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Australia The Almighty Buck The Internet

Australia Cockatoos Chew Billion-Dollar Broadband (bbc.com) 82

Posted by msmash from the eat-like-nobody-is-watching dept.
Australia's multimillion dollar broadband network is under attack -- from cockatoos. From a report: The National Broadband Network (NBN) company said it has spent tens of thousands of dollars so far fixing cables chewed by the birds. Australian broadband is already criticised for being slow. According to a recent report it ranks 50th in the world for internet speed. NBN estimates the bill will rise sharply as more damage is uncovered. In an attempt to improve Australia's internet speed -- currently lagging behind many developed countries at 11.1 megabits per second -- a national telecommunications infrastructure project has been instigated and is due for completion in 2021. But engineers returning to sites have found spare cables chewed and frayed. The culprits are cockatoos, a type of parrot which normally eats fruit, nuts, wood and bark.
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Australia Cockatoos Chew Billion-Dollar Broadband

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  • Blue ruin! I'll get some tinnies while you chuck another pie on the barbie, mate.

    • Re: Strewth! (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Your wife's a bird fancier isn't she? I've heard many blokes say she likes a cockatoo.

  • Wow (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Friday November 03, 2017 @01:30PM (#55484209) Homepage Journal
    Whoa, tens of thousands of whole dollars? Sounds like a major problem.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      One Australian Dollar is worth 1 million American Dollars you FUCKING MORON.

    • Sounds like a major problem.

      This could be easily solved with a government hardware giveaway: "One shotgun per child!"

      A .410 and birdshot should be enough, unless the cockatoos are wearing body armor, in which case I'd recommend a Heckler & Koch MP7A1.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        See, the thing is, the last time we went to war with the birds of Australia, we lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

      • Have you seen the state of Australian broadband? Your proposal will simply cause a new headline to run: "Australians taken shotgun to shitty Billion-Dollar Broadband"

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by dow ( 7718 )

        A child with a shotgun would do more damage than the cockatoos. Our Telephone company used to keep complaining that our line had damage that looked like someone had shot it. Eventually they buried that particular line.

  • Yet another reason for people to be screaming, "This Broadband is for the birds!"

  • spare cables chewed and frayed

    American telcos generally lock up equipment, largely due to risk of theft. Concerns are justified, by the way---I've seen a box of F-pin connectors get stolen. Who has a hundred coax cables they need to put ends on?

    If birds chew on the cables, then why not run buried lines and store spare cable in sealed containers?

    "The company says it is currently installing protective casing which costs just A$14 each, that will protect the wires from birds in future and save their three billion dollar network."

    Oh wait, they already figured out how to deal with it. The article is pointless. "Business is inconvenienced and decides to deal with it." Wildlife has always been a nuisance for utilities; in Am

  • The birds are just angry that they don't have Internets

  • It’s Australia (Score:5, Funny)

    by BLToday ( 1777712 ) on Friday November 03, 2017 @02:04PM (#55484475)

    If the birds’ poop didn’t spawn radioactive nanobots then I consider that a win.

  • Cockatoo's don't dig holes, if they have a problem with wildlife eating the cables they should have buried them, then the spiders would protect them.

  • I used to have a pet Umbrella Cockatoo - known in the bird-owners world as a destruct-o-too. Could crunch a broomstick like you and I could crunch celery. The cables should have been buried,

  • "According to a recent report it ranks 50th in the world for internet speed..."

    Of course... most of the internet traffic is going outside Australia, and then gets bottlenecked at the inverters that flip the bits upside down so that the rest of the internet can understand them. This is why digital goods ie movies, music and apps. cost so much more for Australians.

    Well, that's what the industry told me, at least.

    • Of course... most of the internet traffic is going outside Australia

      No it doesn't. The vast majority of the traffic is delivered by local data-centres and CDNs. In Australia it's exclusively the last mile which is utter garbage. 50 year old copper telephone cabling in complete disrepair, where it has been repaired it was done so by connectors which have been discovered to be corrosive, and long runs between nodes and houses such that even some apartments with 4km of the centre of the city are stuck with internet that can at best be described as third world.

  • With all those bites on thier network you would think the bandwidth would improve at least a bit.

  • They're using the wrong transport layer. (Score:3)

    by plopez ( 54068 ) on Friday November 03, 2017 @03:08PM (#55484965) Journal

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    FTFA:
    "The Hungry Beast team had read about the South African experiment and assumed that as a developed western country, Australia would have higher speeds. The experiment had the team transfer a 700MB file via three delivery methods to determine which was the fastest: A carrier pigeon with a microSD card, a car carrying a USB Stick, or a Telstra (Australia's largest telecom provider) ADSL line. The data was to be transferred from Tarana in rural New South Wales to the western-Sydney suburb of Prospect, New South Wales, a distance of 132 km by road. Approximately halfway through the race the internet connection unexpectedly dropped and the transfer had to be restarted, the pigeon won the race with a time of approximately 1 hour 5 minutes, the car came in second at 2 hours 10 minutes, while the internet transfer did not finish, having dropped out a second time and not coming back. The estimated time to upload completion at one point was as high as 9 hours, and at no point did the estimated upload time fall below 4 hours.[12]
    "

  • And I hear snowcocks can be a handful too.

  • We have the same issue here every fall with squirrels chewing the insulation off the fiber. Just what are they making the insulation out of that makes it so appealing to animals?

  • Bury the cables? That's so obvious there must be a reason they're not doing it. Musn't there?

  • Cockatoos are very intelligent and are perfectly capable of finding food themselves. The problem is many people feed them and they get bored, so they take to pulling out nails. Some communities here have begun to distribute flyers warning people not to feed them but stricter enforecement is probably needed, especially as in some places feeding birds is actively encourage, even though they don't need this type of help.

  • Over here, the bald eagle has a facination for removing drones from the sky. I suppose we have to add yet another dangerous wildlife to the list: ravenous cockies eating the bandwidth!

    As they say: Gawd help all of us.

  • Why aren't these cables armored and buried underground? This is incompetence on the part of the cable providers, entirely!
  • Some folks I know in Australia describe the cockatoos there as amazingly destructive. They travel in flocks, and will occasionally settle on some poor somebody's roof and rip half of the shingles off, just for fun. TFA is no surprise to me.

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