The issue of upload speeds under a Fibre To The Node NBN (as proposed by the coalition) has remained largely unanswered. In a Google Hangout moderated by Fairfax, Malcolm Turnbull has provided a little more detail — but only a little.
When asked about upload speeds, Malcolm Turnbull’s answer was, as it’s long been, that “The upload speeds are very much for the retailers to configure.”
Turnbull did expand on this a little. “From a technical view, the way that download/upload speeds are set are typically in the order of 4/1; so when we talk 25 down, we’re talking 4 or 5 megs up.
It’s important not to overdo this. The Net is getting more asymmetrical, not less. The vast majority of traffic is heading down. What is driving this is video; mostly video entertainment. People do upload videos, but the upload channel is much less significant in a residential consumer environment.”
I guess that folds in well to the stated Coalition aim that future FTTP rollouts will be limited to business parks and the like, although it wholly misses the point (in my view) that having a ubiquitous network would help to remove the need for workers to necessarily be in such a business park.
Then again, Turnbull also took the opportunity to express his indignation at Australia’s technology media and its lack of imagination, and I’m part of that pack, along with (according to Turnbull) ZDNet’s “Josh Gordon“, so perhaps I’m missing the point.
Source: SMH
Image: Eva Rinaldi