Our area ‘finally’ got NBN and now I have to pay more for slower internet with downgraded infrastructure. Yes. It’s insane.

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  onelove on 20/08/2019 - 23:20

  +1

  Welcome to Australia :)

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  kazozza on 21/08/2019 - 10:42

  I think I dodged a massive bullet with the TransACT network here in Canberra. VDSL 2+ speeds and reliable bandwidth. No NBN for me.

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  bardlee on 21/08/2019 - 13:10

  A friend of mine in Bomaderry NSW had a pair gain line he shared with a neighbour as was most of Bomaderry and couldnt even get adsl. His max download was 2.5k a sec. He lived with that for years and then got wireless 10 gig a month for $120 dollars with telstra and he was always going over. Now on 50/20 NBN and couldnt be happier. Was 10 years of hell though.

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    weezlebub on 21/08/2019 - 15:04

    2.5kbps, wow, that had to be on a SCADS or 6/16 (very old pair gains system)

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  Doyen on 21/08/2019 - 15:17

  +1

  You are helping pay for the pastoral station 160km outside Alice Springs to get optic fibre to their place. If it we based on commerciality on a hoursehold per household basis there would be no NBN. It would be InnerCityBN.

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    The Wololo Wombat on 21/08/2019 - 15:42

    I don't see how I'm helping pay for this - it's actually costing them to downgrade our area…they could've simply kept our existing infrastructure and used the money saved to make other areas even better.

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    crentist on 22/08/2019 - 11:53

    That was the original plan, where the gov provided upgraded infrastructure that would be used by everyone. Now they spend money making things worse, and allow companies like TPG to lay down their own competing infrastructure in inner city areas and reduce amortisation

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      ssquid on 22/08/2019 - 12:03

      People using those competing infrastructures are still going to get slugged a tax to fund the NBN because it's such a lemon.

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        crentist on 22/08/2019 - 12:41

        Now, sure. NBN is scrambling for every unearned dollar they can get before the rest of the industry and public turns on them in the next 5 years or so. But originally that competing infrastructure wouldn't have been installed at all and they'd have a comfortable 50 years of usage to recover costs over. Not to mention the broader economic benefit of an upgraded network

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  cyrax83 on 21/08/2019 - 16:26

  Suck it up princess, welcome to our government. Also they aren't digging up the old Optus cable - they are leaving it in but turning it off.

  Also NBN has/will deliver half decent speeds to most of Australia now. If you have to deal with slightly slower speeds from your uber fast internet, then so be it.

  I went from 4-7mbps on shitty ADSL2+ to 30-40mbps on HFC. Thank god for NBN.

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    crentist on 22/08/2019 - 12:15

    Those are terrible speeds for new infrastructure. Fttp is miles ahead. I’ve been on basic fibre plans in Malaysia and Japan, paying about $30 for 450mbps in each direction. The extra capacity doesn’t come at some extra cost in installation or use.

    But it’s very useful for work when I can download 10gb in the time it takes to make a coffee. Or leisure when I don’t have to care that updating a game or downloading a movie needs to be planned hours in advance.

    What was wrong with your 4-7mbps anyway?

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      Knight2000 on 23/08/2019 - 11:24

      I disagree with "The extra capacity doesn’t come at some extra cost in installation or use". Of course extra capacity costs extra money. Service providers needs to provision sufficient capacity in their core network to allow customer to use their purchased bandwidth. Capacity isn't dictated by only the access network i.e the fibre that connects one user to the service provider. The reason that the countries you mention have those amazing speeds is customer density (due to population density). More customers > more income > return on investment on higher capacity network infrastructure which is shared by all the customers of those service provider.

      Australia is a huge country with a population of 21~ million which an area of 7~ million sq KMs. Malaysia is 31~ million people (higher than Aus) with an land area of 330,000 sq KMs (tiny compared to Aus). Japan and Korea are renowned for their super fast internet, check their population density and you can see why they have better infrastructure.

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        crentist on 23/08/2019 - 18:04

        I disagree with "The extra capacity doesn’t come at some extra cost in installation or use". Of course extra capacity costs extra money.

        Maybe not literally zero cost, but I meant that the installation and usage costs of a fibre connection to a house would not be much different a copper connection.

        So any expense needed to upgrade the capacity of the core network doesn't justify limiting capacity at the user end by laying down brand new copper lines, which they are doing. And an excessive increase in core network congestion from fibre users could be managed by throttling those users artificially if needed, which they are doing anyway.
        But now, if/when they do upgrade the backbone, they'll have to go around to everyone's home again to remove the very real limitations of copper.

        Australia is a huge country …

        This point kinda contradicts your first point. The NBN rollout is more focused on upgrading jiggling wires around homes, which is probably going to be the most expensive part of handling low population density.
        True there's less people to recoup costs, but that better explains why an internet connection in Sydney costs double Tokyo, and less why our needs are different enough to spend billions without upgrading our old infrastructure.

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  crentist on 21/08/2019 - 16:57

  +6

  My dad is in a strata community or whatever you call it (basically a small suburb of apartments and townhouses with shared infrastructure and central management). I think they have DOCSIS or whatever. NBN is coming and Telstra wanted to do this same crap, downgrading existing lines to copper and raising costs. I forget the specific details.

  He told me they fought it and tried to get them to do a proper upgrade and they refused, saying it couldn't be changed or would cost heaps. Somehow they spoke to their partner for the rollout (LendLease?) who said that it could be changed easily without any extra cost. Telstra got mad and said they shouldn't have been told this and had a hissy fit, so the community threatened to block Telstra from making any changes (and getting TPG instead maybe). That apparently softened Telstra up a bit, and now the rollout is being done without downgrading existing infrastructure.

  It's pretty awful what they are doing, and that they are very aware they are doing a really bad job.

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  mrblu on 22/08/2019 - 08:08

  +1

  Can we sue the government for this shitfest?

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  Punda on 22/08/2019 - 09:07

  I had too get it because afsl was being cut off. Definitely no difference in speed only in price. Also I had to upgrade my back to base alarm system for it to stay monitored, and the monitoring costs more!

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  hypie on 22/08/2019 - 09:58

  +1

  OP… the increase in uploads is far more important long term than your download speed. I suggest you negotiate with a few providers. I was paying $70pm for 100mbit 500gb through skymesh.

  This is coming from someone who had cable for 15 years before switching to HFC. I still get 100mbit, but 40mbit uploads, which is far more important for my home automation, security cameras, nas drives.

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  swilso on 22/08/2019 - 20:35

  You should try living in rural QLD, even though we’re still on a town block in a region centre, 100m away from fibre they put us on fixed wireless 50mbps connection. Started with less than 1mbps download speed, finally got upgraded 3years later and usually sit 10-20mbps. Would have been faster on ADSL2

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  babolimp on 23/08/2019 - 00:08

  i feel you. i get 130Mbps with cable internet at home and never have any issues. in contrast, we have NBN at work, which gets frequent dropouts and long periods of no internet, and we've only had it a few months. if you want a 150mbps connection on NBN, the price is like $200 a month. get lost. i'm dreading the day when i'm forced to use NBN at home.

  it's pretty laughable when you compare fixed line progression to mobile. 2G > 3G > 4G. great speed upgrades with each. then we get NBN but gimped with slower speeds than pre-existing tech. just lol.

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  myusername on 23/08/2019 - 09:41

  what do you expect Aust is only a developing country.

  if you want faster internet speeds you need to be living in at least a 3rd world country

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  Dack Smith on 23/08/2019 - 09:59

  -1

  You should be thankful for our great internet speeds.

  Did you know our avg speeds are much faster than Rwanda and Myanmar ?

  NZ beats us because they are a much more developed country, so no comparison there.

  We trusted the man to free us, but instead we were enslaved.

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  Knight2000 on 23/08/2019 - 11:14

  +2

  Hi there,

  The only reason you were getting good speeds on the Optus HFC service is, like you said, there might have been hardly any people on your HFC segment (HFC bandwidth is shared with other users on a segment/local area)

  NBN isn't going to rip up or sell the Optus HFC network like you mentioned. The Optus HFC network was a poorly maintained infrastructure that the NBN bought and then realised that most of it was unusable (that's another discussion for another day). Therefore NBN could only use the Telstra/Foxtel HFC network for HFC.

  HFC maybe a very old standard in the physical sense but encoding/transmission technology has vastly improved and the DOCSIS 3.1 standard that NBN has adopting will allow Gigabit speeds on HFC and very fast upload speed (uploads are very important as more people work from home or produce their own content or run businesses from home.)

  The congestion you're experiencing might be of 2 types. Too many people on your HFC segment like I mentioned before OR your ISP hasn't purchased enough bandwidth to service all the customers in your area. Changing provider to one that purchases enough bandwidth (called CVC by NBN) from the NBN can resolve the 2nd type of congestion. What are your neighbours saying about the NBN speeds they are getting?

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