Hacker News Reader

Comment by theandrewbailey | Hacker News Reader

> In an age where the state of the art broadband to the home in the U.S.A. is 10 gigabits, Australia is currently building (it claims) a National Broadband Network at great expense that promises a blistering 12 to 100 megabits per second at the top end

I know it mentioned "state of the art", but the vast majority of Americans would be lucky to get 100 megabits without breaking the bank every month. Many (most?) don't even have the option of such speeds.

View on HN

Many (most) of Australians don't even have the option of 10 mbit.

When the new NBN is rolled out, most will have the option for 25 Mbps. This plan is due to be completed by 2020.

My office is "in the city" in Adelaide, a city of 1.25m. Our only reasonably priced option is 12Mbit ADSL2 (which is about 0.8mbps up).

We can get 100mbit fibre for $1000/mo, plus cost of installing the fibre.

We can get 12/12 DSL for $300/mo.

As an app developer, I am often unable to upload anything to iTunes Connect without saturating the link and it timing out. The only feasible option is paying a premium for 4G/LTE speeds on Telstra.

Part of the issue is that getting transit out of Australia is EXTREMELY expensive. Telstra still has a stranglehold on the country, and the amount of cables out of the country hasn't kept up with demand.

Not to say your point isn't true, but that has nothing to do with successive governments shitting on each other's plans when it comes to installing infrastructure to houses (or choosing the right infrastructure to install).

Sure. I think they are two separate, but related problems. Even if the NBN were perfect and brought gigabit internet access to the entire country, without more intl transit it wouldn't help as much as people would hope.

It would still make a huge difference on the things that matter the most bandwidth-wise, such a video services and software distribution - all things that are on geographically distributed CDNs with local nodes in Australia

I've got a 100mbit Fibre connection. I live in an inner city suburb.

It is continually dropping out (I get an average about 1 hour a week of downtime), my upload speed tops out at 35mbit (using iiNet's own tools) and for a lot of things like YouTube, videos can be sketchy, even on the more popular ones.

Australian's really aren't missing out on much if this was supposed to be the standard.

If your fibre is dropping out... Something is really wrong.

You're telling me. When we first moved into this apartment building, NBNco hadn't even hooked the building up correctly. It took 5 weeks of constant calling to eventually get an engineer to actually fix it (and in the process, get the entire building connected, it wasn't just us having issues).

Comcast is horrible and has a monopoly in Sacramento, California. Fastest speeds are typically 25 - 75mbps. 25mbps costs $59.99.

Well, technically you can get AT&T "high speed" internet for $50+ per month, at a whopping 18mbps max.

This is the capital of Califoria, so, yeah.

That's surprising. For all the crap they get, Comcast is somewhat aggressive, deploying faster DOCSIS 3/3.1 infrastructure and upgrading speeds for free.

I pay A$70 per month for 6mbps in Sydney. So, you know.

AT&T, rolled out fiber to many of the suburbs. I can't imagine switching back to Comcast, night and day.

As an Australia->America expat, you have to compare to what we have now.

At the moment the highest grade connection attainable for most residents of Australia is ADSL2+, with a max speed of 24Mbps (realistically you're lucky to see 10). This usually comes with a bandwidth cap that varies based on the price you pay (e.g. [0]) as well as a contract. For a moderately high usage household (streaming video, YouTube, downloading video games), you'll usually have to pay ~$90 for one of the better performing providers (such as Telstra) or ~$80 for one of the lesser providers without a cap (e.g. TPG and the like which often offer unlimited but have plenty of congestion issues). Further, if you're not in a metropolitan area, usually you pay an extra $20-$30 monthly premium.

Compare that to the US, where most (or many) [1] households have access to 50-100Mbps cable for a reasonable (I pay ~$75/month for 150Mbps in a Comcast monopoly area) price.

America isn't great compared to what could be but it's a whole lot better than Australia.

[0]: https://www.telstra.com.au/broadband/home-broadband

[1]: http://www.broadbandmap.gov/speed

Yup, I live RIGHT outside of City borders of Durham, NC, where Google Fiber is coming, Frontier is putting up Fiber, and AT&T is putting up fiber. My max available speed? 24mbps DSL for $50 a month. Even though TWC says they are in my area, when they drive to my house they say they can't do anything for me, and I doubt Google, Frontier, or AT&T are going to be able to do anything for me.

The point in the blog post is that if you are currently building a national broadband network, why would you build anything except state of the art?

Because there is a non-linear relationship between money invested and the end result, and the greatest efficiency in investment may be achieved through a heterogeneous approach.

For example, if there is existing coaxial cable infrastructure in an area, it may be far less expensive to deploy higher-speed DOCSIS than it is to roll out entirely new fibre for the same amount of bandwidth. DOCSIS is easily capable of gigabit speeds, the main issues are sharing QAMs with existing cable television and the ratio of customers per headend.

Politics got in the way.

Plus, Labor should have done a better job communicating the value of (FTTH) NBN. The average people in Australia think NBN is just to watch YouTube in HD.

Especially when the current solution offers no upside (slower speed, no cheaper, a rollout that will take just as long).

I like to play "stupid or liar" when it comes to things like this, but I can't figure out which it is when it comes to the NBN decision making.

I feel like 100 megabits down in the states is at least a somewhat-baseline anywhere there's a city or suburb (excluding rural areas). It's basically one of the lower tiers for ~$50-60/m for Comcast, TWC, ATT, Verizon, RCN, Centurylink, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com