Monday 26 August 2013

NBN: Debunking Turnbull interview with Alan Jones.

Comment on: Turnbull with Alan Jones, 15-Jul-2013

Other related pieces
  • The Disturbance Bogeyman: Your rockery might be ruined! FTTN means 3 massive disruptions, plus you get Fibre connected later, anyway. Modern installs don't dig trenches.
  • "We don't know the Future": Fibre became old hat 30 years ago. There is no future Amazing New Wunderkind Technology whose magic touch will somehow be instant, fast and free.
  • "Incremental Upgrades": The Core network is continuously upgraded, the Customer Access Network, the part the NBN replaces, has never been "incrementally upgraded".
  • Disruption and reusing assets you don't own or control, for free. The most bizarre logic you'll ever see. Somehow it's good business to preserve and upgrade somebody else's assets. They sold the house (Telstra) when they owned it, now want to pay for a complete renovation and move back in, and pay rent at the upgraded price! In what fantasy world is this "good business"??

The Turnbull Copper/Node Plan may be good for today and the next 10 years but what about 20 years’ or 30 years’ time?

1. How do Telecomms and very other infrastructure business plan? They have to invest and build ahead of time so capacity is there when needed.

They do forecasts, which naturally have a range of probabilities...
Based on averaging demand from large numbers of unique consumers and their historical preferences & consumption.
  • We have very good data from the ABS on the growth in demand for Download Data: it's been growing at 60%/year for average download volume.
  • Upload, not so much.
  •  Even at 30%/year growth in the NBN Co Plan, it's impressive demand growth we'll be seeing.coming.
Why Turnbull has to a) insist 3.5% real growth all that's possible and b) why he has never heard of sustained high-growth rates in Oz Telecomms?

He can't look, won't look because he knows the facts already... High growth for next 25 years. [that's a good stress-test modelling for the Copper/Node plan]

2. NPV applies to the whole of the accounts: CapEx, Opex, Revenue, financial costs (Interest, depcr, ...), Profit, full loan repayment and Return on Investment (implies 'we paid back the loan').

Applying NPV solely to the Cost side is wrong. They're covering up a $10 billion loss, and intending to not pay their largest Creditor, Telstra, $8 billion on already agreed contracts and NOTHING for the use of the copper for 20 years.

Mal-economics, where fantasy becomes Reality and all your Financial Dreams come True!

3. The truth about Data Networking is a exceedingly wide demand: exponential distribution.
Top 1% consume 75-times more data than the average of the bottom 50%.
And the bottom 25% average 500-1000 times less than the top users.
The network profits are generated by the top-end users, NOT the bottom 25%-50%.

The "speed fiends" pay for everyone else. When people are allowed real choice, they assign a very high utility value to the time they save through faster access rates.

Commentary

I've realised that Turnbull is so hard to criticise for lying, dissembling and misdirection because it is so basic and so dense: he buries us so completely in B/S, that refuting any of it is long and tedious, which loses the audience, meanwhile the Reality Distortion Field has skipped on to more outrageous B/S.

If something is correct, it's turned upside-down to mean "bad", if something is incorrect it's touted as gospel.

The "spaces between" is where most of his worst, most egregious deceptions & withholdings are made.
It's what he doesn't say that forms the basis of his biggest lies: he left out 25 of 30 years of financial forecasts and nobody noticed!

Like the "Coalition NBN Plan": They shred a real Business Plan but never present one of their own.

They present a few partial cost models and snippets from a fully worked model they never reveal. Nor any of their input assumptions.

Would Turnbull submit that "proposal" to a BANK and get a second look?
No!, so why give it to us, the voters?

LNP provide: No revenues, np full costs (CapEx, Opex, Financing/Investment), no profits, no loan repayments, no major creditor (Telstra) payments either and no ROI, just a massive and compounding loss.
No Risk Analysis, contingencies & mitigations or any range of outcomes.

He's a master of phrasing concepts "simply and obviously" - and with upside-down logic, or "double-speak": what's good is bad, what's wrong is right.

To refute Turnbull's lies requires time and detail : which will just see people's eye's glaze over. He knows this and plays on it.
Eg: "My numbers haven't been questioned in 4 months."

Turnbull also adapts:
  • he doesn't just respond to previous criticisms ("building a harbour bridge",
  • he adapts he argument to audience, Jones and Kohler get different lines
  • he drops old arguments (no more "$50 modem" and "more affordable" is rare)
  • and new arguments. He's now picked up on asbestos pits and how they can leave them alone.
Which nicely ignores "we will replace copper with fibre down the track", so the poor state either means higher maintenance and constant remediation or much higher costs later when its degraded more.

He phrases negatives as positives, but how unusual is that?
the Telstra network is a deplorable state, only 30% of it will be usable.

So instead of a reasonable "holly scintillating poop, batman! That'll be terrible for VDSL/FTTN!"
we get something like:
 "VDSL/FTTN  is wonderful because we can use it 'as in' and disturb your rockery". Never mind he doesn't own or control the asset and his plan doesn't include paying the owners, Telstra, a cent for it.

I'm thinking the most telling thing is the absence of Business Leaders standing behind Turnbull and supporting his views, applauding his initiatives to save money (avoid investment) and they aren't standing shoulder-to-shoulder chanting "only 25 megabits, no more".

Anyone in charge of a current business, wholesale or retail, goods or services, knows that their future profitability is tied to a solid, reliable and universal broadband network, so their customers can interact and shop on-line with them.

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