Michael van Rooyen: 0:00
My discussion with my guest today was so interesting we had to break it into two parts. Here is part one of that interview.
Robert Joyce: 0:07
In the last 10 years we’ve seen a tenfold increase in traffic on the NBN and we’ve gone from houses that used to have seven connected devices to houses today that on average have 22 connected devices and, by the end of the decade, 35 connected devices.
Michael van Rooyen: 0:22
Today I have the pleasure in interviewing Rob Joyce, who is the Head of Customer Strategy and Innovation at NBN. We’re going to be talking all things NBN connectivity, fiber and all things related to how people work, live and play using the NBN. Rob, welcome to the podcast. Hi there, Hi, Michael, Before we get started, do you mind sharing a little bit about your background in the industry and what led you to your current role as head of customer strategy at Innovation of MBN? Yeah, sure, how long have we got.
Robert Joyce: 0:48
It’s a long story, it’s funny enough. I was a son of a telecoms engineer, oh wow. So my dad was a telecoms engineer in BT and from the earliest memory I used to remember going around the exchanges and seeing these old mechanical switches wearing away, click, click, click. And my granddad, he was a cleaner there. They had a fallout shelter in the basement with rations and it was proper old school. I guess it was a GPO that had evolved to become British Telecom. But I pretty much understood telecoms from a really early age because of that sort of grounding with my dad and it’d show me how, when you again a lot of people won’t remember but the rotary dials on a telephone, when you did this you saw the actual switch move and it connected through physically, a physical path, through a copper exchange. So telecoms from an early age.
Robert Joyce: 1:31
I went to university, studied telecoms and during uni I got sponsored by Marconi. So, marconi, it was the end of the 80s, it was still pretty much the end of the Cold War. But I went to Marconi, torpedoes and mines, all sorts of things. But a guy there said to me you don’t want to be here, mate, cold War’s coming to an end. Telecoms is where it’s at and mobile phones where it’s at and I said mobile phones as in those big bricks that you carry around.
Robert Joyce: 1:54
He said yeah. He said that’s the future. So I took his word and I went into researching 2G evolution. So it was putting data for the first time on GSM and then that sort of opened the world to 2G, 3g, 4g, 5g and that’s really been the career, mainly mobile, but always with an eye on, obviously, backhaul of mobile sites is typically fiber. So when an opportunity came to broaden my portfolio and work back in a fiber company, I took the opportunity. So I joined MBN about a year ago as their customer, head of innovation and strategy and sort of all good things that fiber can deliver. That’s my bag.
Michael van Rooyen: 2:30
Yeah, wow, wow, Look. I must say that’s a couple of things on history. There’s incredible history. I don’t think I’ve had anyone on the show that has actually a heritage of family being, if I think about that, three generations, right. Your grandfather worked there, your father worked there and then obviously that really attracted you, and certainly being able to see those machines in the way they used to operate would be fascinating compared to today with such digital access. Right, and certainly the name Marconi that’s a name I haven’t heard for a long time, right, but that’s fantastic. And you touched on 5G. I saw that you’ve spent a lot of time building 5G networks, testing for not just 5G but all the lead up to that, so that’s an interesting space. I’ve been talking to a few customers more recently about private LTE and 5G. Where do you think that’s going from a holistic point of view? I?
Robert Joyce: 3:12
looked at that. When I was the CTO at Nokia, we were obviously big at pushing private 5G. Nokia’s portfolio includes. The challenge is always spectrum. If you can’t get spectrum either on loan from an operator who holds most of it, or the government’s got some pieces that it can auction, then you’re pretty scuppered. You can, of course, use unlicensed bands, but then you’re subject to interference and limitations. So for me it’s all about spectrum and the Australian government is getting there, but they’re not as advanced as, say, the Germans. The Germans took a portion of the 5G band and they assigned that for industrial use. So in Germany there’s lots of factories now that have private 5G because of the sort of German foresight. So yeah, spectrum is the key, but certainly we’re seeing all sorts of novel use cases across the industry. Obviously we’re delivering connectivity nowadays at NBN, but certainly a lot of connected farms are looking at private 4G and 5G to enable automated cherry pickers or weed killers with lasers, etc. It’s an amazing space.
Michael van Rooyen: 4:11
Yeah, the use cases just continue to come up with edge computing, but continue to be more powerful and also connectivity right, being able to drive a lot of those services. It’s just phenomenal Talking about NBN, because you’re obviously attracted from building wireless networks to this big carrier network. People know about the NBN, but do you mind just spending a couple of minutes of just reclarifying what the NBN is, what its mission is for those people, because there’ll be a lot of consumers or people listening to this might think of NBN in a particular way. But maybe you can just solidify it a bit further for us.
Robert Joyce: 4:39
Yeah, I mean, let’s go back to my history, the copper lines and the old exchanges. Once upon a time here in Australia it was even the post office back here before it became Telstra. But Telstra built this network probably starting in the 1930s where you’d have these mechanical switches in the exchange and before that you’d have the old switchboard operators that would switch the lines but to your house you would have a twisted copper line Again. It’s probably still in most houses but that copper line was great for voice telephony through the 80s. Even though we digitized the switch back at the exchange, the copper line was still to your house and it was fine till the 90s, until dial-up came. Dial-up was cool and we all remember the whizzy-wurry sounds on dial-up.
Robert Joyce: 5:21
But as we moved through the 14.4, the 28.8, the 56, and we went to ADSL where we got to about a megabit per second, we started to come to the limit, especially on long copper lines. Some of these exchange to household runs can be 30 kilometers. Then getting a megabit down there is a problem because what happens is the again, if we’re going to talk physics, the square waveform starts getting distorted because of the length of the copper. You then struggle to differentiate between ones and zeros the digital internet and then you become limited or you get errors. So we needed to do something about upgrading that copper line, and really that’s what NBN is formed to do it’s to uplift Australia’s digital internet experience by replacing that copper. For us, fiber is the the key delivery mechanism of the future, yes, and so we’re busy upgrading many of our customers now um to fiber so that we can give them a gigabit today and we can.
Michael van Rooyen: 6:18
We can go well, well beyond that in the future yeah, it’s the, it’s the right, it’s the right footprint right. I mean, for those technologists and myself, starting with fiber, I think that was obviously the ambitious intent of what NBN obviously pivoted a little bit during the rollout, but certainly the amount of fiber that’s being rolled out is really the real key that’s going to drive us forward. Right. You really remove bandwidth constraints. The upgradability is easy. You just change the CP on both ends and then you’ve got much more capacity without needing to haul new cables.
Robert Joyce: 6:45
Exactly yeah, and it’s something that we can’t do overnight. So and again, I’m not going to get into the politics because I’ve not been here long enough but certainly we can’t deliver fiber to every household overnight, and, in fact, there’s households in the outback that we never will get fiber to, and we’ll come on to those alternative methods of connectivity. But what happened here in Australia originally was we ran fiber to a point, let’s say, in the street, and then we used the copper line, so now the copper line was much shorter. So, as I said before, we don’t have that length limitation, so we can now pump 100 megabits down pretty much the limit 50 megs, 100 megs down that short copper line.
Robert Joyce: 7:22
The trouble with copper as well, though, is it’s metallic, so it’s in the ground, it’s getting wet, it’s getting hot, cold, it expands, and so, eventually, it degrades, and our rule of thumb is about 4% a year.
Robert Joyce: 7:32
So if you had a 50 meg service on copper, every year, that copper typically degrades, so we can see there’s a ticking bomb on the copper lines. We need to replace them, and we need to replace them as well, because it costs us a lot of money to go out to street cabinets that are copper-based, that get flooded. So there’s an interest for us not only to upgrade to fiber for speed and for what users need, but also to reduce our OPEX costs in terms of servicing the network infrastructure. Going back to the history, yeah, we got fiber to the node and fiber to the curb, but now we’re going the full hog. We’re now doing what we call fiber to the premise or fiber to the home. So that’s a fiber from the exchange all the way through to your house. So you’ll have what we call a network termination box on your wall. The fiber will come into there and then, typically, you’d have a 10-gig port that you’d plug into and then you’d go Wi-Fi into your house from there.
Michael van Rooyen: 8:25
I thought it was brilliant. Obviously there would have been a lot of assessment done at the time of the build of what’s the right NT to put on the wall. If you just look at the automation even behind that being able to switch carriers you guys are obviously the underlie to all that, or the underlying network that supports multiple carriers sitting on top of it, and I think the ease of that integration is actually quite brilliant. I don’t think people realize how far we’ve come, even just commissioning a new service.
Robert Joyce: 8:46
That’s right. I mean, you’re right, we’re the wholesaler, so we don’t sell direct to the customer. We enable the likes of Telstra, optus, leaptel, aussie Broadband those guys to sell to the customers, but they all sit on our infrastructure and, as you say, it’s interesting People can change their internet service provider overnight if they want. They could change them every month, of course. So we geared up to be able to do that. So we don’t just run the network. We also have to integrate with, as I say, over 100 different ISPs in order to be able to provision billing provision, service provision, assurance, etc. It’s not as simple as just running copper in the ground or running fiber in the ground. There’s this whole IT backend that is also very complex.
Michael van Rooyen: 9:28
Sign significant, and the intent was also to provide kind of parity right, so that we’re trying to get to a point of parity. Yes, of course there’s distance in some areas but realistically, being the underlay of everyone, most people should experience the same sort of quality, speed, performance. Yeah, exactly.
Robert Joyce: 9:44
As I said before, if we think about the Outback we’re tasked with, what could we do for those long copper lines where we can’t get more than a megabit? So there were two alternatives and we implemented both. The first is what we call fixed wireless access. So it’s a type of 4G 5G network, but it’s dedicated for Internet service provision. So there’s no mobiles on there. So we can more easily control the amount of bandwidth that we provide our users. There’s no fluctuation during the day on that.
Robert Joyce: 10:09
So we have a network of 2,000 sites providing 4G and 5G fixed wireless access. So that’s how we connect a number of our customers. And then, beyond the fiber and the fixed wireless footprint, we have our satellite service. So we have a service called SkyMuster, nbn SkyMuster it covers the whole of Australia, including the islands as well, so it’s the only national sovereign 100 coverage network in australia. Um. So we are the biggest network, but don’t tell telstra that um and that has been in place since 2016 and that’s delivering speeds of up to 100 megabits. So you know, imagine if you were a farmstead, you were on this copper line, you were not getting more than a megabit per second. Overnight you upgrade to SkyMuster all of a sudden 100 megabits per second. You can watch Netflix, youtube and of course, we’ll come on to the change in landscape of satellite, but in 2016, that was pioneering.
Michael van Rooyen: 11:02
That is. I mean, a lot of people are thinking about what it is today, but that’s an interesting fact, and so they heard the SkyMuster terminology being thrown around over many years and we’ve done some work with it. I think about remote school learning, where we’ve had SkyMuster delivered to education departments, et cetera. But reflecting that it is actually a sovereign state end-to-end network is something that probably people miss that data point on them. I think it’s a very bespoke solution, but that’s a great point. So, off the back of that being the underlying network, there’s no doubt that the NBIN has really significantly impacted Australia from a connectivity point of view. Can you discuss some of the most transformative changes that NBIN has brought to some of those rural and urban areas?
Robert Joyce: 11:39
Yeah, I mean, as I say, without more than a megabit per second you’re not going to be able to do a lot with the internet, not anymore. I mean it’s funny. I mean I remember getting 384 kilobits per second on 3G and we thought that was fast. I mean, imagine getting that today, so certainly delivering 100 megs. Or on the fixed wireless network we can now go up to 400 megs and on the fiber we can go to a gig. And this is as of today. Obviously in the future we expect to expand those a lot further. But certainly it has delivered parity across Australia there to expand those a lot further, but certainly it has delivered parity across Australia. There’s no one in Australia that says I cannot connect anymore. You can connect at least 100 megabits per second, and 100 megabits per second it’s enough for, as I say, 4k Netflix. It’s for multiple video streams, it’s enough for working from home downloading big game patches. I mean I don’t know whether you knew that it’s game patches that cause the peak on our networks.
Robert Joyce: 12:31
No really Every couple of Fridays there’s a Fortnite or a Call of Duty patch and these things are like 100.
Robert Joyce: 12:38
Gigs and gigs yeah 20 gigs to 100 gigs and, yeah, typically we see the peak on a Friday night, oh, wow. And it’s interesting because I’ve got three kids and they love Fortnite and we’ve got a one gig service at home. So one gig you can get down the patch in pretty much about 20 minutes. All right, and I don’t know whether you’ve got kids, but they’re on Twitch and they’re talking to the mates and you can hear the lads or the girls that have got 50 meg service, because you hear the dad come in the room about nine o’clock and go. No, johnny, you know it’s bedtime now.
Robert Joyce: 13:08
Oh, but I’m halfway through the download Dad, you know, Joyce has got it down.
Robert Joyce: 13:12
It’s like, yeah, we’ve got it down because you know we’re on a gig and, yeah, you don’t need a gig all the time, Of course, but you do need a gig in the moments that matter, and that could be downloading that Netflix movie On a gig. Netflix is down pretty much in. A movie is down in less than a minute, whereas 50 megs. Your Uber’s going to be clocking the meter while you’re waiting to download. So it’s certainly the moments that you need these higher speeds and again, we’ll come on to future services in a bit and we can talk about what might need more than a gig.
Michael van Rooyen: 13:45
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s a fascinating data point. Obviously, there’ll be patch Tuesday. That’s a very, very interesting data point and I think the other point you’re making is, besides, in been making parity availability for connectivity, there’s just this expectation Everyone expects a higher speed. Everyone sees these new services and even if I see the IPTV world changing right to so many people even not even all of their antennas there for for home, a lot of them are just streaming the nines, the sevens, the tens all.
Robert Joyce: 14:11
yeah, yeah, I mean, that’s a key fact we’ve been seeing. You know that more and more the broadcast tv is is now diminishing. 55 percent of our traffic on the nbn is video wow, wow, and typically on a an evening that peaks around nine o’clock, people are, like you say, are watching live tv streamed. Nowadays on the apps they’re’re watching Netflix and basically video’s driven the growth on the network We’ve seen in the last 10 years. We’ve seen a tenfold increase in traffic on the NBN and we’ve gone from houses that used to have seven connected devices to houses today that on average have 22 connected devices and by the end of the decade 35 connected devices. But, as I say, a lot of that has been driven by the streamers. The average Aussie watches 300 minutes of video a day, which is five hours, which is a lot. Already, half of that is now on streamed rather than broadcast and we’re seeing more and more of the broadcast ebbing away onto apps and you may have seen that the free-to-air broadcast is quite keen to get their apps front and centre on the new TV. So there’s a bit of lobbying going on there, but what we eventually see and it’s in our interest to keep an eye on this is all of that.
Robert Joyce: 15:16
Live broadcast TV will come onto our network and it’ll come onto our network and we need to think about how we carry that, how we ensure quality of service. We need to think, or the broadcasters and the country need to think about what do they do with the old towers, the old spectrum? I mean, I can imagine that Telstra and Optus and TPG are rubbing their hands at getting hold of some of that low-bound spectrum, but there’s no reason that you have three delivery mechanisms for video anymore. The minute we’ve got satellite and Foxtel, we’ve got broadcast and then we’ve got streamed and I can well imagine that in 10 years’ time that that broadcast is done away with and we’ll need to think about. Yeah, there will be some stragglers that we need to bring along and that might mean delivering them a satellite dish or connecting them via the fixed line, the NBN. But certainly I do see a world where broadcast TV is no longer here in probably 10 years’ time.
Michael van Rooyen: 16:05
Yeah, look, I completely agree If I think about the transition, even from the analogue to digital that came along. We forced people to switch over for many, many reasons. But even if I look at the time that I spent working in the pay TV business, we went from MMDS tower delivered to signal to when we migrated to satellite. So it’s just this evolution, right, and I think, much better than I would. But overseas delivering of IPTV has been a big thing for many, many years. Right, they’ve been pushing that for a very long time. But, interestingly, it would be interesting to see the graphs that you would see that have the transition of data. The 56% of a big network of video is a lot of video, right, it’s a lot of video and continue to grow yeah.
Michael van Rooyen: 16:41
And everyone wants it to be HD, Everyone wants it to be 4K and again that’s an interesting point about what does 4K need.
Robert Joyce: 16:47
Again, I won’t name any names, but you go on some websites and you look at what they recommend for needing 4K and they’ll say 25 megs, 25 megs. Sometimes it’s 35 megs. Now I don’t know whether you’ve ever tried, and we do this in our labs and the Discovery Center here. We limit the bandwidth and then we see the performance of those streaming services. A couple of them. If limit the bandwidth and then we see the performance of those streaming services. A couple of them. If you click play, they won’t just stop at 25 megs, they’ll go all the way up to about 120 megs to download enough to fill the buffer. And then, once you start scrolling at 100 megs and you let go, it’s instant. It’s not like you don’t see the red circle anymore or whatever.
Michael van Rooyen: 17:26
I’ve noticed that.
Robert Joyce: 17:30
Yeah, if you’re on 100 meg plus, you don’t see the red circle and that’s quite a nice experience. It’s a bit like again when we went from analog to digital tv, when you used to change the channel on digital tv it’s sometimes it’d take a second to change and you’re like what’s this? You flick through channels on the digital tv. You had to wait and then on the digital tv you might remember if you had one of the early tvs you would hear the football cheer next door before you’d hear it on your TV because of the lag.
Robert Joyce: 17:51
So yeah, so it’s a bit like that with streaming services nowadays Until you’ve experienced bufferless playback, you don’t know what you’re missing. But once you’ve experienced it, it’s like well, why would I ever go back? There’s been a lot written in the press recently about what do you need, but we’re seeing now that at least 100 meg is a hygiene factor for decent video.
Michael van Rooyen: 18:13
4k videos bufferless playback, wow. And you touched on your labs and no doubt you have lots of skunkworks and labs and building and testing. Out of that, what are some innovations that we can expect in the near future from NB and how are those advancements going to help with the digital landscape of Australia?
Robert Joyce: 18:29
We talked about one gig services. So our fixed line technology, whether that’s hybrid fiber or full fiber, now delivers a maximum of one gig residential and actually 10 gigs enterprise ethernet. But we’re looking at moving that now, moving that to two gigs, initially on the residential side. So there’s consultation out. Obviously we can’t just flip a switch because we’ve got all these ISPs RSPs connected to as retail service providers. They need to be ready, they need to get their billing systems, their IT systems ready. So it’s a long process. But certainly our network’s ready for two gig and in fact it’s ready for 10 gig and in fact we showed recently it’s ready for 100 gig. Recently we set the world’s GPON record. So GPON is Gigabit Passive Optical Network. It’s the technology that the NBN is based upon.
Robert Joyce: 19:17
We, together with Nokia, set a speed record of 80 gigabits per second using the fiber that goes to your house, the fiber that goes to my house. So we showed that, as you said before, as we upgrade the electronics at the exchange and at the CPE in the home, the fiber is good for the future. In fact I recently went to Nokia Bell Labs in the home. The fibre’s good for the future. In fact I recently went to Nokia Bell Labs in the States and they were showing me 400 gigabits on a single fibre. So our network is already fit for the future. And it’s funny because when I was at university I remember a lecturer saying to me. He said once we get fibre to a house, he said that’s it infinite bandwidth? Now I doubted him at the time and yeah, it’s probably not infinite bandwidth, but certainly from where we are today, one gig. To say we’re going to move to 400 gig and beyond is amazing.
Michael van Rooyen: 20:02
Look at this. I’ve been doing I call it digital plumbing for many, many years and I’m a big fan and love digital plumbing, right, because it really is the underpinning of everything we do. And I remember a frame relay, atm circuits, 155 meg. It was like incredible. And now you just think about the mobility and what you can get out of a 5G network. It’s just, it’s very exciting and just again that those use cases that are coming. We’ve been talking a bit about speeds and feeds for home, residential, what are the kind of plays around the commercial space enterprises, same sort of thing as really RSP. You provide the fibre underground, just to distinct the two because people might think NBN’s really residential related. Of course you underpin the whole of the digital economy for Australia. Can you just touch on a bit about the business side of the play.
Robert Joyce: 20:44
Yeah, on the business side we offer two types of services. We offer what we call business fibre and that’s based upon the technology that comes to our houses, so it’s based upon the GPON network. So that is good for, say, a gig today and two gigs in the future and many small businesses. That’s more than adequate. But then we also have what we call our enterprise Ethernet service, which is a dedicated fiber. So we will deploy a dedicated fiber to a building or to an enterprise and that’s good for up to 10 gigabits per second today. And again we see a roadmap where we can take that to 25, 50, 100 plus. So certainly you know we cover both the resi and the business. There’s a bit more competition in the business space. Because it’s bigger business, people are willing to deploy their own fibers in that space. Yes, but I think in the residential space and the business fiber space it’s pretty much ours to have.
Michael van Rooyen: 21:34
Yeah, and when I reflect on the build of NBN, it’s so widespread. I mean, Australia is such a large continent and, unlike the US where there’s lots of different fibre we were talking earlier about lots of other vendors of the US, for example, that deploy fibre in maybe it might be citywide, it might be statewide You’re building a network for the nation statewide of you’re building a network for the nation. What have been some of the hardest and biggest challenges that you guys have faced from inception and kind of how have you addressed these to provide this widespread connectivity?
Robert Joyce: 22:02
Yeah, it’s interesting because I thought about this last night and it struck me that your mobile phone is probably very similar to mine and it’s got a SIM card and it just works, whereas your house is completely different to mine. So where you have the fiber termination point and where I have the fiber term, it’s totally different. So the challenge, one of the challenges that we really have, is each and every house is different. Sometimes it can take us an hour to do the upgrade. Sometimes it can take us two days because we have to find where the copper line is. Can we use the old duct that the copper line went? No, this house has been altered since then, and so that’s the difference that use the old duct that the copper line went. No, this house has been altered since then, and and so that’s the difference. That’s the challenge.
Robert Joyce: 22:38
The challenge for us is people don’t realize how complicated and how bespoke each and every house is. A good point, and so be it. And then the other thing that also makes our life challenging is that we we may upgrade a house to fiber and we may have to, rather than we can’t obviously dig under the house, but we may have to rather than we can’t obviously dig under the house, but we may have to put the fiber on the first or the second room we come to or the first wall, whereas the old copper line that was put in there before the house was renovated or rebuilt might terminate in the middle of the house, so that typically is where they may have their Wi-Fi router today. So when we terminate on an outside wall and we say, now you need to think about your in-home Wi-Fi, what a lot of people do is they take that old Wi-Fi router they’ve had for five or ten years, plug it into this bedroom socket and then wonder why the back of the house now has lost connectivity.
Robert Joyce: 23:25
And then we end up struggling to explain that well, you certainly do have 100 megabits to the house, it’s just that you also need to upgrade your Wi-Fi. It just that you also need to upgrade your Wi-Fi. It’s a bit like putting crap tires on a Ferrari. You need to think about it. So nowadays we’re trying to educate, together with the RSPs, people to think about their in-home setup. The Nest solutions that we see and the mesh solutions these are what we need if we’re going to cover the whole houses. And don’t forget we talked about bit rates Because bit rates are now the hygiene factor is 100 meg. It’s no good just getting 5 meg to the corner of the room. If you want a good experience, you need to get 100 meg. So you need potentially more Wi-Fi access points than you did in the past. There are main challenges at the moment.
Michael van Rooyen: 24:06
It’s a good, interesting perspective on the challenges, right, so you wouldn’t think about that and it’s a great point around. Everyone’s premise is different. People just assume we can just install it easily.
Robert Joyce: 24:16
And it’s interesting, in the Discovery Center, our exhibition lab upstairs, one of the displays is exactly that the topology of the NBN, and it’s amazing to see where the fibers go in the street, how each and every house is connected, which streets are still on copper, which streets have gone half and half. And if you think, one of the other challenges we have is we can’t force migrate people from copper. We’re offering them an upgrade so they can upgrade to fiber, so we still maintain streets that have 50% copper lines, 50% fiber lines. And obviously eventually we’re going to need to think about how we convince the lager to move forward because, as I say, the copper line will degrade Just thinking about that from a connectivity for, for the strata.
Michael van Rooyen: 24:57
We touched on how you’re trying to bring parity, connectivity and benefits of the internet and and those to to all consumers. How’s, how’s n been working to bridge that digital divide and and promote that connectivity and and inclusivity?
Robert Joyce: 25:10
one of the um inclusive uh schemes we’ve had is what we call the School Student Broadband Initiative, and so there we’re looking at underprivileged families and we’ve offered 30,000 families free internet for a year. So if they’ve got a school student at home and they’re below a certain threshold and they can talk to the agencies to get the application in, then we’re now providing free broadband for these families. And, as as we’ve said, we’ve not touched on the pandemic yet, but certainly we have realized just how important the, the internet, is and how important connectivity is. You know, we went from maybe often working at home and maybe kids never schooled at home, you know to overnight to hey, listen, we need you and I need to be working from home, we need to be on Zoom calls, team, calls the kids. I mean, again, I can remember three kids in my house homeschooling Thank goodness we had laptops for them and then also mum’s watching Netflix when she’s not homeschooling.
Robert Joyce: 26:07
So again, it was a massive jump on society, a massive jump on the network. We saw a 20% traffic increase overnight and that’s not gone away. So the point I was trying to make was we’re still there. You often hear it. We did five years evolution in about two years in terms of digital connectivity and yeah, that’s not gone away. So, again, brings me to the point on fiber. Fiber is eight times more reliable than copper. Eventually, people will see the light, so to speak, down in fibre. They will see the light, and I often say this fibre’s faster. In fact, fibre’s greener. It actually consumes a lot less power, of course, because we don’t have repeaters in the streets as we do with the copper-based network, and basically it’s the future.
Michael van Rooyen: 26:52
I hope you enjoyed part one of my discussion with Robert Joyce. Listen in next week for part two.
