Hi Aaron, yes that is true. But remember once nbn goes live you can only use the other cable services for 18mths. Unlike the ftn etc which can have 4 nbn services. Aussiebroadband have been amazing. I’d get the cable moved beforehand where you want it. Activation is a tech coming to check and they bring the little nbn modem with them and get the service active. Took 10min. I’m getting solid speeds as well. Uploads are lots better than Telstra ultimate.
Grrrr… I was hope all day yesterday waiting for the installer to turn up. It was an 8-12 appointment, they rang at 12 saying he was delayed. I said fine, so long as he’s here by 3… Nothing nothing nothing. I’m still home at 5 so I rang them - oh no, sorry, he was sick all day so didn’t go to any of the appointments. And by the way, no, we can’t rearrange, you need to call your ISP. Customer service goes to shit when things are run by the government. If I had a choice of installer I’d tell them to get stuffed and use someone else, and if enough people did the same they’d go out of business. Instead their pockets are lined with my taxpayer money through a government contract. /Rant
Anyway, new appointment next week so I’ll see what happens then!
Eventually the Telstra and Optus POTS will be shut down and everyone will be moved to VOIP for telephony services and whatever else you should desire (if you have a choice between Coax/fibre/DSL) in your area. You will have to move to either Fibre over Coax, VDSL, Fibre itself, satelite or 4G depending on where you live. By now you should have gotten the “It’s time to change” letter. You have about a year between the “it’s time to change” and being completely diconnected from the network.
Regardless, If you don’t choose now you will end up with nothing later. That doesn’t matter if you are already on the Telstra/Optus POTS or whether you are on HFC. The service you are on now will be shut down and if you don’t choose you will be disconnected entirely.
The problem with HFC is that everyone on your block is on the same cable. It’s stupid really. The answer was to place GPONs (on ramps) that each user connected to. The problem with HFC is that if some dick in your neighborhood decides to be a bandwidth leach everyone in the neighborhood suffers for it. It’s still a token ring network, except now its called “NBN.”
VDSL is slightly better, especially where you have a cabinet in your street. I’m getting 24 out of 25mbit out of VDSL because I’m paying for the slowest speed. I have the entire line to myself. No sharsies with douchebags. Excluding FTTH this is about as good as I could have expected.
Thanks to Malcolm in the middle we get a bunch of dead end technology we will inherently have to upgrade in perhaps 10 to 15 years over again. Unfortunately they’re just kicking the can slightly further down the road. But I will take a connection that tops out at 24mbit (3MB) a second as opposed to one that tops out at 5mbit. Maybe one of these days I’ll upgrade to the one that tops out at 100mbit a second (the same LAN speed I was getting 20 years ago).
This post comes to you via my newly installed NBN HFC connection. The tech was very good and spent about 3 hours installing it. It turns out the numbering where the cable comes into the apartment block was wrong, or my neighbour was using the one marked with my unit number. Eventually he discovered the correct cable and linked it up, via a carefully done but still ugly hole drilled through the balcony door frame.
I’m paying for iiNet’s unlimited boost plan which promises downloads of 5-25 megawotsits, and got 23 earlier today. Getting about 11 now whilst using Netflix.
All in all pretty happy. It beats my ADSL of about 6Mbps generally and 1Mbps of late.
It’s still pretty pathetic compared to the rest of the world, but I guess that’s what happens when you get the government to do stuff.
This crappy NBN is what happens when you get a Liberal-National government to build something important.
The whole point of Malcolm Turnbull was a short sighted “we don’t need that speed now.” 2 years later most of us or on the cloud either by choice or by force if we are Apple users. Most Google users are the same.
Its a bit like that person who told us we’d never need more than 512k of RAM. We will have to revisit this whole scenariio in 5 to 10 years time where we will realise that unless you’re going to put a street cabinet every 100metres apart its practically infeasible to get a gig out of VDSL which will lead to a hurried mess of new GPON installations and new FTTH connections across the majority of Australia which is regional/remote.
While some 15million Australians live in a city the vast majority of Australia is not a city, and once again we have ended up with a two tier internet system where you have the old world DSL or maybe cable if you have happened to live in an area previously services by Optus/Foxtel (such as Geelong). Meanwhile there’s a whole bunch of new green ugly boxes littered across peoples streets in regional/remote areas that stand out like a sore thumb but wont provide a long term solution.
VDSL in a counry the size of Australia is a joke, and I’ve argued the point even with Lib/Nat supporters for the last 10 years almost now. But, this is what happens when people with no idea about either IT or telephony get to have a say about the entire backbone of Australia’s internet connection. They bought into what guff Turnbull said and now we’re hear with no headroom to really go above 100mbit/second on this network topography.
Then you have the “if you don’t like it well then just move” brigade as if life was ever so simple.
1 Like
I can think of fifty billion reasons (and rising) why your point of view is detrimental to the overall benefit of the country, Orestes. But hey, it’s all OPM. In this case, other grandchildren’s money. You want speed, you want it now, and you don’t want to pay the real cost for it.
We all want more speed, with greater download limits. But there is the question of how fast it is needed, how it fits in with the advance of technology, and how to pay for it. And the correct role of government. This is renationalisation. How the NBN has been costed and accounted for in the books is a travesty, deceitful in a way that only makes sense to a lawyer or a politician. Do you really think the NBN expenditure should be excluded from the federal budget?
And what happens when Telstra finally adopts 5G with significant download limits? The NBN will be an expensive white elephant. The only reason it and Optus aren’t already actively promoting wireless broadband in direct competition with NBN services already (“get 4G broadband, it’s just as fast as the NBN!” -yes I know, but marketing) is there are contractual arrangements preventing them from doing so.
And I don’t say this to defend Turnbull, who I despise. It just that everything the Rudd Government did was a grand fuck up, and the NBN was just another example. How anything can go from a $4b progressive upgrade plan to a back of a napkin (literally true), kafkaesque and Byzantine contract ridden boondoggle with no true costing and accountability is classic Dr Death (the QPS nickname for Rudd). Turnbull of course is just too Lord Wentworth to fix it.
Instead of steady upgrade and capacity upgrades, we got a long trough in development as Rudd and Conroy diverted for a dream of FTTP (except for the country areas of course, best not mention them in any promotional material, let them think they get FTTP too). Why would the private sector keep development going once the government stepped in? Even better, get the government buy you off with $12billion to stop? The current government’s version will get faster than current speed to more people more quickly at less cost than the Conroy/Rudd NBN would have (which could give access to higher speeds for those that paid more, but only eventually), and despite the contractual landmines Conroy set up. But even the Turnbull version of the NBN is still at a ridiculous cost that coming wireless tech will make largely useless in many areas.
And don’t get me started on the implications of VIOP only in natural disaster areas.
2 Likes
If you had looked at the fine print and not Rudd’s polispeak you would have noticed that the Rudd/Conroy NBN was planned to deliver FTTP to most city areas, about 100 odd country towns, with most country towns bypassed, even if the bloody main fibre ran through the centre of town (high profile examples like Birdsville excepted). Most rural areas would have been serviced by a mix of wireless and satellite, just as the are being connected now!
With all that said, I’ve chatted with people who have FTTP and they love it. Malcolm Turdball ruined it for the rest of us by changing to FTTN
I don’t disagree with what’s been said but with the CVC pricing structure even those lucky enough to be on FTTP are still paying a hefty premium for the higher speeds and it’s still capped at 100 mbit.
Instead of charging by volume and letting the available speed of the connection max out they’ve got this strange ‘speed tiers’ system in place.
Because the retailers can and it is in their interests to do so. Also, those prepared to pay for higher speeds are more likely to download. There is also a political game going on here. It is in the interests of the retailers to buy insufficient bandwidth from NBNco, in the safe knowledge the pressure from unhapppy consumers will be on the government, not them. The intent is to cause enough political pressure to greatly reduce the NBN’s bandwidth wholesale charge, thus increasing their profits.
Of course, if that happens, the NBN is unlikely to ever recoup its costs, and thus the politicians will not be able to continue to have the manipulative and entirely political classification of the NBN as a ‘commercial’ activity, thus its operating loss will have to appear as part of the federal budget each year, already in deep deficit, and the debt added to the rapidly growing federal debt. That would be very unfortunate timing with Gonski, NDIS, and the submarines for the dole scheme in SA, all massive nbn sized projects and also unfunded, about to start racing up even greater deficits.
What a cluster fuck.
1 Like
Some RSPs like Aussie Broadband seem to be doing the right thing and buying enough CVC and their charges aren’t crazy per month.
Eg. 100/40 with 1TB = $100/month.
I’m on a basic 12/1 NBN plan on Telstra/Foxtel HFC.
When it works, it does what it says on the tin.
However since it went in 6 months ago I have had 4 outages ranging from 3 hours to 4 days.
Got it through iPrimus, which may be some of the problem, but every outage has corresponded with a Telstra/Foxtel outage as shown on the Telstra service status page, so I think it’s the HFC that’s having the issues,
All up, this is not good when you consider that I gave up my PSTN phone line with customer service guarantee for this. I use my landline as much as most people use a mobile.
Lies and nonsense… Do you vote Liberal per chance?
Yeah no… Don’t flag my post discuss it or go and cry in to your latte that you can’t afford to buy on a Sunday because plebs don’t deserve a pay rise.
I’m pretty sure Sunday Lattes are affordable again since weekend penalty rates got cut 
1 Like
I flagged your post. If you think what @Entropy posted was incorrect, then back it up with polite argument and facts, and continue the discussion, rather than shutting it down with rudeness.
3 Likes
I can’t be bothered entering into the hyperbolic abyss that is NBN politics from the right wing who still think a token ring network is acceptable in the twenty first century. It is the practical equivalent in application to a bunch of tin cans tied to one string.
I also can’t be bothered to explain the nonsense and hyperbole surrounding the flaws in VDSL. If you can’t do some basic geography to understand the problem on an IT related forums you’ve got other issues.
You destroy what could have been a nation building project for political expediency and nothing that would make sense to any IT engineer who was starting out designing a telephony network in this country except Malcolm Turnbull.
I’m sorry if you don’t like the truth but it is what it is. Any sensible engineer would have gone with a full fibre optic backbone in a country the size of Australia with the last mile being whatever takes your fancy.
Now when I spend time thinking about it, I go round with an eye out for all the ugly green boxes, and their inherent issue that if the power goes down to them so does your phone and internet.
Enjoy your latte while you can.
1 Like
Whilst none of what you’ve alluded to about the NBN is factually incorrect that doesn’t excuse using abuse towards other forum members IMHO.
One of the good points about this forum in the past has been the polite way that discussions are conducted and I’d hate to see that go by the wayside.
2 Likes
There is really no polite way to deal with people who put their own political expediency ahead of the nation.
1 Like