A number of commentators have claimed that Australia doesn’t have the backhaul to handle everyone having 100Mbps. Some even going so far to say that “if you give several million households 100Mbps bandwidth, then you have exceeded the entire bandwidth of the whole internet”1. Computerworld did an article on the impact of international backhaul and asked the question in regard to the NBN “do we have a capacity bottleneck to access this (international) data?” Their answer, “Not even close”.
As far back as early last year Robin Russell, CEO of the Australia-Japan Cable, wrote in an article that international networks are nowhere near being considered a capacity constraint.
“That proposition can be despatched immediately,” he wrote. “Each of the four networks that will be providing the bulk of international connections for Australia is capable of carrying at least a terabit per second of data. The total international capacity in use for the Australian market in 2009 is estimated to be around 300 gigabits per second. Accordingly, total capacity usage could double, then double again, then double again, and then double yet again before the capabilities of those networks was exhausted. It would therefore be difficult to say that international networks are a capacity bottleneck in the Australian market.”2
Nortel Networks’ Ryan “Perera said that Nortel’s modelling suggested the NBN would demand 3.6Tbps of international capacity … assuming bandwidth of only 30Mbps per user, not 100Mbps. We know that the capacity is less than 1Tbps today.”3
Data carriers Pacnet and Pacific Fibre are partnering to build the Pacific Fibre cable, a low-latency undersea fibre optic cable spanning Australia, New Zealand and the US.
The bandwidth of the new cable will be a minimum of two fibre pairs with 64 wavelengths per pair. Each wavelength has a throughput capacity of 40 gigabits per second (Gbps) for a total of 5.21 terabits per second (Tbps) bandwidth.
A video of a typical cable laying ship can be seen here4
The cable length is estimated to be 13,600 km long and will connect Sydney, Auckland and Los Angeles… The pipe can be upgraded to 12Tbps with 100G technology.5
According to Duideka’s findings, by the time the NBN is built we will be have 25 terabits of international capacity, what does that mean?
… keeping in mind the ABS statistics say the average fixed line connection only downloads around 35GB, 1TB is 1000GB
It is a similar story with the bandwidth in your street
- Duideka’s findings in number form can be found at http://whrl.pl/RcolMc .
- http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1515125 [↩]
- http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/358578/nbn_101_floating_submarine_cable_question/ [↩]
- http://www.ecmag.com/?fa=article&articleID=6045 [↩]
- Yahoo 7 TV, Mighty Ships TC Documentary [↩]
- http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/358578/nbn_101_floating_submarine_cable_question/ [↩]