Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbarnes_1 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who used to live in Sydney and now in SF with Webpass... I can tell you that Webpass would be what a proper NBN rollout would look like. It's kind of amazing. It only costs $60/month and you just get an ethernet drop.

No login, no metering, no shaping.

Example latency:

  admin@RT-AC5300-E6A0:/tmp/home/root# ping -c 5 8.8.8.8
  PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8): 56 data bytes
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=0 ttl=55 time=3.526 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=1 ttl=55 time=3.559 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=2 ttl=55 time=3.547 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=3 ttl=55 time=3.518 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=4 ttl=55 time=3.584 ms

  --- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
  5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
  round-trip min/avg/max = 3.518/3.546/3.584 ms

View on HN

And no public IP, which was really disappointing when I switched from AT&T Uverse.

I'm always intensely curious what residential (and these days, even business) customers want with a dedicated, publicly routable IPv4 address.

why were you disappointed?

I wouldn't use it for anything too resource-intensive or important. It's just nice to have my home development environment available over SSH for the rare coding emergency. I shouldn't exaggerate how disappointed I am. It's obviously not very crucial to me, since it would be easy enough to set up a cheap VPN for tunneling but I haven't bothered to do that yet.

why not just use IPv6?

Someone will probably roll something like this out in the metro areas and it will eat the NBN

Webpass only serves multiple dwelling units AFAIK.

You can already order microwave and fixed fiber links in Sydney CBD, Pyrmont, etc but they cost a lot more than $60/m.

The NBN was a solid idea. Execution is always kind of the issue though.

> was

:( such a sad truth.

I doubt it. I'm no expert, but isn't it illegal to provide non-NBN internet to any house that has NBN?

I recall someone complaining that they had no internet at all for months, because the NBN wire got hooked up to their house, but not plugged into anything at the other end - then their internet company was legally obliged to disconnect their DSL because technically they had an NBN cable - it just wasn't plugged in to anything.

Of course this would be a good law IF we were getting proper fibre NBN (and the above technicality got seen to). Just like we don't want multiple companies running power lines to one house.

It's not illegal for a company to offer an alternative to the NBN. I think it is however mandatory for a provider who can service a dwelling with NBN to upgrade from a legacy technology (i.e. DSL) to the NBN.

This does not preclude other high-speed internet options servicing those dwellings.

For example, https://www.lightningbroadband.com.au offers or plans to offer 100/100 (actually, some pages have mentioned 200/200 but maybe that's coming later or business only). A salesperson explicitly told me they plan to service NBN-connected areas too but that they'll probably prioritise other non-NBN metro areas first, because the demand will be stronger.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com