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ricardobeat

Amazingly the article refrains from providing any numbers for Australia. From the original report:

- 5G: 792mbps

- 4G: 950mbps

https://www.opensignal.com/blog/2019/07/08/5g-boosts-the-max...

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In my experience, you never get that outside of the town centre. 10mbps cap in the suburb on 4G.

Anyway, this doesn't really highlight how good our 4G is, it highlights how poor our interconnected fibre network is. It's a bloody multi-generational disaster, a train wreck salvaged. And the price of it all lands on the consumers.

For example, I'm on cable, and life is good. When I get migrated (by force) to fibre, I will have less bandwidth and pay more. It's also wildly known at the moment to have constant drop outs. YAY the future.

And remote areas are put on Satellite, they were never going to run fibre to the home.

The NBN in its post 2013 form is a disaster but I'm not aware of any areas that are still being migrated from HFC to fibre by them. Are you sure this is the case? If you have HFC you will likely stay on HFC, but you will indeed have your bandwidth downgraded and price increased. Thanks Liberal Party.

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

HFC Still better than FTTN (VDSL) with most of the HFC network supporting DOCSIS 3.1 supporting speeds of 10Gbit

It depends where you are. I just did a speed test in the suburbs on a Telstra reseller and got 118MBit, which IME is par for the course around Perth and suburbs.

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).

Uneconomical because 4G doesn't compete in price for data allowances, once you are using more than 50 GB or so per month?

At a constant 118 MBit/s I calculate that you'd go through over 50 GB per hour, so the usefulness is limited.

I pay US$55 a month for unlimited data @ 50Mbit on my fibre/copper line, and US$100 per year for 80GB per year on my 4G mobile (there are other options up to about US$70/m for 150GB/m but no unshaped & unlimited data option.)

I suspect that part of the reason that 4G is so good in Australia is that data allowances are relatively small which limits congestion.

You won't go onto FTTP, they will use the Telstra HFC cable and you just get a different modem. Most of the drop-out problems I think are fixed.

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.

About 2 months ago I was staying at a friends place that had HFC NBN and it would drop out at least once a week.

I'm in an apartment tower which is vendor locked to Internode (IINet/TPG aren't even available).

I'm fortunate that the connection is 100/40/unlimited for $60 AUD, but it still annoys me that I have _no_ options to obtain a static IP whatsoever.

It's not as good as a static IP but you can look into DynDNS providers to have a static way to access your machines from outside. Almost every provider has a free option and it's very easy to setup.

After 5 years of rock solid Telstra HFC, I'm now on NBN HFC (same wire) and it has been unreliable as fu__. Right this very moment I'm currently getting ongoing 40% packet loss to the first hop, probably because it's raining.

its not just remote areas going on satellite now. The NBN is in a rush to get it finished by mid next year so they are now moving suburbs on to satellite. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-11/powderfinger-star-off...

Australia has the Telstra "4GX" and Optus "4G plus" networks - it's AU 4G with its own spectrum and band aggregation.

I have seen gigabit speeds on 4GX - once, when it was new and the spectrum was hardly used.

Since the reports are quoting real world maximums, I'm sure that number is true - but doesn't reflect your average experience.

IIRC the largest ISP in Australia is Vodafone who provide more mobile IP connectivity than anyone else. (Source: Personal discussion with senior management, ~5? years ago)

Whoever told you that was being very liberal with the truth, Vodafone has always been #3 in the Australian mobile market since they started, they were hemorrhaging subscriptions for most of this decade due to underinvestment (known as "Vodafail").

They only started providing wireline services very recently, one of the few "western" markets they were not a full telco player in.

The discussion was around mobile IP connections. I am not sure if your calculation includes for example (just guessing!) other mobile carrier branded services using their network (MNVO[0]), non consumer (eg. IOT type or vehicular) mobile nodes, etc. I would trust this person implicitly as I used to work for them, they are an engineer not a salesperson and they are not known to extend the truth. While no information is infallible and perhaps they were wrong, given their position, however, I doubt it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_mobile_virt...

Edit: Seems my info was bad. Disappointing! Latest stats page 9 @ http://clients3.weblink.com.au/pdf/HTA/02127798.pdf and page 31 @ https://www.acma.gov.au/-/media/Research-and-Analysis/Report... They are indeed third (last!), though currently the fastest growing. Their MNVO base = 350K customers, total = just under 6M customers. Guess it shows how long I've been outta dodge :)

I can't see this being true for IoT/M2M either, sorry. There are a couple of small MVNOs on Vodafone but nothing that would bridge the gap between them and the other players.

_Maybe_ they have a good share of multinational contracts from their parent company, that is the only area I can see this statement being true.

Vodafone are doing some work with NB-IoT but the general market for this are metro utility companies - the coverage doesn't exist out of these areas to be taken seriously for a nationwide fleet.

I would put good money on the number of payment card terminals and power meters alone on Telstra being bigger than Vodafone AU's entire M2M business.

As sibling commented, Voda is distant third in Australia. The incumbent is Telstra, with ~50% mobile share and was the dominant fixed provider pre-NBN.

Telstra's mobile footprint is vastly superior to the other two MNOs in terms of geographic coverage.

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