On cricket calculations

David Salter, former Head of TV Sport at Channel Seven and the ABC writes: Re. “Is this $1 billion cricket deal all it’s cracked up to be?”

In his attempt at a cost-benefit comparison between the new television rights deals for cricket and tennis, Glenn Dyer makes a fundamental error by omitting from his calculations the number of televised hours each sport provides.

All the worthwhile tennis in Australia is compressed into one month — January. But there are six hours of quality cricket for four or five days a week throughout the summer. Big difference.

On next steps for the NBN

Laurie Patton writes: Re. “NBN Co always had obsolete technology, now it has to admit it”

NBN Co actually started out with 21st Century fibre and was the envy of broadband networks worldwide. Departing CEO Bill Morrow has obviously worked out he’s on a hiding to nothing after four years haplessly defending a mess of someone else’s making.

Left in charge you have the chair of NBN Co, Ziggy Switkowski, and Mr Turnbull’s former departmental secretary, Drew Clark. Clark oversaw development of the fundamentally flawed MTM model and is now on the NBN Co board. Both should do the right thing and help the government (and the country) find a way out of the mess they’ve created.

As I’ve been saying for three years now, initially in my previous role as CEO of Internet Australia, we need a bipartisan recovery plan and we need it now.

Julian Robinson writes: Re. “NBN Co always had obsolete technology, now it has to admit it”

I wonder if the outrage at the failings of the NBN are not overblown? I’m no apologist for the decision to replace fibre to the home with the “multi-technology-mix” but despite looking have not yet found answers to two very relevant questions:

1. What is the likely capacity of 5G to eat into the NBN? As a tech person I appreciate that a given radio bandwidth can only carry a certain amount of data, but have yet to find knowledgeable analysis (that must have been done) that tries to quantify the limits on 5G capacity vs potential demand. My instinct is that 5G is not capable of serving up the millions of movies we want to watch in populated areas. If true this means we’ll still need the NBN just about everywhere.

2. To what extent is expenditure on the existing FTT-node installations wasted? It seems likely that at a later time it would be perfectly feasible to extend fibre from existing nodes to kerbside without undoing too much of what was done the first time ’round. In this case we’d be more talking about a staged delivery instead of than the original “all at once” implementation Labor proposed. This could even have cost advantages …

I would appreciate practical discussion along these lines, and any relevant facts if someone can point to them.