Telstra’s Gigabit Class LTE Network | Hacker News Reader

Telstra’s Gigabit Class LTE Network

cellularinsights.com

48 pointsmilan0340 comments

It's widely acknowledged that Telstra's LTE network is by far the best in Australia.

It's also by far the most expensive.

The 180GB of data used for the tests would have cost them - assuming "BYO device" plans and that Telstra did not give it to them for free:

    On the "Large" (50/30GB) home wireless plan:
    $150/month + $1300 for the 130GB extra used during peak times.

    On the "M" (25/15GB) home plan:
    $100/month + $1550 for the 155GB extra.


    On a "M" mobile phone plan (10GB):
    $45/month + $74,800 for the 170GB.

I'm honestly take TPG's crappy DSL, which is cheaper and has unlimited plans, over high speed connection at prices like that. It's easier to simply queue up stuff overnight.

What's the current state of the NBN network in major cities? What's the availability of Fibre in cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Perth? Are there unmetered plans? Are they affordable?

NBN state is less than stellar, a vast majority of suburbs have no NBN at all, and a very small minority have actual fibre to the premise. Unmetered plans are becoming more common but are only "affordable" ($60-70 a month) at the lowest speed offering (12mbit). If you want unmetered at 25 or 100mbit, you're looking at 80 or 100 respectively, and that's looking at TPG and iiNet.

FWIW (and I know this is a single data point), but my experience with NBN has been positive.

It's also Fibre to the Node (FTTN) which is often maligned in internet/tech circles for being a poor technology choice. I'd prefer FttP, but it's not an option and I'll take what I can get.

I'm now getting close to my plan's speed (50/20), but you're right about the increased cost. It's roughly 45% more. But the speed from the old ADSL2 plan is probably 4-5 times faster.

The only complaint I would have is that speeds during peak are pretty off the advertised plan speed. They fall to around 18-20mbs down at night.

Heh yep. According to the Nighthawk M1 plans the best is AUD$70/mo for 20GB and $0.0035 per MB after that. So their 180GB would have cost AUD$630. Little more reasonable, but still not a mainstream price yet.

https://www.telstra.com.au/broadband/mobile-broadband/nighth...

They were the best, and then Vodafone shat the bed and haemorrhaged customers, most of whom (inc. me) went to Telstra.

Their network wasn't ready for an influx of hundreds of thousands of people, and it went downhill fast. Now, that was a couple of years ago and I'd be happy to hear that they've improved. I'm no longer with Telstra - because of the reasons I've outlined above.

Edit: I realised I have work's Telstra 4G dongle in my bag. Totally unscientific test: Speedtest just reported 26ms/8.91Mbps down/5.95Mbps up. I got the iPhone 5(?) on the day of launch, which was pretty much the first 4G phone in Australia. Sitting in central Melbourne I got ~50Mbps up/down. :-/

Edit 2: My phone's native Optus 4G connection gets 23ms/7.23Mbps down/2.26Mbps up.

Those are quite poor speeds. I'm with Optus with a 4G connection and just did a speed test on my Galaxy S7

80Mbps down!! wow I was surprised to see this. I thought my home 30Mbps cable connection was good

20Mbps up, this was an even bigger shock. I'm only on about 2Mbps up on my home connection.

90ms latency from Adelaide to Sydney which seems pretty good too.

Wow! Where are you? Local congestion is obviously a massive factor with 4G speeds. I'm at my office in Melbourne's south eastern suburbs, where connections - everyone's, irrespective of telco - seem to be poor.

yeah I was quite surprised too. I knew the internet felt speedy when I tethered to my phone, but never bothered doing a speedtest before.

I'm in Adelaide and the test was done about 10km from the CBD

The impression I get is that Telstra lobbied pretty heavily for an essentially hobbled fixed-line network. The reasoning is pretty simple: the ACCC stepped in in the early 2000s and gave access to Telstra exchanges for putting in their own hardware (DSLAMs) to provide ADSL service. As a result Telstra (IMHO) decided that fixed line was a loser so focused on 3G/4G as a profit driver since there was competition there (most notably Optus) and thus the ACCC couldn't really force Telstra to "share".

The result? A "next generation" broadband network that for a lot of people is 12Mbps... in 2017. This being a hobbled version of the FTTH network the previous government originally set out to put in place.

The other side of this is Telstra owns half of Foxtel and you can't provide an IP based TV service at 12Mbps (realistically) so no competition there either.

Anyway, this is what I think of when I see announcements about Telstra's LTE network. All others be damned.

So that explains why Telstra has been doing so well and why Foxtel had so many buyers lining up for it! /s

This makes sense. Telstra's backhaul for fibre and cable customers is very lacking. They have oversold their bandwidth and suffer lots of congestion during peak times.

Take a look at this: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/10/telstras_netflix_do...

Telstra is on our list of 6 most expensive networks: https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world....

This will not be cheap.

For most customers, current bandwidth is fine usually(and even in the countries with highest monthly download, the average is 10GB/month), so this is less interesting.

But this network has a an order-of-magnitude larger theoretical cell capacity and since most costs are infrastructure costs, cost-per-GB for carriers should be 5x-9x lower. And there are other innovations around the corner , which together with this promise something like 25x-50x cell capacity improvement. And

So bandwidth is becoming abundant. The only question: will prices reflect that?

Given how much more abundant it is on the wired side, and the fact they're all now introducing caps - no. The only way to increase profits when you're a monopoly is to charge more money for your product. The only way to do that when there's no ACTUAL scarcity is to create artificial scarcity through caps.

>But this network has a an order-of-magnitude larger theoretical cell capacity

Does it? It seems like they just have more available spectrum. 4x4 MIMO and 64bitQAM help, but not an order of magnitude in practice.

For us techies, it's good to know that all the software and hardware development behind this is done by Ericsson on the network side and Qualcomm on the device side. They tend to stay a bit hidden because they don't sell directly to consumers. Telstra builds and configures the network and own s the spectrum. Netgear puts the Qualcomm chip in an a box with antennas.

The router shown has a (not enforced) 20GB data cap - so you can blow through it within minutes :)

theoretical max of service

1Gb/s: (20 gigabytes) / (1000 megabits/second) = 160 seconds

reported maximum in testing from article

400Mb/s: (20 gigabytes) / (400 megabits/second) = 400 seconds

When Telstra cable was first released in the 90s it had a 100MB cap and 130Mbit speed, so you could blow your $150+ monthly plan in seconds (and many did)

Epic read – and makes me wonder how long fixed services can truly survive. These kinds of speeds with little infrastructure surely scale better for those making the money, and are easier to implement for consumers too.

As long as latency still matters. Gigabit wireless service can certainly be usable for a broad range of consumer applications, but you still have people playing online games, streaming, etc. that are heavily impacted by latency.

Personally, I wish I could get a decent 100/10 fiber connection in my area just for the latency advantages over DOCSIS alone (it takes roughly 10ms to even get out of my ISP's internal network onto their transit provider).

+VR

Latency's going to be a real bear if it takes off and multi-user applications prove popular.

Nothing about wireless inherently causes more than a millisecond of latency. It's all about system design.

Modern LTE latency is comparable to DSL/Cable at <=30ms in many cases. Sure fiber latency is lower, but until that is available to the same amount of people as DSL/Cable the mobile technology will have advanced too. Online gaming and streaming is totally fine over a LTE connection, the only problem is bandwidth caps. (This might not apply to professional gamers, but i consider those a niche)

30ms is abysmal.

That's roughly the transit latency from Texas to the coasts. By your logic even a fiber link from Texas to NYC will have "abysmal" latency.

It's totally fine for any kind of realtime online interactions though, unless you are a super competitive gamer, but even then many do not have access to fiber and still do well Also note that i am saying "lower than or equal", my current LTE connection gives me 18ms ping to nearby locations, same as my cable connection.

The Telstra LTE bandwidth is extremely expensive too at around $5 per Gigabyte, so their test of just 180GB would have cost about USD $75.

I get 10$ per GB. :(

I ditched Tesltra for the Aldi (Telstra 4G reseller) year-long pre-paid plan when they offered it for a short time.

42GB for $250 = $6/GB.

Spectrum is finite though. You can add more fixed clients by adding more hardware at the CO and running more fibre. Eventually, even if no one is even actively downloading, your cellular network will saturate just from the number of clients.

The same is true of wireless networks today. An 802.11n wifi network is also limited by the number of clients, even if none of them are consuming their share of bandwidth.

Assuming omnidirectional antennas.

If you aim well enough, that finite spectrum is only shared by a handful of clients.

You could go even further and construct some kind of copper tube to send your radio signals down.

Yes, having a lot of antennas on the base station is just like attaching a mile-long cable to your cell phone.

Why run a copper tube kilometers when a point to point microwave will be way cheaper?

Rain

"performing everyday tasks such as ... streaming YouTube 4K videos"

to your phone? what's the point?

Or to your computer since the device they were using is a modem:

> Netgear® Nighthawk M1 powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon™ X16 LTE modem.

https://www.netgear.com/about/press-releases/2017/NIGHTHAWK-...

Mobile VR or Augmented VR could be cool.

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