Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

I remember moving from New Zealand where I'd had 100-200Mbit/s fibre for several years to Australia in 2012, when I arrived I moved into a brand new apartment in the first suburb to get fibre to the home, turns out it wasn't to all homes... and I was stuck with 2Mbit/s, which is what i had when I started high school in NZ many many years ago. 2017 is here now and I literally spent over an hour today trying to help someone figure out how to get better than her 2.5Mbit/s ADSL to her house which is not at all far from the CBD, turns out there's nothing she can do. Up until recently I was paying for 3x ADSL lines all set to annex-M and peered together using PFSense because all you can get in most of the cities is 100~ year old copper that's falling apart thanks to the hard right governments that are anti-technology and often anti-education from what I can tell. Recently I gave up on my three links and managed to get a point-to-point 5ghz wireless link from a beam off the top of my roof to a large building in line of sight which is better but obviously won't scale well.

Three years ago I was working for a small company in a ye olde converted apartment building in the heart of Melbourne. We were on ADSL, but had to upgrade because graphic designers really don't like the A part of ADSL.

So we went to symmetric DSL - going from 1.5/16Mb up/down (from memory) to 10/10. This cost $500/mo.

But over in San Fran, our satellite office was getting 100/100 for $50/mo. They were literally getting ten times the bandwidth for a tenth the cost. Admittedly their building was in range of some nifty ISP and it wasn't a deal you could get anywhere, but the difference was startling.

(AU vs US dollars were about the same at that point)

This is really funny (sadly) and too true! If having a decent internet connection is even a slight prirority for someone in Australia, then it's really important to investigate what the internet is like before signing any papers!

If you end up in a bad area, there isn't much that can be done about it apparently. I know people who have spent literally years trying to get an issue resolved.

Where the hell did you get 100-200Mbit fibre? We had a fibre connection at work for our data centres in Wellington and I still felt the connection wasn't all that great (mostly the limit of the undersea fibre cables to Australia/US Pacific).

Even people I knew on TelecomNZ/Spark fibre didn't have the greatest connection speeds (They were decent I guess, but not what I'd consider fibre at all).

100/200/1GB is common now with UFB in NZ, and apartments/offces in the the CBDs are getting sorted. And dark fibre to DCs is available too. Heck - Trade Me was on the Wellington fibre loop back in the early 2000s.

International connections are up to the ISP - and those prices have dropped sharply over the years.

The main cost remains the last mile, and while plenty of money is there to be made from international (I was a Pacific Fibre founder - we tried, and a director of an ISP that can rapidly hook up connections from DCs to AWS etc) that's not really holding us back for most uses.

It was common as anything in Christchurch, most of my friends had between 40 and 500Mbit at home either on fibre (up to 1Gbit to the home at the time back in 2011), VDSL (I think up to 200Mbit if you're close to the exchange back then) or the old Cable network which was 100Mbit.

At my work we had two 1Gbit internet links at our primary site and anywhere from 1Gbit down to 50Mbit~ way out in rural areas and we had between 500Mbit and 10Gbit dark fibre between sites.

*Update: Just called an old mate still back in Christchurch, he's on 500Mbit fibre but he said that most people he knows are still on around 100Mbit.

Here's some pricing: http://ufb.org.nz/pricing-plans/

All internet should be done through omnidirectional lasers, in due time these companies will become obsolete.

You live in Rhodes, right?

I'm sorry I don't understand? I haven't heard of Rhodes before.

Ah, sorry, poor guess on my part.

Rhodes is a new super-high-density suburb in Sydney. There is zero new telco infrastructure and 45,000 residents. The nearest exchange is in Concord, about 5km away. So one or two buildings have NBN, a few buildings have (overpriced) internal fibre, but the vast majority have sub-2Mbps DSL.

There were a few companies putting in fixed 4G links cos, y'know, 2Mbps barely qualifies for email and web browsing these days.

I lived there a few years ago; perhaps the situation is better now.

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