• Sentiment of the moment: “pandemic swine flu, aaarrrggghh”! And in fairness, there is a reasonable risk here, but right now it’s just a tiny problem — so it’s entirely correct to act swiftly to stop its spread (nip the problem in the bud, as it were). But hearing about this has clearly gotten a bunch of people awfully panicked (to the point that I’ve repeatedly been warned to avoid New York?! xkcd summarised this pretty well). Thus it seems the world’s public health authorities are getting better at managing outbreaks, but failing miserably at managing public perceptions and PR …
• Good grief, President Obama has announced a lot of stuff these last few weeks (maybe it’s the hundred-day anniversary thing?). Talk of spending cuts, prodding Congress with its environmental legislation, proposing investment in high-speed passenger rail, and more! It is wonderful to see people getting excited about these announcements — but for now, they are just announcements. I dearly hope some-or-all of these plans turn into reality, because that would be really exciting.
• Looking back at Australia, and to wrap up the National Fibre Spend-fest coverage, I noticed an interesting comaprison of fibre prices — although I suspect the numbers in my last post, rough-and-ready though they were, are more accurate — and it’s interesting to see a defence of the ownership model that Team Rudd are going with. (though, who left the stupid Perth comment?!)
• It so happens that I fly into Perth on the day of the daylight savings vote! And I still think it’s breathtakingly pointless; I mean, c’mon, anyone notice anything wrong with, oh, the economy lately? But still … this is pretty funny (via Rick!)
• I was saddened to hear that the fourth East Asia Summit meeting, due to be held in Thailand, was cancelled (and the accompanying ASEAN meetings were cut short). Not to dismiss the protestors — Thailand is in a rough state and the current government is far from universally representative — but they are screwing with their country in ways that don’t seem to be helping.
• And finally, there’s been a server change around here (yay OpenVM and cheapness!), but hopefully that was seamless from your point of view.

Reader response time: an e-mail I got yesterday pointed out that at no point in the Prime Minister’s announcement did he talk about how much people would pay to get shiny new FTTH connections! And presumably this will be a significant detail for any private investor deciding whether they want to jump into the venture. In fact, cost questions seem to be the crux of most of the criticism I’ve read (not counting fluff from people who don’t understand that upgrading speeds on fibre is relatively easy; just because it’s built at 100Mbit doesn’t mean it’ll stay there).

Thus I thought I might do a quick and thoroughly unrepresentative survey. In Hong Kong, it’s HK$600 per month for PCCW 100Mbit fibre (that’s US$75 or A$100-ish), while Bredbandsbolaget in Sweden charge 320 kronor (US$40 / A$55) for the same. In New York, Verizon will slug you $140 (A$200) for 50Mbit or $60 (A$95-ish) for 20Mbit — though note that their base US$45 offering is worse than my iiNet connection in Perth!

However, none of those networks was built with government money. South Korean fibre got about $1.5 billion worth of subsidies in the early 2000s (mostly for rural areas), and a Korea Telecom 50Mbit connection in Seoul costs a mere 26 000 won (US$20 / A$27) per month.

Of course, prices in Australia would never start that low. But then, my dial-up connection in 1996 was $5 per hour of use (thank you, Telstra), and of course prices will drop over time. Early adopters may well be slugged $100+ a month to cover construction, but given that the network will be owned by a wholesaler that’s not likely to remain a problem long-term. Optic fibre won’t go obsolete anytime soon; a properly-managed FTTH network should hopefully mean cheap and fast Internet five or ten years after it’s built …!

So the Ruddster has gone and made a post-overseas-trip splash of a technology / economy / “nation-building” announcement, dumping the old decent-but-not-great fibre-to-the-node proposal with an infinitely larger, more expensive, and more complicated fibre-to-the-home solution.

That said, FTTH is also more awesome! We are being promised 100 megabit, the same speed as a typical home wired network, and fibre has plenty of room for technology upgrades. But the 2017 completion date and complicated-sounding public-private partnership are less awesome; how the owner of the new network behaves will be an important question (or in other words, keep yer grubby mitts off, Telstra!). Details are just as scant as they were with the old proposal, so it’s no easier to draw conclusions.

To compare, the best residential Internet in California is 15 megabit, but most people (me included) have closer to 5 megabit; in New York City the fibre service maxes out at 50 megabit (though that’ll likely be upgraded). So it’s not fair to diss on this as slow — unless you compare to places like South Korea and Hong Kong, where crazy population densities allowed even my dodgy hostel to provide a hundred-megabit connection (on good days, at least).

A better question is whether this will be a worthwhile investment, given alternatives. If it works, I can see this giving long-term support to new online services, online TV and VoIP and the like — which would be a great way to nudge growth in the tech and media sectors. But it might also become an ineffective burden on the public purse rather like how Optus and Telstra competed to lay coax TV cables. That technology isn’t outdated and the cables are still useful, but the money could probably have been better spent in mobile coverage or international data links.

Thus I reserve judgement. All else being equal, FTTH is cool, and will be a good thing — it’s just that the devil, as always, lies in the detail.