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I think you are going way too easy on the current government. "Stuffing around" - more like active sabotage. Their policy has been consistent in the NBN all the way through, and has defied all independent technical advice. It was a political solution that never made any technical sense.

I thought he was going too hard on Turnbull (current PM). What has he done that justifies your appraisal of his brief term?

People seem to be forgetting about Abbott, who in my opinion did indeed fuck around with rubbish policy his entire term (helped into the grave by treasurer/idiot Joe Hockey).

>I thought he was going too hard on Turnbull (current PM).

The problem with Turnbull appears to be that either:

1) He has to balance his rather more radically right wing members of his party while keeping his further centre members happy else he loses his position. (Many peoples explanation).

or

2) He has significantly changed his opinions and position on many issues over the last 5 years.

And this is a problem because people cant really tell which it is.

Turnbull hasn't really changed many of the policies of his predecessor, he just wraps it up nicer and in a more statesman like fashion.

He was previously a more moderate right wing (by australian standards) but has since gone significantly more right wing.

Im not going into specifics because I don't want to go beyond the realms of the overall topic and end up talking about Gonski or something, but thats my take on why people are a bit bemused by Turnbull and not particularly forgiving despite his inheritance.

I'm well aware of those two popularly perceived problems, but I don't see how either justifies him being a bad PM.

I believe proposition (1), there being more evidence that supports this view and more rhetoric that supports (2).

If he were elected with a significant majority of both houses, and the party returned to a more centrist state, such that he didn't need to appease the more Right-wing faction of his party in the same way, would he not still be the perfect PM many of us thought he might be?

An aside -> his election strategy was mostly: (1) use data to find popular buzz-words ("JOBS", "GROWTH", "INNOVATION"); (2) repeat those ad infinitum; (3) shy away from any compelling political narrative or vision for the future of the country (e.g. "MAGA" narrative); (4) ???; (5) Lose House seats to Shorten and Senate seats to Pauline et al.

I think you're forgetting that Turnbull was the communications minister under Abbott. He's square to blame for this.

I agree that his actions as communications minister that contributed to this were horrible, but being given communications minister was essentially a punishment for crossing the line.

(1) The NBN falls under the portfolio, and the government knew they would have to deal with controlling the ever increasing costs of the program, which were hugely underestimated by Labour, and (2) The person in the role of Communications minister would take the blame for the public realisation that the costs were going out of control and had to be cut. (3) Any cut would result in a poorer NBN, because that's what cutting costs when you're building any product/service does.

So he was essentially handed that flaming pile of dog shit by Abbott, probably to lower the chance that Turnbull would ever be able to wrestle back power.

Turnbull's solution was to get the private sector to pay for a part of the network (FTTN instead of FTTH). So, costs would be managed, the 2020 target was still reachable, and it leaves the NBN open to improve the network to FTTH later on.

What could Turnbull have done better?

The bigger problem of the NBN is its business model, which charges Telcos for bandwidth on a total downloads basis rather than on a % use basis. This is what causes the poor service of the NBN. This could have been dealt with by Rudd, by using a different model for the NBN, as discussed above, but Turnbull couldn't do anything about that.

Not just that, but the Liberals presented Turnbull as some sort of masterful IT expert on the extremely flimsy pretext that he made a shitload of money flipping an ISP two decades ago.

He has a slightly better grasp on some areas of technology than the average person perhaps, but certainly no more than the absolute bare minimum any communications minister should be required to have.

Except that Turnbull was in charge of alot of this stuff in the Abbott gov't before he became PM. However, no one running this project to date has done a very good job.

> in hindsight it appears that it could not be delivered anywhere near the original budget.

What makes you think that? It's on the public record that NBN Co were fairly well on-budget (after they'd upped the peak funding from $39bn to $44.1bn a few years earlier) up until to the 2013 election.

Of course, the media preached it was over budget, so that's what most people think, and Malcolm Turnbull was so suspicious that he commissioned a forensic review into their financials - which was very quietly released when it found "no material issues". There was also some evidence of the incoming NBN management choosing to keep quiet and shut down a cost reduction program that had successfully found efficiency gains and cost improvements ('Project Fox' which was leaked to the media).

All major fibre rollouts have tended to show that costs reduce over time - Chorus in NZ reported a 44% reduction in per-premises cost over their rollout so far, and Openreach in the UK have reported a 50% reduction from when they started.

Coupled with the fact that the Coalition's plan blew out by $15 billion, I think it would have actually been better to continue with the original plan and try to fix the problems. What they ended up doing was to not fix any of the existing problems, and try to 'fix' the things that were good about the NBN (the technology)...

This isn't counting that any upgrade to FTTN (which will be required in less than 10 years) would cost tens of billions of dollars more, or the much higher running cost of FTTN. In the end, the LNP really picked a dud and absolutely screwed up something that could have been fixed.

Before they self destructed and lost the election, the labour party's costings increased by nearly 10x (along with changing the model). Your comment even describes a budget increase of 5 billion?

Also, there are other reasons why the Chorus costs are coming down, that don't apply here:

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/10/nbn-co-comparisons-with-nz...

Where do you get your cheap 4G/LTE?

Best I can find is prohibitively expensive, especially if I wan't to stream 4K content...

It's not exactly 'cheap', but if you need 100-140Gb a month there are data only sims for $70 monthly from Optus and resellers. They guarantee minimum 12Mbps supposedly. In metro areas with the latest LTE modems people are pulling 200Mbps down.

If you need lots of data though, the cost becomes less viable.

Optus’s 100GB (if paid monthly)/140GB (if paid annually) plan: http://www.optus.com.au/shop/broadband/mobile-broadband/data...

When I was investigating this stuff six months ago, I believe these plans were somewhat different (and indeed the Critical Information Summaries for them seem to have dates of May and July), with only the first month being cheaper or having as much data or something. (That the month-to-month one still uses the wording “$70 for the first month” on the marketing page makes me uneasy, but I don’t think there’s a catch, I think it’s merely outdated wording.)

I shall consider switching from amaysim to Optus.

Vivid Wireless offer unlimited 4G data capped at 12 Mbps for $90 a month. Its on the Optus network so your experience will depend on what the coverage is like where you live.

> Its on the Optus network

Actually it's a completely separate network to Optus' 4G network. Optus bought them several years ago.

It's also highly throttled and utterly shite for most users. I was one.

Useful to know. I was considering moving over to them to save money on my ADSL2+ connection. My area has fantastic 4G speeds without any congestion issues as its semi rural and I was expecting them to be quite good.

Have been with vivid for about 12 months, was supposed to be a temporary arrangement while I waited for my building's strata to fix the internal wiring between my apartment and the MDF in the basement. All of the NBN horror stories and the strata's malignant incompetence mean I'm still using it and it's pretty solid in my experience.

I'm in central Sydney and normally average around 10mbps down

From the critical information summary (https://static.vividwireless.com.au/online/Wireless-Broadban...):

> Whilst the Vividwireless service uses the Optus 4G Plus network, it is designed to be used in the home and its data speeds are different to mobile and mobile broadband speeds on the Optus 4G Plus network. In metropolitan areas where you connect to 2300 MHz coverage at your nominated address, download and upload speeds of up to 12/1Mbps are available.

And the cheaper 200GB plan CIS (https://static.vividwireless.com.au/online/Wireless-Broadban...) adds,

> Otherwise in other compatible coverage areas, download and upload speeds of up to 5/1Mbps are available.

So, 12/1 or 5/1 rather than 23/12 or 45/15 as I tend to get out in the country on the same network.

Yes, hiding this information in there is misleading, because people aren’t generally aware of what the different frequency bands and relevant 4G technologies (TDD/FDD) mean and think that “4G” is just one thing.

I used OVO for a while -- IIRC it was $60/mo for 50GB. No speed limits, Optus network.

I used this for work and the kids shared the 4MBps DSL.

I use amaysim’s 50GB data pack, at $65 for 28 days, and on the Optus network. In the country town of Stawell (a few thousand people), I get roughly 23/12Mbps. I’m moving to Navarre soon (about a hundred people), and get about 45/15Mbps there.

For me, living by myself and working from home most days, it’s substantially better than ADSL2+, as it’s faster, more reliable, doesn’t lock me into any contract, allows me to use my internet supply from other places as well, all for the same price as ADSL2+ (which is admittedly generally $10–20 per month dearer in the country for a given service level, and at this price point would include 100GB instead of my 50GB, but I simply don’t need that).

This arrangement works well for me.

Hey Chris, I just moved from Ararat. I never would have expected to see another regional western Victorian on HN!

For reference, Stawell has a population of 6,000 while Ararat is about 8,000. The towns are approx 30 minutes drive distance away. The world is smaller than I thought.

In Ararat it’s almost better to go with 4G. While you get decent caps (1000G/m for AUD$90) the problem is that the internet drops out every time it rains.

I can’t imagine running a business that requires internet access in regional Australia, good on you for finding a way!

I grew up in Melbourne, but preferred the idea of living in the country, so I made it so. (I’m employed by FastMail and head into the office every couple of weeks or so; I told them of my plan to move into the country before they hired me.) When I was first planning it, I had been considering NBN essential, but shortly before actually moving here it occurred to me that regular 4G was actually quite suitable—better than ADSL2+, a test rapidly revealed. My experience with about five months of depending on 4G in Stawell is that apart from a period of about five days where the supply was dodgy (mostly usable, but no more), the Internet supply is at least as reliable than I ever got from ADSL2+ in two locations in Melbourne—where running a ping all day typically has zero packet loss. And ADSL2+’s reliability was never superb.

Your 1TB/$90 and rain dropout refers to ADSL2+, does it not? I haven’t noticed any problems with rain and haven’t seen any caps anywhere near that high on 4G.

Well, now I’m buying in Navarre, which isn’t covered by NBN at this stage (hence it wasn’t in my initial dragnet) but does have an Optus 4G tower, and thus great internet supply.

You're right, I was using ADSL2+ and we were connected to a pillar where we were the only ones using it (50 pair). We reported a fault but rather than fix the problem properly they just hooked us up to another pair. The justification was "well you'll have NBN soon".

Gee, I can't wait...

This is an excellent summary of the situation.

There was a few major potholes in the original plan. The nobel aim was to wire up (and use satellite to augment) the majority of australia, including, critically a large part of the rural population. The appeal was to level the access for the population to high quality internet. From then on; however, it became a political football, with both parties internal reworking it and bike shedding the entire technology stack with no clue on implementation and a strong lobby from the incumbent privatised telco (Telstra) and other telcos to ensure their business is not threatened.

Bunch of muppets.

> For my part, I'm dropping all wires and switching to 4G/LTE, where I can stream 4K content, get decent uploads and still pay less than I would on the National Broadband network.

If everyone does that you'll be lucky to stream youtube videos at 240p. Wireless bandwidth is inherently shared between everyone, wired is dedicated.

> wired is dedicated.

Cable internet is shared. Most of the NBN rollout (HFC) is on ageing cable internet puchased from another vendor.

Yeah, LTE capacity can definitely not meet everyone's needs. But in my part of an Australian major city, the only wired option at the moment is NBN over HFC, with a set up fee or a long contract, at a time when all the retailers are trying to undercut each other by buying insufficient capacity.

Under these conditions, LTE is the clear winner. That may change as you point out.

> Wireless bandwidth is inherently shared between everyone, wired is dedicated.

False. NBN FTTP connections use GPON which is a shared connection (https://www.nbnco.com.au/utility/glossary-of-terms.html#g).

yep. 4g relies on most other people doing little more than messaging, looking at facebook and checking maps to see where the nearest noodle place is.

once everyone is pushing video levels of data around then it will be miserable.

This is a great summary, and a large number of people I know are doing exactly this. Using 4g since the 4g network in major cities on Telstra is extremely fast, and fits their lifestyle (really just using phones at home, or a hotspot in a pinch).

> For my part, I'm dropping all wires and switching to 4G/LTE, where I can stream 4K content, get decent uploads and still pay less than I would on the National Broadband network.

No, you don't.

NBN is built using your tax money

NBN will be maintained using your future tax money

NBN is protected by laws from any potential competition from the private sector, those laws are passed using your names.