http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/only-17p...
https://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/17/13230500/gigabit-ne...
Besides, what people pay for and need in October 2017 is probably less than a child starting school will use in 2022 when they hit year 5. This is a national infrastructure project - surely it should be built with the future in mind?
This is without discussing upload speeds - not everyone is a purely downloading user. Viewing a population of civilians as a population of solely consumers seems a common folly.
I recommend the four corners tv show [1] (linked in the original piece), likely the cause of the extra media attention on the NBN lately.
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/whats-wrong-with-the-nbn/9077...
From my perspective, they’re blaming the lack of uptake on a symptom of the change they themselves implemented. If they’d left it with fibre I propose many people like myself would pay for the higher tier plan.
I can only extrapolate my own experience, but perhaps if there was some truth in advertising enforcement. I've had NBN plans elsewhere, and I never chose the top plan, because I'd still be limited by other parts of the internet I was communicating with in practice, and everyone knew the top rate plans quoted speeds are literal nonsense. Why pay extra when you get the same performance on the bottom/mid plan?
Compare to a country with a more sane model (like NZ, the US in places or many Asian countries), and you'll find much higher uptake of fast internet. The Government could fix the NBN to encourage people to take up faster plans if they wanted, but their insistence to not fix any of the barriers makes me conclude they must be doing it intentionally...
I have FTTN and won't pay above that because at peak netflix hours my 25/5 drops to 10/1. If i go higher, I can't break 35/8
Romania has among the fastest Internet speeds mixed with the cheapest cost per mbps, yet consumers there frequently don't choose their fastest options because they can make do with less and save a bit of money.
Per Akamai's Q1 State of the Internet report, Romania doesn't make the top 10 in average mbps. Yet their % of connections above 10mbps is #8, and above 15 mbps is #9. Despite how inexpensive a faster connection is in Romania, people are often choosing not to bother with the fastest options. Despite that, Romania is still much faster than Australia - people there aren't choosing 5mbps options. If you hypothetically give a consumer a choice of a 100mbps connection at $50, and a 50mbps connection at $25, you're going to see a lot of people seek to save some money where they can (which doesn't mean they don't still want very fast Internet in that #2 price slot).
Lowest I know is from UPC which still has some weird 50mbps option but compare that to the biggest ISP, RDS, which has practically made 300mbps the default as you pay the same amount for 100mbps as for 300mbps since a year or so, both for 7$. And by 300mpbs I mean 300mpbs (the remote servers being the bottlenecks while good ones & tests max out).
A lot of things are wrong in Romania but internet is not one of them :) but for those interested, /u/HoliGigi's explanation: https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/2ct58s/average_inter...
The capabilities need the infrastructure in place first so that they can grow to use them, it's impossible for the other way around to occur as you cannot transfer something that requires faster connections before they exist.