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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

Now they are rolling out FTTN-to-FTTP upgrades, the fuckup is finally starting to get fixed. I think, given some more years, we’ll end up in roughly the same place as we would have been if they’d stuck to the original plan - we’ll just have wasted 15+ years and untold billions on the FTTN detour.

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Murdoch bought the government to screw the NBN / stop TTN -- so his cable network would profit for longer. its that simple.

Australia is NOT the example to follow, its worse then Canada they sold the public network to a private entity who then sold it back to them 10yrs later. EXACTLY the same situation. BUT WORSE!

History will remember the name Rupert Murdoch long after certain other famous names have been forgotten. The harm he has done will take generations to set right.

He certainly won't be forgotten in the UK any time soon [0]

[0] - https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/anthony-hilton-st...

I really doubt that’s the reason. Under the ruined nbn, video streaming was still perfectly usable. And slow internet hardly impacted the streaming companies.

It was really gamers trying to grab 100gb updates and workers transferring large files who were hit hardest.

Nothing is being fixed for the areas initially promised. My area, rural, was supposed to be the first to go fibre.... but Oz is huge... and so they chickened out and gave the rural guys nothing. The main house still only has ADSL1 (8Mb/s peak, & generally sits around 2Mb with a lot of noise). As such, I use a tethered 4G connection for all internet in my cabin.

However, to cater for rural areas, they rolled out Wireless NBN, which is just a dedicated 4G connection and 50% more cost over standard NBN... staying on 4G is cheaper and has a closer tower (so the signal is better).

Starlink is starting to look better... (if only I trusted Elon Musk).

the original FTTP plan was never going to FTTP the entire country. most of australia - in the spatial sense of "most" - is sparsely inhabited and fixed-line is uneconomic. the original plan was always satellite + wireless + FTTP, based on density and perhaps a bit of political pork barrelling, and it is quite likely that the original design of which regions would be serviced by which tech was also somewhat optimistic, and might need to have been adjusted, even if the FTTP plan wasn't torn up by the liberal-national coalition

(the original FTTP plan was replaced with a "multi technology mix" plan -- the new federal government argued that their plan would be cheaper because instead of laying new fibre, just buy the existing degraded legacy copper lines from telstra, and also buy and reuse the HFC from telstra and optus.

so instead of spending tens of billions of dollars of public money building brand new infrastructure, spend tens of billions of dollars of money and reuse existing degraded infrastructure! think of the savings!

from memory getting the HFC regions to actually work was a bit of a fiasco, that part of the rollout was heavily delayed.

anyhow, it is great to see the coalition lose another federal election, albeit entirely unrelated reasons)

> gave the rural guys nothing

And even semi-rural, just outside the main cities, you might find yourself with "Fixed Wireless NBN" that promises to hit 25Mbps at least once per 24 hour period.

Broadband in Aus (I'm a recent migrant) is so far behind Europe and so expensive!

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