Ask HN: If you have had a FTTN broadband rollout, how is it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If you have had a FTTN broadband rollout, how is it?

7 pointssamuellevy5 comments

Brief background. I live in Australia, where, as many people may know, we were getting a Fibre To The Premises broadband rollout, organised by the government.

As many people are likely also aware, we in Australia had a change of government last weekend, with the incoming government dedicated to Fibre To The Node, instead (citing a faster rollout, and lower costs).

I run www.weneedthenbn.com (I'll put a clicky below), which is one of the many sites which have appeared in the last week, attempting to rescue the FTTP broadband network plan.

What I'm asking for is this: Have you had FTTN or FTTP/FTTH broadband? What can you tell us (from a user experience perspective) about stability, access, speeds, cost, etc. I would like to build up some user stories, either to use as "this is why we need FTTP", or to show me that I should stop worrying, and learn to love the node.

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I live in the US, and I have had both FTTP (via Verizon FIOS) and FTTN (via AT&T U-verse).

FTTP was by far, the best internet service I ever experienced. The latency was super low, download times were always fast, uploads were synchronous, and the service had amazing uptime in the 3 years I had it.

FTTN was by contrast, a miserable experience. The hardware was finicky, the latency was terrible (thanks to a DSL Interleave), the downloads were inconsistent, upload speeds were laughable, and the hardware was total crap and couldn't stay up at all.

Unfortunately, Verizon has halted new development of it's FIOS product even though it was awesome, due to cost. AT&T has pushed forward with it's crappy U-verse solution and has eclipsed FIOS installs in my local area.

My takeaway from this is that fiber optic cable is far and away one of the most stable and solid technologies since the invention of the copper wire. But unfortunately it comes at such a steep price, that it gets sidelined when it comes up against the "Last Mile" problem of getting a connection from the node to the residence.

I would love to see an opt-in option for FTTP where you pay the difference to the service provider to have the fiber optic cable run into the residence. Even if they charged me at cost ($2-3K USD last I checked), I think many would pay for it due to the better experience. Over time, this cost would fall and everyone would opt in.

My understanding is that a lot of people had bad experience with FTTP/FTTH when it was first rolled out in the US, because the telco would cut the copper cables that lead to the house. This meant that once you switched to FTTP/FTTH, you had no way to switch back to ADSL (or that it was prohibitively expensive to do so).

In my neighbourhood in Canada, FTTN is quite common, and speeds of 25Mbps/10Mbps and 50Mbps/10Mbps are commercially available using VDSL to cover the last mile between the node and the home (and this is well below the theoretical capabilities of VDSL, since the telco is also using VDSL to deliver the TV component of a triple-play package ). While a new modem is still required, since the last mile is still copper, it means that switching from ADSL to FTTN+VDSL and back is easy (alleviating concerns that a FTTH provider might suddenly jack up prices knowing that you can't switch back to ADSL).

I believe the local telco has started rolling out FTTH to select areas, but:

- it's available in far fewer neighbourhoods than FTTN

- the monthly fee is much more expensive (think $150 CAD/month, compared to $40/month for FTTN)

- there's an expensive installation fee for FTTH

- the bandwidth cap on FTTH doesn't increase proportionally with bandwidth compared to FTTN or ADSL; the caps are so low that you're basically on usage-based billing for all usage above the base monthly fee

I haven't experienced FTTH yet, but reports from people who do have it seem really good.

I have however worked supporting both FTTP and FTTH on a private network. In my experience, FTTH was so much simpler to diagnose. If there was an issue you would check the exchange, and their house. The Fiber converters we had where tiny compared to the ones NBNCo offers too.

The FTTN users where a lot harder to deal with. All the network equipment is still fairly young (under 10 years iirc), but we would still get cables from the pits that needed to be rerun. Our nodes supported 4 houses at most. Though most of them only had 1 or 2 users attached to them.

I lived in West End, Brisbane for a while and due to the closing of the local ADSL exchange (to build a new childrens' hospital) Telstra upgraded the whole area to FTTP.

Getting it set up was a nightmare but this was entirely the fault of our ISP (DoDo are the worst.) After it was installed I had 3 months of perfect internet access until moving out of the area! Shame I could only order 30mbit at the time.

http://www.weneedthenbn.com

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