Two power supplies - $11,000 each
  
• Two supervisor modules (in case one fails) - $62,000 each
• Two dist. forwarding cards - $33,000 each
  
• 9 x 24 port fibre modules - $33,000 each
• Two x 4 port 10GB modules - $45,000 each
  
• 216 x GBICs - $882 each

Ouch. Let's add that lot up - $823,000, and I am sure I have missed some memory and licenses, and this does not include another 10-15% on top for maintenance and support.

Let's reduce that by 50% and call it an even $400,000. That is sufficient to light up the fibre to 216 homes. The cost of just this back-end switch alone works out at $1850 per house.

Now then, we are talking about wiring up say 2 million houses. If each switch does 200 houses, we need 10,000 of these out in the field.

After that though, what do these connect to? I included two x 4 port 10GB modules on the assumption that each switch will have a pair of 10GB uplinks to another pair of switches one level up (in case some idiot puts a backhoe through one fibre uplink, your traffic will run over the other uplink. Modules also fail, so if one 10GB module fails, you traffic runs on the other - everything about this switch is redundant - apart from the last mile link to your house).

The thing is though, they might not bother running 10GB uplinks from each node - 1GB might be enough. But what is the point of running 100MB to each house and then having 216 of them sharing a 1GB uplink?

OK, let's assume you are cabling up our area. I think there are 20,000 dwellings and businesses. You need 100 front end switches. They connect back to a series of mid-tier switches. If we are running 10GB uplinks to the mid-tier switches, and each module can only support 4 links, and each 6513 has 11 slots available, that means you can connect 44 front-end switches to each mid-tier switch. We need 3 for our area, which you then double to provide redundancy. Let's price up the mid-tier switches

• 6513 chassis - $34,000
• Two power supplies - $11,000 each
  
• Two supervisor modules (in case one fails) - $62,000 each
• Two dist. forwarding cards - $33,000 each
  
• 11 x 4 port 10GB modules - $45,000 each
  
• 44 x 10GB FXP modules at $3,000 each

$875,000 retail, or let's say $400,000 again with the discount to make life easier. We need six of them to support 20,000 homes, so we split the $2.4 million cost across them and that comes to $120 per house.

Or, we could say that we know that we are going to have 10,000 front-end switches across the country. 10,000 divided by 44 equals 227 - call it 230 mid-tier switches, which you need to double. So we are now up to 10,460 switches at $400,000.

Wouldn't you love to be the salesman collecting the commission on that sale?

The 460 mid-tier switches then need to link into the core, where you need another 2 dozen to complete the picture. Let's call it an even 10,500 switches at $400,000 each. The cost for switches alone comes to $4,200,000,000. Call it $4.2 billion for 2 million homes, or $2,100 before you have laid an inch of fibre. Of course the entire network is unlikely to consists of this model or even brand of switch - I have simplified things terribly just to provide some base costings.

There are 7 million houses in Australia, plus lots more business premises. I can see $16 billion being spent importing switches from China if you want to run fibre to 90% of them.

Notice I have not added a cent for the racks and data centres and air conditioners and backup generators and backup batteries and alarm systems and all the rest required to house all these switches. I also haven't added a cent for all the fibre required out in the street, plus all the patching that each data centre will need. Not a cent has been included for design, installation, project management, electricity, maintenance, security, network operations centres to run it all from and so on. Then you have networking monitoring, billing systems, a help desk/call centre and blah blah blah. Big money pit.

I'm starting to see where the $43 billion number came from.

I am wondering though whether they will actually run the fibre in and terminate it in each house, or just terminate it in a pit out in the street and only run it in if the household requests it. If the fibre stops in the street outside your front gate, you might not consider it fibre to the home, but Kevni would. You see, he has said nothing about running fibre into the home.

Now, what do you need at home to connect to this network?

At present, you can buy a nice little ADSL router with wireless and 4 network ports for $140.

The GBIC alone that you will require to light up your fibre termination will cost over $300. All that gets you is a fancy laser pointer the size of a small eraser - you still need to connect that to something, like a router with wireless and 4 network ports. At present, I can't find anything like that on the market in Australia. The closest I can find is a switch that will accept a fibre connection for $600 (into which you then insert a $300 GBIC) and if you want wireless, you then connect your wireless router to the new switch.

In other words, the days of a nice, cheap $140 home network are over. Start thinking $1,000 to get connected.

So that's $1,000 for networking kit at your end and $2,100 at the "other" end and an unknown amount to provide the fibre in the middle and put that "other" end together.

How many people are sitting at home right now getting ready to pay that sort of money?

Stuffing chooks

I promise that this will be the last in a short series of recipes for manly men. Men who like to eat like men. Perhaps even men who eat other men.

Let's not go there.

Today, we feature stuffing. I'm talking about stuffing a chook, or a duck, or even a goose. If you want to stuff an economy, go talk to Woin Swan. Or, if you want to see a goose stuff an economy.... still go and see Woin Swan. If you want to see a chicken act like a turkey, go see Krudd.

Question - can I use this recipe to stuff a dolphin?

Answer - go away. You annoy me.

Question - what about fish?

Answer - what about them?

You can use this for just about anything that flies, or would like to fly. It's good with chooks, ducks, geese and turkeys. Do not start me on ducks stuffed into geese and then stuffed into turkeys.

Question - what about penguins?

Answer - I thought I told you to go away.

First, get your bird. Fresh, frozen, hanging in the shed out the back and slowly going green - whatever. Do the usual thawing and rinsing and cleaning. This stuffing is no good without something to stuff, so sort out the stuffee before thinking about the stuffing. Otherwise, you will be stuffed.

Question - does it need to be organic?

Answer - I prefer them with the organs removed.

Question - no, "organic".

Answer - is that short for "organ mechanic"? Sounds like a prostitute to me. Or a quack that does penis extensions. What has that got to do with the stuffing of chickens? (Russ Meyer fans may recall a certain barnyard scene in one of his movies that involved a naked man with a chicken - I will not go there).

You really only need three things to make a stuffing (apart from a chook or duck or whatever) - onions, bread and herbs. So go and find those three things to start with.

Question - brown onions or white onions?

Answer - what are you, a racist? I have no onion preferences, and I do not think it necessary for my young children to be forced to play with brown and white onions in kindergarten so that they don't grow up with weird prejudices.

Question - how many onions?

Answer - well, how big is your bird, and how big are your onions? Forget that. Start with two onions that are smaller than a cricket ball. We're going to make more stuffing than will actually fit into the bird, so don't sweat it. But if you are doing a big bird (not the Big Bird) then you can scale things up.

Question - but don't you need to sweat the onions?

Answer - ok smartarse, you are right. But that comes later. To start with, just find two onions.

Question - does it matter if they are a lot smaller than cricket balls?

Answer - no. So long as they are bigger than golf balls.

Question - what is a cricket ball?

Answer - something real men bowl at each other at high speed. If you still don't get it, go find a baseball. Then find two onions smaller than that.

Now you need some bread.

Question - can I use packet breadcrumbs that I bought at the supermarket.

Answer - leave this blog and never come back. Mention breadcrumbs again and I will feed you feet first into a wood chipper.

Let me start again. Now you need some bread. Preferably a good Italian loaf, like ciabatta.

Question - how do you pronounce that?

Answer - I have no idea. I walk into the wog deli and point.

Question - what about a french stick?

Answer - if you were suggesting that we have a bowl of hot chocolate and wanted some bread to dip in it, I would say yes. But we are making stuffing, so you need something with body. The bread needs to be chewy. If you feed ciabatta to pensioners, their false teeth will come out. That's the sort of bread you need. It's the sort of bread where you need cheek muscles like Arnie to chew it.

Question - what about Wonderbread?

Answer - that is right up there with packet breadcrumbs. Wonderbread is not bread. It's a wonder the food and health authorities allow them to call it bread. It is not bread. It is white paste with small holes in it. Go away.

Question - what about brown bread?

Answer - fuck off hippy.

Select a few large slices of ciabatta, or whatever chewy loaf you have managed to find. Yes, you can bake your own bread at home if you want to. Sheesh. Ciabatta is not even and square - it is normally shaped like an enormous, slightly flattened slug. Use the big slices from the middle. Get your olive oil - you do have olive oil? - and a pastry brush (which is just a fancy term for paint brush that has not been used to paint anything yet) and brush olive oil on both sides of the bread. Pop them in the toaster and toast them for about half the time you would normally toast a bit of bread.

Be careful here - the oil will cause the bread to toast at least twice as fast as normal. Watch it carefully. Having your toaster catch on fire at this point will not help things.

Question - how much oil should I apply?

Answer - just don't soak it in like a sponge. Apply a thin coat - like the first coat that you apply over the undercoat when spray painting a car.

Question - I've never spray painted a car.

Answer - that is not a question. And you are not a man. Be gone.

Once you bread is slightly brown - all you want is for it to be crispy and crunchy, not black - you essentially have croutons made via a manly method. Let the bread cool - the oil will make it dastardly hot, like molten lead when you are casting your own shot, so don't try and grab it straight out of the toaster.

Question - I've never cast my own shot.

Answer - that is not a question either, and you are not a man. Didn't I tell you to be gone? Be gone! Begaaaaawn!

Once it has cooled down a bit, slice it into small squares. You do that by slicing the bread into thin strips, then rotating the strips through 90 degrees and slicing across the strips to make squares.

Question - can I make rectangles instead?

Answer - it's your stuffing. You can make love hearts for all I care.

Question - should I cut the crusts off?

Answer - this is stuffing for men, not girls! Men eat their crusts! Leave the crusts on!

Throw all the nicely toasted bread squares (or lovehearts) with crusts into a big bowl. Try not to eat too many of them. If you have selected a good loaf of bread, and a good olive oil, they will be delicious. Wonderbread (curses be upon it) and flavourless oils fall flat on their faces at this point. It is important to use good bread and a flavoursome olive oil!

If you want to go slightly nuts, you can cut a garlic clove and rub it on the oiled bread before you toast it, or you can even make up a mix of oil and garlic and paint that on the bread and then toast it, but bits of garlic will fall off and land in the toaster, and it doesn't smell that great when you are making toast and vegemite for breakfast the next day. We aren't making genuine croutons here - we are making manly stuffing. Men do not ponce around with frying croutons in a pan.

Remember those onions?

Peel them and chop them up. Normally, one would say "dice", but you might think I am talking about a game of chance and start rolling them across the bench top to see what numbers come up. Chop them as finely or as coarsely as you like. I prefer as fine as I can make them without removing my fingertips.

Put a frying pan on the stove, add a glug of olive oil heat to medium heat and when the oil has warmed up, chuck the onions in and let them sweat. That means fiddle with them from time to time by pushing them this way and that with a wooden spoon or a fancy silicone spatula. Do not use your fingers to do this. After a few minutes, chop up some garlic and throw that in. Or do what I do - throw the onions on, then start peeling and grating garlic (I have a very nifty little garlic grater to do this). By the time you have finished applying the last bandaid to your fingers after grating the tips off, it will be time to throw in the garlic.

Question - how much garlic?

Answer - does your girlfriend like garlic? If not, I suggest none. If she likes it, as much as you want.

Do not let the garlic go dark brown! Just cook it enough to take the sharp edge off it - until it is golden. But cook the onion - it will not cook much more once you put it into the chook, and you do not want half-raw onion in your stuffing.

Then tip the onion and garlic in with the breadcrumbs. Or, you can tip the breadcrumbs into the pan (if it is big enough) and infuse the pan flavour into them. Then tip the whole lot into your nice, big bowl. If it tastes good at this point, you are off to a good start. It should taste like a steak sandwich with BBQ'd onions, but without the steak. Got that?

Now the fun begins. It is time to raid your kitchen cupboards, and your herb garden (if you have one) or your neighbour's herb garden (if they are not armed, and have no attack dogs).

If you have pinenuts, toss them into the frying pan you have just used and swizzle them around from time to time until they have browned a bit. What that usually means is that about half have a big brown patch on them and the rest still look raw. That's enough - toss them into the bowl.

Question - how many pinenuts should I use?

Answer - I have a big resealable tub that all my nuts and dried fruit lives in. I usually hunt around and fish out a half used bag of pinenuts. That is sufficient.

Question - can I use pine cones?

Answer - you have a serious problem. And your name is probably Antony Lowenstein.

The best way to spark up a stuffing is to add lots of dried fruit and lots of herbs. You know the stuffing that you get when you buy a whole chook from say Red Rooster? (it is a greenish paste of breadcrumbs and finely chopped lawn clippings). You want your stuffing to look and feel and taste nothing like that. Use that as your guide.

I usually roughly chop dried dates, apricots and whatever else I find in the cupboard and then throw them into the bowl.

Question - can I use dried apple?

Answer - I am not allowed to eat dried apple. I ate a whole packet on the way to the snow once, and did the most horrendous farts for the next 4 days. The whole lodge slept with the windows open, even though it was well below freezing outside. I even cleared an entire bar one night. Everyone ran outside with their drinks - we're talking hundreds of people. If I farted on the chairlift, you could hear dozens of chairs full of people behind me complaining about the stench. The worst moment came when I fluffed on the chair lift, and it stopped! We almost lifted the safety bar and jumped. You can risk dried apple, but I won't.

The trick is not to end up with a dried fruit salad, but a nice mix of fruit, herbs, bread and onions. I don't use things like raisins, but I have tossed in dried cranberries. I don't recommend them. Stick to things that you would normally eat fresh off a tree - apricots, dates and so on.

Question - what about the herbs?

Answer - well, what does your garden grow? I avoid coriander and basil - too strong. Parsley is good, but in small quantities. Same with rosemary. Sage can be thrown in by the handful. I love lemon thyme with chook, but I normally make a herb butter with garlic and lemon thyme and stuff that under the skin, so I don't put much in the stuffing - you want to mix things up a bit. Lawn clippings are definitely out. Those thin green things that look like tubular grass - they are definitely in. Put lots of them in.

I also like to zest a lemon or an orange and toss that in the stuffing, maybe with just a small squeeze of the fruit as well. I then chop the lemon in half and use that to seal the chook after filling it with stuffing. More on that at the end.

So, now you have a glorious stuffing mix. Taste it. You should want to eat it as it is. It should be a nice balance of tasty bread, aromatic onions and herbs and garlic and the sweetness and richness of dried fruit. If you have got it right, you should now be hoping to have way, way too much of it, as you will want to eat a fair amount before sticking it into the orifice of a raw chicken.

Question - can I add booze?

Answer - I like to add a touch of tawny port from time to time.

Question - how much?

Answer - well, I pour a good measure of port into a glass when I start making the stuffing. If there is any left by the time the stuffing is made, I tip that into the stuffing. You just want a hint of flavour - not so much that you end up with fruit floating in a thick port soup.

Question - should I add an egg to thicken it?

Answer - I wouldn't bother. You can if you want. If you add an egg, you will have to stop eating it. That's why I don't add an egg.

Don't forget the salt and pepper. Use plenty of salt - the fruit is sweet, so you need salt to offset it. Just don't turn it into a salt lick.

Stuff the chook, and when it is full, stick the lemon halves in at the end to stop the stuffing falling out. You should have stuffing left over - stick it in a ramekin, cover it with foil and bake it in the oven with the chook.

Here is my advice about the bread. Lots of juice will run out of the chook as it cooks. Some of that will run internally into the stuffing. If you use shitty, pasty, gooey white bread, you will end up with mush. If you use a tough, crusty, chewy bread like ciabatta, it will absorb the tasty juices without dissolving into a floury slop. I have used ciabatta that was a week old and tough as a shingle. At that age, you trim the mouldy bits off, oil it, toast it and then chuck it in. The tough old bread, when cooked inside a chook with fruit and herbs, will emerge with plenty of body and stacks of taste. Do not skimp on the quality of the bread.

Cook the chook however you normally cook it. I take it you can roast a chook. If not, go consult Pogria.

That's my stuffing.

Try not to stuff it up.

What does this tell you about the chances of a 100mb network succeeding?

From the SMH today:

Telstra's cable network has about 400,000 customers but only about 10 to 15 per cent are believed to have taken up the highest speeds now available of up to 30 megabits per second.

Now have a look at Telstra's current pricing plans for ADSL:

256/64kbps

• $29.95 200MB
• $59.95 12GB

1500/256kbps

• $39.95 400MB
• $69.95 12GB
• $79.95 25GB

ADSL2+ ADSL

• $59.95 600MB
• $89.95 12GB
• $99.95 25GB
• $149.95 60GB

If you have a look at the TPG pricing plans or the iiNet pricing plans, you see the same pattern repeating:

1. You pay for higher speed, and
2. You pay for a larger download quota
   

With TPG and iiNet, you get a quota split into two parts - peak and off peak. The top iiNet plan at $129.95 offers 60GB of peak and 80GB of off peak quotas. Not bad.

If you graph all those Telstra pricing points and run a trend line through them, you get this:


The topmost data points show the ADSL2+ pricing plans, which top out at $150 per month. These are much the same as the Telstra cable pricing plans, which offer up to 30MB download speeds at present. However, the SMH has just told us that only 10-15% are going for the highest speed offerings. The only reason I can see anyone choosing the fastest plan under this pricing policy is because you want to download more than 25GB per month, and the only way to go over that limit is to pay $150 per month for an ADSL2+ plan with the top download rate.

Here are the pricing steps in each plan:

• The first 12GB (or thereabouts) costs you $30, regardless of the speed chosen
• The second step of 13GB costs you $10, regardless of the plan
• The third jump of 35GB, only available under one plan, costs $50

So we have:

• Step 1 - $2.50 per GB
• Step 2 - $0.77 per GB
• Step 3 - $1.43 per GB

This averages out at $1.56 per GB.

The thing is, downloading data is not free. I believe this is mainly because so much of our internet content comes from the US, and the undersea cables are not cheap to use, and the US internet carriers charge quite a bit for interconnections.

Now there are two ways this 100MB network can play out.

The first option is that people do not change their browsing habits drastically, and are happy to stay on a 12GB plan - which is probably where the bulk are now.

The second option is that this triggers a radical shift in habits, and the move to a 100MB network means that many people migrate to a much bigger download plan. The question is, how big a plan would they need?

I think this question is already a moot point - Telstra has already told us that only 10-15% have moved to the fastest, fattest plan, which matches how I view internet users. There are a small number of geeks who are very heavy users (I have worked with a few of them), there are a reasonable number at the other end of the spectrum who are on 256k links, or even dial-up and are happy with it, and then there is the mass in the middle on a mi-level, reasonably priced plan.

I used to argue with my last geek on a regular basis - he was on the fattest TPG plan, and he was downloading around the clock. He needed terabytes of storage at home to handle his downloads. He was also a mad World of Warcraft game-head, and would sometimes arrive at work not having slept the night before after battling online somethings all night. Senator Conroy and Krudd obviously think that we are all like that, or that we should all become like that.

Geekboy had no kids. I tried to break it to him that when he did start having them, he wouldn't have time for all that. Geeks. They never listen.

But let us look at the pricing graph on the assumption that the likes of you and me mutate into uber-geeks when the fibre rolls in, and we want an all you can eat type of internet plan.

If you read the fine print and FAQs on the Telstra and iiNet sites, they tell you that even on ADSL2+, there are not many people getting over 20MB speeds. Most are in the 10-20MB range.

So let's assume that if you are currently on the fastest plan available, you are getting 15MB maximum speeds. If you speed now goes up 6 times or more to 100MB, how much more download quota will you want?

Well, let's assume 150GB - with all of that being peak, rather than a split of peak and off-peak.

At an average cost of $1.50 per GB, your download quota alone will cost you $225. then you have to factor in the installation and equipment charge. Even if you assume a lowly cost of $50 per month, you are looking at a $275 per month bill.

I'd say most broadband users are currently paying around the $50-70 mark, and are reasonably happy with that. I'm on a $69.95 plan which gives us 12GB per month, and I see no reason to pay an extra $10 per month to go up to a 25GB plan. We get by with 12GB almost every month - what is the point? Should we download movies we don't have time to watch, because we are doing things with the kids?

The only way I can see this thing flying is if the fibre network is expected to replace the free-to-air broadcast TV network, and I can't see that happening. Otherwise, it is going to provide enormous capacity that will never be used.

You could argue that people will be happy to have a 100MB connection and stick with a 12GB monthly plan, but that's like having a Ferrari that you can only drive in first gear. I don't see it working out that way.

So this fibre network offers the following:

• It offers speeds that 85-90% of users aren't interested in now
• It pre-supposes people moving to much higher download plans, which most people are not prepared to pay for
• If people don't move to "fatter" plans, it represents tremendous unused capacity
• Unused capacity represents wasted resources - mainly money

By the way, how many households can afford internet plans in the region of $225 per month? The top 5% maybe? The top 1%? If your aim is to deliver fast internet to the greatest number of homes, then you need to deliver affordable plans to those on average weekly earnings or less.

Given that they are talking about this being a wholesale network only, if you want maximum penetration so that every deadbeat and bludger can afford it - which is a political rather than economic aim - you are probably talking about a maximum monthly wholesale charge of $20. About what the copper line rental is now. On that basis, it will take about 1,000 years to pay this network off.

And if my logic has still not persuaded you, try this extrapolation for size:

If you follow the trend line, you'll see that a 150GB plan would cost $300 per month using current pricing models - that's about a set of Floyd's balls per month.

Maybe 5% of the population will think about taking up that offer. The economics of this plan suck.

Update - just to be fair, I've added the iiNet pricing as well to the next graph. Note however that iiNet's plans include a mix of peak and off-peak quotas, and I have included both.


I think the TPG prices need to be taken with a pinch of salt as they do not appear to include monthly line rental charges, which start at $20.