Australia’s 4G network is faster than 5G: study

Regardless, it's not really relevant to an article about 4G vs 5G - they are separate fibre networks I believe?

That speed is just double the maximum line speed of my FTTN NBN connection at the same property (but I keep it anyway as household data usage on 4G is uneconomical).

The less bandwidth and paying more are only due to stupid pricing models from the infrastructure provider (NBN), for anybody who isn't familiar with the system. There's no technical reason for it in 60% of the country. They could upgrade anybody in the FTTP footprint to gigabit this afternoon and anybody in the HFC footprint to at least 250 or 300Mbps but are limiting everybody mostly to 100Mbps (but most people are on lower speeds) just because they want to gouge providers for bandwidth. The artificial limitations created by these pricing models also mean that a lot of providers skimp on buying the necessary bandwidth, so for most providers (there are only a few good ones) there are unnecessary slow-downs at peak times as the artificially limited bandwidth gets congested. It's madness!

The rest is unfortunately served by satellite, FTTN or FTTC that aren't able to deliver the speeds, or for the fixed wireless footprint it is also limited, but to a large degree only because the LNP government shelved the planned backhaul upgrades to save some money, so there are all these wireless towers that are served by low-speed microwave backhaul. The plan had been to upgrade any tower to fibre backhaul once the microwave backhaul reached a certain level of utilisation, before it was fully congested. That now doesn't happen, so those users just have to deal with speeds dropping significantly at peak times.

40 odd km from me there are estates wired up with NBN's original FTTP. Yet in my location, all that's available is the hopeless Sky Muster satellite service, which tends to go offline for days at a time, and has trouble with weird contingencies like rain. It was originally slated as a last-ditch option for people in truly remote areas, but the hapless NBN Co has gradually extended its use to anywhere they can't be arsed to serve properly.

[Edit: as a side note, my location shows the corporate fakery behind the 'mixed tech' model. Using a cheap 4g modem from ebay, and without even so much as a fixed antenna, I can get 60Mbps down with 4g. Yet NBNCo doesn't make the fixed wireless option available here, instead foisting on us the 'outback solution' of satellite with its 600ms ping times, pitiful data caps & unreliability]

Each technology has their own hardware faults though, and I've witnessed both. But as a user of the service, I'm actually surprised how decent HFC has been working.

My parents of FTTN get about 50/20,which is what I expect a lot of users on these lines would only be able to access. But the sheer cost of using a NBN over 4G makes it a lot easier to sell, data sims are not cheap

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle

HN is a great place for considered discussion. Let's keep it that way.

Being stuck inside it is not interesting, it's horrifying and depressing.

I moved into an apartment that was built with NBN Fibre to every apartment. I moved here and paid a premium for it because I wanted to get a head-start on the FTTH rollout we were promised.

Instead of the promised ability to move just about anywhere and get the same connection quality and bandwidth options, we now have a roulette wheel where most of the options are mediocre at best.

Worse still, we paid even more for this bungled mix of copper based tech than the original FTTH rollout.

I did have to go through a few modems to find one that worked reliably. Oddly enough, an old Huawei B315s has turned out to be by far the best for my situation. I've tried fancier models that multiplex radio bands, but they were slower and less reliable.

Weather seems to have little to no effect. What does sometimes cause a problem is tourist influxes to the nearest town. The occasional big weekend event can bring speeds down to 12Mbps or so. Still, I'm not complaining and consider ubiquitous internet availability a kind of modern miracle.

I don't believe the rural NBN customers on Wireless Satellite technology would support this premise.

Even customers in suburban shopping centres struggle with their cellular connection - hence Free Wifi being so ubiquitous.

But regardless, our conservative government relies on minerals and education rather than investing in Australia's ability to compete in a digital world.

So here's hoping we can keep up with developed nations who are making use of the high-bandwidth infrastructure made available to them today.

The left proposed an NBN based on 'fiber to the home' technology.

The right threw out that plan and replaced it with 'fiber to the node and copper to the home' technology.

Now it is hard to say if the NBN proposed by the left would have been a disaster as it was only rolled out to a few place. But being fiber based it would at least have been future proofed.

However, now that the most of the money has been spent and the NBN copper system is nearing completion, we are seeing that the NBN as it now stands is a total disaster.

It is already obsolete before it is complete.

I worked at a Telco that installed extremely old hardware, but because it was theoretically capable of achieving speeds that were similar to the low-end of 3G, they branded and marketed it as 3G.

Marketing loved it.

When you pulled out your phone it clearly said "2G" on the screen, but you were paying for 3G.

When it comes to discussing these two distinct clusters of spectrum, the difference is so stark that we might as well be talking about different protocols.

5G and 5G pro?...

Good luck with the NBN lottery! In inner-city Brisbane I'm lucky to have NBN and non-NBN fibre options. But I would cancel fixed fibre in a heartbeat for unlimited 5G if it meant only taking a bandwidth hit.

If you have cable, satellite, or streaming this already happens. The only way to watch TV without being watched is to use an antenna or local storage.

There's no way this can be cheaper, especially in the US where carriers are currently charging $10-20 per device per month. I can imagine a dystopian future where device vendors think "x% of people can't figure out how to connect to their own WiFi, so let's ship a 5G radio with Verizon eSIM instead and make up the extra cost with more privacy-invading ads" but I'm going to ragequit the Internet if that happens.

If we don't look at the bigger picture we can't look at the wider impacts, the ethics, or any of that. This is something I learned in engineering ethics. It was a required class at my university for engineers for a reason.