Hey all,
I've seen a frankly dizzying amount of flat out incorrect information about the NBN recently. Some positive, some negative. So I'm offering you a chance to ask me questions about how it works.
Who am I? I'm a Tech Support Manager, SME and NOC team member for a large Telco. I won't be able to answer political or billing questions, but feel free to lay on any tech questions and I'll do my best to answer them.
To be able to answer that properly I'd probably have to possess financial information that I don't have access to. But it began by large delays and access issues which blew out costs and time frames. In some cases it was NBN's fault, and in others it was local councils and businesses. But the end result was that NBN began to rapidly fall behind their target. Less resources were dedicated to customer issues (post installation issues) as they were needed in provisioning (connection setup). You then though had the issue of people doing jobs without the proper training, which often just led to more issues rather than solutions. Think of it as training on the job. The end result is the poor customer experience you see today.
In terms of infrastructure issues, a large part is how many times they've had to redesign their network. It's impacted everyone in the industry very negativity, and most of all NBN. They've gone from needing one simple network to needing 3 vastly different delivery methods. This means more training, more training gaps, more expensive maintenance, more failure points… From my perspective as a tech manager it's the single biggest problem. I hate dealing with NBN, but I feel so sorry for their front end employees! Impossible to learn everything they need to know.
The other large point I'd like to make is expanding on the newest access issue they face. The deal with Telstra is crippling the ability of anyone to support the product, as to investigate a fault we need to send it to NBN, who need to get a tech (with standard delays) who most of the time then need to raise a Telstra fault. And about 20% of the time (at the moment) it devolves into a blame game between the two, and the customer and carrier get caught in between. Only Telstra techs can legally touch Telstra lines but Telstra aren't replacing many of the ones who retire, and haven't been as they thought their network was going to be made redundant. So much knowledge and experience lost already, trying to support a network already on its last legs. See below link for examples of why some people on FTTN are getting scewed
https://delimiter.com.au/2012/05/01/worst-of-the-worst-photo…
What did Turnbull do to change the roll out plans Labor began (ie. fiber to the node(?)) and did this make things worse?
THANKS for putting yourself forward like this :)
No problems. I recommend you read the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs above, but to summarise it;
Instead of delivering fibre to every property, Turnbull decided to try use a mixed technology network, apparently to try reduce the cost. Australia already has copper going to nearly every house in Australia, and the thinking was that it's cheaper to use what's already there.
It's cheaper short term, but no one is really addressing the cost of maintaining copper. I've seen estimates between 200mil and 700mil a year. I tend to think it's probably not even that much, it would be around the 100 mil a year figure though. This is because copper is fragile and brittle. It degrades at a fast rate and is hard to troubleshoot and fix. It is also end of life as a technology as we are reaching the very limit of what copper is capable of carrying as a physical connection.
Fibre on the other hand has a massive life span. It will not really degrade without external influence, and currently we do not know the limit the physical medium itself has. To explain, it sends data through as light pulses. Currently the only limit to speed we have is how quickly we can send the pulses, and improving this is where most future research into land based transmission will likely take place. It is also easy to troubleshoot in comparison. It's harder to fix, but much less likely to break and will end up costing a lot less money, plus it will prevent us from needing to upgrade our cables in the future. We will still need to upgrade our exchange equipment, but not for a long time, and when we do it will be much cheaper because we will only need to upgrade Central locations, not every damn cable run.
Ok, not really a short summary sorry… Hope it answers your question!
Bonus round: The wireless was introduced because they didn't think the price of installing cables could be justified by the returns they'd get due to population and cost to install. It's purely a business decision and short sighted as they run fine margins on available bandwidth. Any sort of large population growth and people will begin seeing issues
Thanks.
The copper network is way too outdated. We're just kicking the can down the road and balancing the books for the next handover of power.
They want to encourage and decentralize businesses and population growth but they don't want to bite the bullet to bring important technologies to these areas.
I'm not sure that's the motivation truth be told. I don't want to venture into political opinion here, but let's just say I doubt the decision was purely driven by the cost to tax payers (with the exception of wireless areas).
Can't argue about the copper, the sooner we can upgrade to something better (or even replace it all with brand new well shielded copper) the better for everyone
Hi tassietigermaniac and everyone else :)
To just add to this, if anyone wants to know if their specific address is NBN ready and what speeds you could/should expect (and not be told otherwise/lies from your service provider), feel free to start a Conversation with me and privately message me your address.
For tassietigermaniac, do you have access to the nbnco portal? I'd assume you do working for a big Telco, but just in case you don't, hit me up too :)
Haha cheers Vangelon! I was lucky enough to have one of the first retailer accounts created, but the offer is appreciated. Major props for agreeing to dig around for the right LOC for people, it's a pain!
I wish they'd made some of the changes we suggested around how ORD, APT, PRI, INC and AVC references interact but it's much better than it used to be at least!
This is not really a question, just a whinge
I am currently with Optus cable and getting NBN soon. I am getting the hard sell to "switch over to NBN for no additional cost", and being asked to sign up without being provided any information re plans, speeds etc etc, and as if I have no choice (turns out after further enquiry I will get less speed than I have today) They also say my cable network will be disconnected as soon as NBN is available (I have heard Optus sometimes do this very soon after NBN is available)
I expect most non- tech savvy people will fall for these unscrupulous tactics.
Can one refuse? What happens when one refuses?
Then sadly one loses all connection, and has to pay a lot more and wait a lot longer to get onto the NBN
No information on plans? Did you know that before they sign you up they legally need to both explain the plan in detail, then provide you with a summary? If they can't prove that they clearly explained the plan to you, or missed something in their explanation, then you can legally get out of it without having to pay any ETF's (early termination fees). If they aren't doing this, it is very unethical and they are setting themselves up for a whole lot of TIO trouble later on down the line
The letter I got doesn't mention any plans, just goes on about how easy it is to switch and gives a URL.
When I go to the URL I have to put in my current cable account number and contact details and tick to select a box that says "I agree to switch all accounts in my name to Optus nbn™ when it becomes available at my address" before it will let me continue to view plans.
Hi Tassie,
Thanks for putting yourself forward like this. :)
I have been on fixed wireless for last 3-4 years and suffer major congestion issues at night times and on weekends. I have tried 2 different ISP's running on different backbones and they both crap out at the same times. It seems NBNco have overprovisioned the tower and it's not being updated. A lot of the time my 50/20 connection goes below 5Mbps. For the first 12 months or so speeds were great though and pretty close to constantly being what I was paying for.
Anyway, in the meantime NBNco have gone down the road and stuck in a FTTN point about 2-300 meters from my place. Will I have the option to convert over to that once it is online or will I be stuck with my overprovisioned wireless? (Also they have already replaced the IDU and ODU at one point).
What ISPs have you used?
Internode and Telecube. Had them both running concurrently. Telecube uses Vocus as their backbone and node uses something different (or so I believe?). In the end I stuck with telecube as the performance was the same but the costs were cheaper. :)
Maybe try Aussie Broadband? If you get congestion with them, then you definitely know it is the tower. ABB have built their own network and don't oversubscribe.
@Stix: Yeah, nah.. ABB is on my radar if I have any issues in the future but for now I'm convinced it's an NBN issue so I have to wait until they either upgrade the tower or hook me up to the new node. :)
Interesting. I haven't heard of them, but it seems you're right. If they offer their fixed wireless then it might be worth checking their speeds out
No worries Eightimmortals,
If you can provide me with your LOC in a personal message (or your address) I can check for general congestion for you, and see if they have any plans of swapping your service class (what type of services are available to you). It sounds to me like it's a tower issue if it's spread across two towers. I make the point earlier that the fixed wireless will have this issue, it will get congested very quickly as the technology still isn't fast enough to provide the bandwidth required to service NBN speeds.
If it's both carriers then it will likely have something to do with how much more expensive it is for carriers to buy traffic for fixed wireless. FTTP, FTTN and FTTB are by far the cheapest options open to us currently.
PM me either your LOC or your address and I'll have a look for you, or your carrier might be able to answer that for you too.
I'd have to do research, but I believe there is the option of manually requesting a cable run to your house directly. But that's a very pricey route, often exceeding $5k
Initially, Telstra offer FTTN for $4.7b
Why NBN $30b budget still blown, even when they've switched FTTP to mixed FTTN/HFC.
Also, does 5G prone to congestion? Does 5G has the capacity to service large customer base on unlimited quota/bandwidth?
I'm not sure myself how they ran out of $30b dollars. I believe it has something to do with the cost of redesigning their network and the ridiculous fees they have to pay Telstra currently though. Whoever bought the copper network, THEN agreed to pay $9b a year in maintenance when Telstra will still be getting money for ICOFs (incorrect call out fees) is either terrible at negotiating or had an alternate agenda. Anyway, trying to keep politics out of it.
The fact is, restructuring and building a network is an extremely expensive task. There are legal agreements, maintenance issues, scoping, compatibility… the whole 9 yards. Not to mention that most of the staff need training and will take a while to get proficient at their jobs. There is bound to be a lot of wastage at the start of a project like this, it's unavoidable, and I don't think it was taken into account when the initial expectations were set.
5G is prone to issues (not just congestion) simply because NBN decided that each tower can cover x amount of land mass/population, however, it really needs a tower every y meters. I use variables as I don't have the figures, but they based their initial estimates on theoretical peak performance. That's a bad idea with radio and wifi as they can suffer from SO many types of interference. Thunderstorm, snow or rain? It'll slow down. Got a brick wall instead of plaster? It'll slow down. Got a fridge within 10m of your radio? That'll slow it down. Construction in the area and someone is using a crane? That'll slow it down… I've had a company demand we organise the removal of a crane from a local construction site once as it was causing their connection dropouts.
To address congestion directly, the tech is just not up to scratch yet. Unless they get much wider frequency bands (which isn't possible unless the government auction off more in the right ranges) then they can only send so much data from their tower. Again, I don't have exact numbers, but lets say that each tower can provide only 2gbps max. While there are fewer customers on it this is fine, but once you hit say 1000 customers (the minimum I'd expect NBN would want from each tower), then this leaves only 2mbps per customer. These are made up numbers, but that's how it works. The tower has a limit on the amount of traffic it can push out, and we're finding that they are constantly hitting that limit.
It's worth adding at the end that NBN aren't using real 5G. Just a sort of enhanced 4G network that the media (and maybe NBN?) have mislabled. When 5G does role out properly I can see a lot of these issues going away
Can you name good NBN players you know atm like ABB who has less congestion and good infrastructure?
Probably not, to be honest, I only have visibility of my own ISP and to suggest that would be biased. It's best to rely on the wisdom of other users in the area, unless you know an NBN employee who can check all the CVC's for you. But that would be a huge task for them anyway
How have we been so horrifically crippled by the incompetent sh1tshow that has been the NBN rollout?