4g here is also far better than the shithouse fake NBN foisted on us by our far-right government, which loathes and fears any technology more recent than coal & witch burning.
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.
Big projects, govenment & commercial alike often fail. The real NBN certainly might have. But to make up out of a complete vacuum that it was some sort of deliberate con is just another barmy conspiracy theory.
Lets see, Kevin Rudd said it would cost $15 billion. The total cost at the moment seems to be $51 billion. So your conspiracy theory is that the crappier NBN we got which required less work cost $36 billion more than the one you are saying was budgeted for?
> Kevin Rudd said it would cost $15 billion.
The first 90% fibre plan was $43b, later revised down to $37.4b of which it was supposed to be $30b of investment from the Federal government. [0]
About $12b of that was in payments to Telstra ($11b) and Optus ($800m) in return for access to lead-in and last-mile conduits/pits, and decommissioning of HFC networks.
That original business plan was revised later after a KPMG study to recommend ~93% fibre, ~4% fixed wireless (LTE variant), and the remaining ~2-3% on two dedicated satellites (new launches).
(Edited to add: Note that this plan included an eventual ROI, where the government would get it's money back - and hence it be zero/low cost. The current plan has no hope of that happening short of selling the entire thing off to Telstra.)
FTTH installations were budgeted at $1500/residence to install, which by the time the Abbott government was coming into power was actually trending closer to $1200 as the workforce was trained up in deploying the gear and became more experienced in dealing with any odd situations.
There is/was a fantastic video of a talk given by someone from NBNCo (I believe Mike Quigly?) at a University where they go over the architectural design decisions, and how the 93% number was arrived at. The video also went over in detail how the fixed-wireless process was to work.
Arguments that remediating conduit and installing new copper is either cheaper or less work to install aren't backed up by evidence, with NBNCo's current cost for FTTC being somewhere over $3000/residence in 2019[1].
Additionally, because there's now FTTP, FTTN, FTTC, HFC, Fixed-Wireless and Satellite - the whole network is harder to manage and maintain. You need a bigger, more widely trained workforce, you have more equipment to maintain, and more vendors to deal with.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_National_Broadb...
[1] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/nbn-cos-actual-cost-per-premi...
We are one of the most urbanized countries in the world, more so than many who have rolled out fiber.
> 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.
> our far-right government, which loathes and fears any technology more recent than coal & witch burning.
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Whereas you can watch the moment of television where all respect I had for Malcolm Turnbull crashed into the floor (fast forward to the 17 minute mark and watch for about one minute):
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-12/nbn-debate/4882232
"Anthony said that fibre to the premises can deliver one gigabit per second, 1000 megs, and you're quite right, it can. Do you know what it would cost to have a guaranteed one gig' service? At least $20,000 a month."
So basically Turnbull used a deceptive truth (the cost of a high speed service with dedicated guaranteed backhaul) to blatantly and intentionally lie about the cost of gigabit services that would be sold to 99.9% of NBN-connected customers. The fact that he knew enough to concoct this deception made me realise that he wasn't just as bad as the rest of them, he's worse. He used his knowledge and intelligence to cleverly and carefully craft a statement that's blatantly false yet defensible as technically true if he were caught out. Nobody is that clever by accident.
I’m not saying the NBN isn’t a trash fire of an infrastructure project (it is), or that our 4G is bad (it isn’t), but at least for me I get rock solid 100/40 on HFC, which is for sure better than my NBN service in inner-North Melbourne
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
I no longer have a FTTC connection to test, but I don't think it's 3ms low.
Using AussieBB. It's around 20ms from Sydney to Melbourne on our routes
Now when I go back to my parent's house I get 10+ Mbps 4G on Verizon and Tmobile. It's awesome.
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.
The nbn from its conception was a half-baked, last minute idea made up by Kevin Rudd. If any public network was needed, it should have been wireless. The nbn discounted any possible future that resulted in wireless being a viable way of delivering the internet to everyone. Wireless is also necessary because things aren’t stationary. Cars can’t use fiber internet, for example. Fiber to every home is ridiculously expensive, with a large percentage of homes not even using any more bandwidth than is required to stream Netflix. Fiber also excludes rural areas, and any lower density areas in general.
A public wireless network would be utilised much more, as even a lower speed wireless network that is available everywhere and cheaper opens up more possibilities than a limited high speed network. It isn’t just speed that is important. We also have the issue of data caps. High speed connections that have 20gb per month data caps are pretty useless, yet a large percentage of the population can’t afford any more than that. The nbn, whether fiber or not, would always just result in a product a large percentage of normal people couldn’t even utilise.
The liberal party made the nbn worse, but it was a terrible idea to begin with. All the political parties are corrupt.
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.
Can people not see and pros/cons based on suburbs that have fttp/ftth?
You can do the same with fttn based on some suburbs - where people who have paid for 100Mbps end up only getting 20Mbps during peak hour