read this article it tells you a bit more. I’m not sure how 4G usage might get charged but no doubt info is coming on that soon. https://www.cnet.com/au/news/telstra-to-launch-outage-friendly-frontier-gateway-new-gateway-max-2/
Yeah unfortunately Optus doesn’t have any cable infrastructure around here which is a bummer, I’d prefer to not give Telstra any more money than I have to, however, I also like internet faster than 1.5Mbps.
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Totally fair, just putting the option out there. It’s quite amazing just how many cabled areas have BOTH (yet how many have nothing).
Yeah, I know. I’d actually completely forgotten about cable until a mate mentioned it to me, and thinking that there wouldn’t be much in the way of anything as it’s a fairly old street. Was nicely surprised.
Interesting article Mitty. The real interesting bit was this:
The pre-activated Telstra SIM will auto-register as soon as the device powers up, and if your fixed-line connection at home drops out, the Gateway will connect to the mobile network to keep your Internet connection up and running. It will also offer four times the speeds of current gateway devices.
I suspect that this is Telstra trialling their response to the NBN finally getting to critical mass. Not that 4G would really pull 400Mbps of course. If it did and I had one I might just find myself having a “cable outage” all the time. Telstra (and Optus) has a no marketing clause for using wireless against the NBN, that won’t last of course and I suspect once 5G becomes available the gloves might come off.
Hi all,
Telstra’s uplink is no better than Optus’s in my opinion. I get 115mbs download and 2.1mbps upload with the speed boost. It’s soooo much better than ADSL. Though weirdly last night when watching TV streaming on the Apple TV it passed a few times during playback. Maybe it doesn’t like Frasier. 
The installation was a bit painful, the guy asked me to hold onto a cable in the Telstra pit so he could work out which line was mine then got me to feed about 30 metres of coax down a pipe from my house back to the pit. I should get a discount for that! Then he gave me grief about me wanting the port inside my house where all our ethernet ports terminate. But I eventually talked him into it.
According to the NBN people, when NBN becomes available, if there is a Telstra and Optus cable, they will use the Telstra one. So maybe that makes things a bit easier later when they come to install NBN.
But all in all I’m very happy with the cable.
I recently signed up for Telstra NBN (FTTN in my case not cable) and I also received a Telstra 4G dongle with my Telstra branded modem.
I haven’t used it yet (the appointment for install is during Feb) but it seems that Telstra aren’t only providing 4G fall over on cable but also on FTTN.
Unsurprisingly the new Modem has leaked on Whirlpool:
https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=2606540
Not much of a leak when it’s launching next week (note: I didn’t know this).
To answer some earlier questions in this thread which are all in the linked threads etc in that thread if you look hard enough:
For existing contracted customers they can upgrade for $9 a month or $216 outright. Customers not in contract will have to pay $384 (not really worth it in my opinion unless you are desperate for the included 4G).
The 4G usage will come out of your included Cable/ADSL/NBN Allowance if that connection goes down, but will be shaped at 6mbps down/1mbps up. It will be monitored for misuse: eg if you try and use it for weeks at a time when you dont’ really have a connection issue (or you take it away with you on holidays). No idea how this will be implemented, don’t want to know 
I’m sure it’ll all come out in good time.
Essentially if you are signing up to a new Telstra Broadband Contract, you’ll probably get one for free anyway, but I’m doubting it’s going to interest that many existing customers, at least until they switch to the NBN and need a new router/modem with a WAN port.
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I just got FTTB through TPG. Currently showing 95Mbps download and 40mbps upload which is slightly better than the maximum speed telstra could offer which was 1Mbps on a good day.
95/40 won’t last with TPG, once enough people in your area sign up…
TPG are stingy on backhaul.
Damn! I wanted moar speed than 115 Mbps. Not for any particular reason, but because. 4G could deliver! I Am not surprised if it is throttled through this modem though, as the NBN deal Telstra has probably required it. Can’t turn the Conroy white elephant into an even bigger white elephant before it is off the ground!
Also, why would Telstra care if I took it on holidays? That could be one of the perks.
It’s not Conroy’s white elephant, it’s Malcolm Turnbull’s FRAUDBAND. He’s the one that truly FUBAR’d the NBN
Telstra came around and installed the new FTTN modem (which is labelled as a Telstra Gateway Pro, not sure if that is the new modem or not), it came with a 4G dongle. We’re still with our old ISP but connecting using the new Telstra modem.
We’re still not on FTTN yet, there is a 2nd date (next week 14th Feb) where NBN do some work at the local node.
Then there is a 3rd date (17th Feb) when Telstra come back and install the phone (and presumably reconfigure the modem with our Telstra login).
Only after that will we be on FTTN.
The process is rather clumsy compared to changing ADSL providers (but at least we haven’t had problems yet).
Bulshit. Not that I want to defend Lord waffle, but ths was Conroy and Rudd’s baby they drew up on a napkin on a plane. It always was a bad idea with a high negative return in comparison to other solutions. A classic example of something that sounds good but wastes an incredible amount of money. That the most common NBN connection contract is 12.5 Mbps is all you need to know.
All it should have been was concentrate on the backhaul, make sure there is high bandwidth fibre connections to important public infrastructure such as hospitals and schools, wherever they are located, and to cell towers to maximise their capacity and reach. As it is fibre is only for urban areas, while the country has to make do with laggy low bandwidth and quickly overwhelmed satellite. This is all that was ever proposed for the bush. I get really angry whenever I think of Gillard crapping on about how the NBN will allow remote surgery or specialist medical consultation in the bush. FFS!
I agree that Turnbull didn’t fix it, like lord waffle is incapable of doing anything, but don’t pretend it wasn’t a dog to start with, a dog that seeing as all the money is borrowed, my grandchildren will be paying for even though they will live and work in a world that will be bathed in wireless solutions.
I disagree. Fibre to the node was a more practical and cost effective option. We always knew that 5G or something similar would be available in future and fiber to the node would guarantee a faster rollout to a broader number of areas with the ability to adopt future technology.
The problem however is that it hasn’t actually ended up being more cost effective, in fact the current NBN multi-mix budget is now higher than the original FTTP budget.
Nor has it been faster to roll out (the number of premises connected per month is faster than FTTP but the 2 year delay has meant catch up won’t happen until after the original FTTP finish date).
That doesn’t mean I think that the original FTTP model was perfect, in fact it was far from perfect.
The decisions made around ‘Points of Interconnect’ was a major flaw (and remains so) and CVC costing is strangling both FTTP and FTTN (albeit FTTN seems to be suffering more).
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I would rephrase that because I have worked in government infrastructure projects, of which none have gone well or according to budget.
I would say “nor has it been faster than the previous government planned to roll out” because I can tell you from experience, I have yet to see a government project rolled out on time and on budget, unless they tripled the actually budget and tripled the timelines. The vast majority are somewhere between 2x and 3x as long and as costly because of how bad government is. I did a project for government where the government was allowed to change their mind so many times (by their own management), that the project delivered 80% of what was originally planned at more than twice the budget. That is government, that is the quality of government resources assigned to projects, that is the time wastage on government. Do a project for some government entities and you will find if they have to give a fixed cost estimate, contractors will triple or quadruple the estimate, and it’s not the fleece the government, it’s to cover their asses because of how bad government are.
The average ‘wastage’ on Australian project management is roughly 11% according to the institute of project managers (somewhat higher than the world average).
Personally I’m familiar with quite a number of Victorian government projects that have come in within 10% of budget and whilst time frame is often an issue it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as bad as the mess that is the NBN.
2x and 3x seems excessive…
It depends on the scale of projects. I.e. a $100K project is more likely to be within budget than a $600 million project.
It also depends on how they baseline and deal with change requests. If the customer asks for X, and when they do a design, it’s actually Y, they generate a change request to cover the difference. Often this is still reflected as being on time and on budget because the scope has changed. I.e. If the original budget was $10 Million, and when you start, it ends up being $15 million because it wasn’t correctly scoped, $15 million is still on time and on budget.
What this reflects is a couple of things:
- Was the original NBN correctly budgeted. There were question marks about that with one party saying they under quoted the cost of the NBN by half, and lets be honest here, we can’t trust either party when it comes to budgeting.
- Are changes to the scope reflected correctly when it comes to cost overruns? I.e. If I generated a change request to change the scope from A to B, and it costs $100,000, and then I change the scope back to A again and it costs another $50K to change it again, both have valid change requests but what often isn’t reflected is the fact that it cost us $150K more to deliver the same outcome (A) because there are valid change requests for both.
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Malcolm has done more than not ‘fix it’, he deliberately set about to destroy it, that was the task Abbott assigned to Turnbull at the time.
The idea that 5G is a more effective solution to FTTH is silly. Firstly, you have to have a lot more 5G towers because 5G has a shorter range, and secondly, how do you think the data is carried to/from these towers? By fibre!
And when it comes to complaining about wasting money your grandchildren will be paying for, consider the over $200 billion to be spent on submarines, fighter aircraft, frigates, and other toys so our military can simply follow the US into an adventure into the south china sea?
I’d rather have FTTH and a good relationship with China than have this abortion of Malcolm Turnbull’s creation
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