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Comment by nreece | Hacker News Reader

Here in Australia, a few responsible providers like Aussie Broadband have already announced unmetered data usage and temporarily stopping all service suspensions.

https://www.aussiebroadband.com.au/blog/aussie-broadband-ann...

Edit: The real test though will be the bandwidth of our gov-sponsored, substandard, widely FTTN (instead of full FTTP).

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As a kiwi it blows my mind how bad your broadband is over there. My cousin recently moved to some rural Aussie town and will be getting 25 megabit, tops. Here in NZ we're rolling out 4 gigabit connections nationwide over the next 6 months.

EDIT: props for getting rid of limits and disconnects though. NZ providers are just saying we'll be able to cope with everyone working from home because we have a fancy network.

25mbs is bad?! Lol I would KILL for that -- here in small-town Canada I'm still on DSL that tops out at 12mbs. My dad who's on a farm gets six through a point to point connection that he pays an arm and a leg for -- although he's shortly getting an LTE connection at 25.

Last week they started laying cable down my street, so it seems pretty soon I'll be able to join the modern world.

It's very regional. A while back someone here on HN was trying to tell everyone how easy and affordable it was to get 10Gb fiber these days and didn't seem to be aware of how ridiculous that statement was. Sure enough, when challenged they produced a link to a company that assured me they could not service my company's area, which not only isn't rural but is also a stone's throw away from a rather large IT company who's name you'd definitely recognize.

Hell, my company has several branch locations which are relegated to point-to-point wireless links in the sub-Mb range.

My parents live 75 km away from Montreal. It's a small, somewhat isolated town, but still: it's not remote in any sense of the word.

Their only broadband option is LTE (and data prices in Canada are through the roof) or satellite (also expensive).

From what they're telling me, people from the area formed a co-op and got government funding to lay fiber. Except now that it's happening, incumbent telecomms also want a piece of the pie, doing everything in their power to lobby, slow things down through the CRTC and give them time to put their own systems in place before the co-op.

Also in Canada here, albeit the big-city part - our telecommunications sector is uniquely bad in terms of bandwidth / service for value and consumer choice.

We have organizations like Internet Society Canada (https://internetsociety.ca/) that are aiming to help change that, but it's an uphill battle.

Yeah it sucks, and what's worse is that there's no near-future course correction by the policy makers. This is going to come back and bite us in some very uncomfortable places.

Kudos for the multi-gigabit fibre, when we can only imagine of a gigabit lottery.

I'm confused, what do policy makers have to do with it?

"Here in Australia Labor’s plan was for a nationwide network with 93 per cent FTTP coverage. Under the Coalition’s model, only around 20 per cent of NBN Co customers will enjoy FTTP. Around a third of fixed-line premises will be lumbered with FTTN."

https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/n...

Let no tragedy go to waste...

how much international bandwidth are you getting now though? when i lived in auckland more than a decade ago, the local bandwidth was rather irrelevant to me, as most of the websites that i needed to access were overseas and i paid about a dollar per GB for that.

a fast local internet is useful mostly for local streaming services. (does youtube count as local in NZ now?)

At least some of that could be due to the fact that Australia is way larger geographically though, right? It's a lot more cable to run.

Not at all. NZ is even less urbanised than Australia. The long-distance transit cables between cities in Australia all mostly already existed before the NBN even started.

You could cover more than 80% of our population just cabling up (literally) about half a dozen reasonably dense cities.

The actual reason is political. One side of politics privatised the state owned monopoly telco, creating a single huge, anti-competitive behemoth. That made progress with the internet stagnate for a decade. Then the other side got in, tried to work with the telco but they wouldn’t budge, and then surprised everybody by deciding to just build a provider-neutral network that was FTTP to 90-93% of the population. This was going fine - a few months behind schedule but on budget (projected at AU$44.1bn) after a few years.

But the opposition managed to convince a bunch of people in the media that it was hugely over-budget (despite the fact it wasn’t, and that all their financials were on the public record) and that a sensible solution was to stop that, and instead buy the old copper networks off the incumbent provider and spend a few billion to do a bit of an upgrade. They were “absolutely confident 25 megs is enough for anyone” and said this would cost max $29bn. They won Government, turned the network on its head and it’s just been one problem after another with huge widespread service quality issues, massive cost overruns, delays etc.

So now the cost of their “more sensible, cheaper, and quicker to build” network is nearing $60bn and finishing two years later than the original FTTP schedule (before they won Government, the party that wrecked the project promised to have it done by the end of 2016!)

So it’s just a big mess. Nobody really knows why they chose to do what they did when pretty much all the experts said to just continue with FTTP (they paid some consultants with links to their party to say their idea was great to get around that). Some say it was business links between party members and the incumbent telco, or the cable TV network they own half of. Others say it was because they had a deal with Murdoch (the leader of the opposition actually happened to have lunch with him the day before they announced their policy) because he owns the other half of the cable TV network. Perhaps it was just because they couldn’t accept that it was a good idea the way it was...

The "Australia is way larger" thing ignores that the situation in the cities is just as bad, or sometimes worse.

Australia is pretty densely settled though. I mean I have cousins on the Eyre Peninsula so I know what "thinly settled" means, but most people live in (comparatively) densely settled suburbs.

Then you'd expect the situation to get better in denser areas of Australia far more than it does.

In Canada Rogers (and I believe Bell), two of our biggest ISPs, have removed data cap fees on internet and ended long distance fees for calls in response to the virus:

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2020/03/16/rogers-waiving-long-d...

In the US, Comcast generally doesn't get a good rep - but they've done the same: https://corporate.comcast.com/covid-19

Now if we could take a second to talk about all the "From CEO..." emails that are being sent around...

FYI - AT&T and other major North American ISPs have also lifted data caps for the next 60 days.

Wait, is Comcast Comcast again? I thought they were Xfinity now (to run away from precisely that bad rap).

I always thought the corporation was still Comcast but they'd just rebranded their products as Xfinity. Could be wrong though, haven't fact checked that.

Xfinity is the name of their consumer/residential package. Possibly to distance themselves from bad PR associated with the Comcast name.

Xfinity is how long it takes to get ahold of a CSR.

Looks like CenturyLink is joining in: http://news.centurylink.com/fccpledge

Two out of three mobile providers in Czech Republic already made their mobile data unlimitted due to the crisis:

https://news.expats.cz/prague-technology/t-mobile-joins-o2-i...

I would expect rationing of the available bandwidth to become more important, not less, as the entire population is stuck at home using it all day.

That’s if congestion was ever actually a problem to begin with.

That's what I've been wondering ... will they ever try using "we need zero rating to prevent network overload" again if they'll demonstrate now that they don't?

I wish I could say no, but: Yes. In time they could claim - potentially truthfully - that an increasing number of increasingly connected devices engaging in more complex applications by ever more data hungry end users drove additional demand relative to the levels seen in the past, even during past crises.

Reality is that peak usage (at least in Canada) is in the evening hours. Impact from WFH during office hours will just use excess daytime capacity.

WFH (RDP/Webex/VPN) uses much less bandwidth than streaming Netflix.

But the kids being at home might make a big difference.

Having kids at home without an internet connection these days is something most parents would rather not experience. Right up there with lack of electricity but lower in the priority list.

I'd have thought Netflix in particular would use less bandwidth than video conf because of the amount of peering / caching tricks they can do to bring their service "closer".

Note: I'm not talking purely bits transferred - I'm referring to network boundaries. In-network congestion should be easier to manage for an ISP and I'd expect plenty of them make it so Netflix and others' traffic is effectively "in-network".

Sure, but any sane ISP in a big enough metro will have ports are the local Internet Exchange where Amazon, Netflix (if you exceed the appliance), Google, MSFT, etc. all peer at.

After that, what’s left?

In Canada, it’s actually the incumbents that largely refuse to peer freely.

What is more important is that WFH traffic is far more balanced in it's up/down ratio and hence is likely to have neutral pearing costs if it leaves the ISP's network at all.

Not to mention that most of the people now moving to home office will be spending their time working in relatively low bandwidth applications not sitting video conferences.

Aussie Broadband have announced unlimited bandwidth for those on limited plans, but also that those few making extreme use of available bandwidth will be throttled. They might slow their connections down, too.

It's worth noting for context that the NBN was meant to be FTTP across the entire country, until the most recent conservative government came in and promptly cancelled all that.

My area is fixed mobile only now.

The storms we had 6+ weeks ago knocked out the landline (and adsl), so we've been tethering for any internet, which is 1 bar strength of 4g.

It's increasingly unlikely that Telstra (the fixed line telco) will ever repair the copper: we've had several promises and nothing yet (nor expected until April).

Australia. The only country that makes the USA look good for broadband...

While I think both countries' ISPs like to compete for a yearly "silliest restriction and worst customer experience" award, the NBN in Australia is a government screwup mostly due to the actions of vested interests and vested politicians.

An entire political party decided that the internet was just for "movies and entertainment", "You don't need fast internet" and similar comments. This guided them towards penny pinching as a strategy which meant they succeeded in seizing defeat from the jaws of victory.

"Penny wise, pound stupid" is the old term for it.

... and now I learn that NZ has done similar things to AU.

Hey... things have gotten better in the states in the last few years. Not great, but metropolitan areas have fiber. My old building that was built in 1965 got wired with AT&T fiber about a year ago.

Part of the problem with that, is that it's single-provider fiber.

If you don't like AT&T's offerings, you can't go with another ISP.

In a lot of buildings - there's exclusivity arrangements so that no other provider can install fiber.

This is why Australia's NBN was a good idea - the fiber is rolled out by a single body, all the ISPs have equal access.

My apartment has NBN Fiber, I have an ONT provided by NBN, and off that ONT there's four 1Gbit ethernet ports - I can call up my choice of ISP(s) and ask for service from any of them.

The idea for having four data ports was that you could have multiple different network conections.

Perhaps your employer wants you to have a 1Gbit connection direct into their network - no worries, they can provision directly onto one of those ports, and then it doesn't matter what malware might be on my home network, it won't impact the work device.

Perhaps you need some kind of remote-monitored medical gear - well having that on the public internet is a bad idea, so your healthcare provider could provision a port for that, too.

It also means that if I want to switch ISPs, I call up the new ISP and ask for a connection, and when they get around to setting it up - I switch over to their port. Not working? No worries, switch back to the old ISP and continue using that until the new ISP figures it out.

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