HFC NBN - Any Experience?

That’s a slight over reaction IMO.

Yes FTTN was a short sighted (and wrong) choice of technology but it’s still a lot better than ADSL both upstream and downstream and it’s not far short of HFC in lots of cases.

Would I like FTTP? Hell yeah… but I’ll take any improvement over ADSL with it’s 1Mbit upload speed.

It’s an overreaction you don’t hear anything but the worst case scenarios when you go looking for them. I’ve been on the VDSL “NBN” for a few months now without a single dropout and new copper right up to my house from the new street cabinet.

I’m getting the full 25mbit/second download speed. I haven’t tested 50 or 100mbit. I have no real need for it yet. Mind you we are paying the full cost for Telstra copper NBN. It would seem that the largest group of complainants are those who are paying for budget ISPs who are not paying NBN Co. enough for their data.

So the crux of that is that some people on the copper NBN are being shaped at the ISP because the ISP is not paying NBN Co. enough money for the data their consumers are using. I would take that into account before you take the 7:30 report/Four Corners reportage into consideration.

Yes, the VDSL NBN is crap, but there is a lot to get your head around before you decide how crap it is and blaming a breakdown in communication between NBN Co. and ISPs is not the right answer all of the time either. Sometimes its the ISP taking no blame. My NBN transition was (mostly) seamless excepting the fact that you can no longer call emergency services via VOIP.

I had Telstra FTTN NBN at my previous residence and it had a sync of 89/35 and we got 70/30 without any drop outs and the house was 600 metres by road from the node with a connection that was as stable as the previous ADSL connection. There were some initial issues with distortion on the voice phone but a rolled out software upgrade to the modem fixed that.

Where I am now they’re currently rolling out FTTN as well and I’m actually looking forward to getting off ADSL (and I’ve got good ADSL here syncing at 19Mbit) because the upload is so slooowwww. I miss being able to upload photos to the cloud quickly.

I have friends on FTTN on the same exchange as I was and some of those complain about ‘the NBN’ but every one of them is using an ISP who offers unlimited plans and they’re paying less than I am with Telstra.

No it doesn’t have to be Telstra but it does have to be a non unlimited ISP at a non budget price point.

You are right, a mate of mine who lives in the Adelaide Hills managed to get on average 100/80 on FTTN. I assume that the lower speeds would be due to crappy copper when they had ADSL. Then again I’m no NBN tech so I’ve no idea…

Tangentially related:

Telstra to offer unlimited internet on plans $99 and above. Plans below $99 to have data limits doubled. Catching up with a lot of other providers.

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Nice!

I can’t even reach my 1TB cap but I’ll take it!

Unimited is NOT catching up, it’s falling back to the pack.

With CVC pricing the way that it is offering unlimited virtually assures that peak time performance will suffer at consumer price points.

I only use about 200 to 300Gb of the 1TB I get now, this change can have no positives for me and it’s bound to cause problems with peak hour performance.

Once my contract is out it’s bye bye Telstra for me.

Come to think of it, I still have a better deal than what’s on their website now as they’re not factoring in the Speed Boost options in the announced costs. Want the faster speeds? Gotta pony up at least $20 a month.

You’re assuming that you’ll even be able to reach those speeds once everyone is unlimited.

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The old addage is you pay for what you get. I would not be surprised if the majority of complainants are using a budget unlimited provider who in turn is not paying NBN Co. enough for the amount of data they’re using.

  • The ISP is being shaped.
  • The ISP doesn’t want to pass on the cost for more data to the consumer.
  • The ISP is hiring Joe Bloggs contractor who is incompetent. Where as Optus and Telstra have been doing pretty much nothing but laying cables for donkeys years.

No the rollout has not been seamless but this is also a differentiation in plans. It’s no longer the NBN Co. managing last mile rollouts and its pot luck who you get for a contractor now to connect your wires. Once again this is a Liberal/National problem they’ve created with the NBN.

Where I am we went with Telstra and the rollout has been seamless, we got a new shiny piece of copper line in the ground that runs to the street cabinet and I haven’t had a drop out or congestion since. We’ve gone from an average 4.5mbit connection to a seamless 25mbit connection.

I haven’t bothered to ask for more speed yet because going from 4.5mbit, 25mbit has been a substantial increase. I suspect once we get used to it we may decide to go up to 50mbit, but that’s a matter for future discussions.

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Thankfully the area where Cable is laid out is quite a small one, and I never had issues on my current internet regarding speeds even in the evenings. I honestly can’t see how moving from cable technology to, cable, technology will decrease speeds.

Either/or, it’s something I have to do eventually (moving to NBN) so I might as well do it now rather than later.

I hope Telstra offering unlimited to it’s premium consumer-grade customers (those paying $99 or more) doesn’t impact on peak-hour speeds, but I suspect it will.

I’ve been advised the fastest speed tier I can be on is the 50/20 one, with a maximum download speed estimated at 45 Mbps. Thank you Malcolm Turdball for your crappy copper fraudband.

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Additional costs apply to speed boosts for evening times. Check the Terms & Conditions. :\

Yes, I’m well aware of the speed boost charges, I’m getting the standard plus speed boost for $20/month. I’m just disappointed that $49 billion has been spent on a dinosaur.

Not wrong.

I’m on Cable with Speed Boost. Currently much of the time I get full speed when doing a speedtest, but it does slow down a bit in peak time (eg right now at 7pm I’m only getting 60mbps instead of 114 which is still fine for anything I want to do). I am concerned that once everyone moves onto the cable network things might slow down even further, since a lot of our neighbours are probably on ADSL.

Wasn’t there an announcement recently about an increase in bandwidth for HFC on NBN happening next year? Might help maybe?

DOCSIS 3.1 I believe. Supposed to enable 1Gb/s downlinks. I’ve seen claims of a simple software update, however, the specs for the Arris modem that NBN provide say it can do up to 300Mb/s, so it would need a hardware swap too.

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Time will definitely tell how these ISPs will implement it.