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Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

While the Australian right wing govt scrapped all the fibre to the home work that was underway and decided that copper from the node to the house was a great upgrade. The internet in Australia is so bad I had significantly better in New Zealand a decade ago.

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Which Australian right wing government are you referring to? Australian telecoms ran off the rails in the late 90s, the moment that the Howard government privatised the state-run phone network. They either stuffed it up (thinking charitably), or pulled a dodgy related party transaction to rip off the public and enrich their mates in business who were kind enough to donate back part of the loot (thinking cynically).

There were no good options after that. In hindsight, the least bad choice was to nationalise the network again, think a lot harder about competition and monopoly issues, and maybe have another go at privatisation some years down the track. But no one had the guts to do that.

The Abbot / Turnbull govt stopping the rollout of fibre in favour of using copper.

Yea Australia have ruined the NBN. In New Zealand (a small island with 5 million people) I have 1Gbps. Had Fibre at 100Mbps+ for 4+ years now. It makes a massive difference when compared to ~10-20Mbps DSL2/VDSL.

FTC Fibre to CAB and using existing coper for the drop to the house makes sense as you can get good performance with VDSL over 20MBS at a 2K yards

This chart suggests at 1800m you can expect below 20mbps

https://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/2013/chart-bt-fttc-...

Which is both slower than the fibre that had already been planned, and slower than the then incoming government's "25mbps for everyone by end of 2016" promise (which they missed).

It also doesn't have a good cheap upgrade path and assumes that the copper is good and doesn't need to be replaced (it isn't, and it does in many places).

And does the average consumer need more than 20MBS and more to the point be willing to pay for it.

Some of the more extreme claims that we all need GB speed links don't make sense its like saying every house/flat needs a 56Kv 3 phase power supply.

> And does the average consumer need more than 20MBS and more to the point be willing to pay for it

The most commonly purchased NBN service in 2016 is 25mbps Down 5mbps up. (51%) and 14% of customers buy 100/40: So yes to both questions.

And that’s 2016. Why skate to where the puck is rather than where it’s going?

20Mb speeds are on the low end, and has no future upgrade path (speedwise). My cable modem allows up to 200-300 Mb service, and DOCSIS is improving with every new version.

Yes absolutely terrible drop in speed over VDSL over distance or noise.

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