To do 10M premises in ten years there need to be 500 premises connected each working hour over the ten years. A million a year. A few thousand a year just isn’t enough.

GPON is an established technology – there were millions of active connections elsewhere in the world before NBNCo chose GPON.

This project needs to demonstrate that it can scale up to the delivery rate required.

The 14 NBN users in Brunswick in no way represent a metric of interest in the project. They represent a trial sample, the number of which was deliberately limited during the trial phase BEFORE the commercial, open phase begins in October in order to conduct tests and iron out kinds.

Repeating the insinuation that only 14 people were interested is untruthful and indicates an unwillingness to check basic facts.

A far more relevant indicator is the number of users in Tasmanian NBN sites, where connections have been in place for a year or so. In Tasmania, the number of active users (with a service connected) is around 34% of the number who were wired up. This is a good figure at this point, considering that the towns in Tasmania are not considered a high socio-economic group.

A further consideration is the well-known “adoption curve” – a typical bell curve where the early adopters are a fairly small number, followed by a much larger number of users later on.

In light of this, it is quite impossible to talk of the NBN as an “early failure” – it is no more an early failure than were mobile phones, DVD players and other now-ubiquitous devices, which all began with a very small number of users before becoming widely popular.

Dr. Ward is a wonderfully entertaining and accessible writer with much to describe of tremendous importance to this debate. He will explain in great detail the many, many interesting things that have happened on planet Earth since higher life suddenly appeared, in the Cambrian age, some 530 million years ago. Eg., five major planet-wide extinctions of 50-95 per cent of all animals & plants. Many more extinctions of lesser effect. Wide swings in oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations, & temperatures.
You will be amazed at the dramatic climate changes during the same period, with median temperature swings of 70 degrees Fahr. During the “snowball earth” period, the entire oceans were frozen!
We are currently experiencing an unusually warm interglacial period, beginning twelve thousand years ago, unprecedented in its extension so far, happening in the middle of a 200 million year span of quite colder climate. Current average median planet-wide temperature is 57 degrees Fahr., while the average temperature over the past 200 million years is nearer minus 20! Without any doubt, this warm time has led to the development of large-scale agriculture and the explosion in homo sapiens population from 1-3 million at 12 thousand years ago to the current 6.4 billion today. It is difficult to imagine this human expansion occurring except in such a period of warm climate stability.
Estimates are for ca. 20 billion humans by 2050. This is not good!

IMO, Dr. Ward’s books should be required reading for any and all responsible citizens of planet Earth. Readers would greatly enjoy the effort and be far more informed about these most serious issues.

Jack E. Martinelli Ph. D. MIT 2011-07-06
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