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Comment by twelvedogs | Hacker News Reader

Australia is still pretty messy, Telstra was privatised and pretty much stopped upgrading their network for years around the 24 mb ADSL level

Eventually we had a forward thinking prime Minister create a new company that started running fibre to homes and wholesaling it to non government businesses but they lost power and fibre to the home became fibre to the neighbourhood running the last bit over existing phone lines

Eventually it was returned to fibre to the home as upgrading existing lines to run shitty 100mb connections was actually much more expensive than just running fibre

We're only now starting to get to the point where fibre is fairly available when it could have been ten years ago

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They stopped upgrading their network because government was publicly implying they'd do something nationally on broadband.

Before then, they were rolling out fast internet. Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago!

Today, the Australian government continues to stomp on the neck of the free market. Numerous initiatives for faster and better privately operated fiber wholesale networks have been sunk by the government, including TPG and others.

TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the inner city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with abysmal upload speeds to protect our investment.

> Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago!

Mhmm, it was great. But at what cost, you had on most plans a 1GB monthly cap.

And then when I went to an ISDN connection they wanted 9c per megabyte. To be fair, they would let you do things like join their squid proxy caching hierarchy, but bleh.

> TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the inner city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with abysmal upload speeds to protect our investment.

Allowing other networks to take away the easiest, highest margin customers would break the NBN. It would likely lead us back to an unfit for purpose, "Free Market" situation, that further disadvantages rural, regional, and remote communities.

I disagree, Sol Trujillo became ceo of Telstra in 2005 and immediately started cutting everything to the bone, Kevin Rudd didn't even get into power until 2007 and the NBN wasn't announced until 2009, fairly large gap there

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