Well we have seen massive decreases in cellular prices over the years, about 50% a year. Meanwhile, the NBN keeps getting more expensive and is legislated to keep going up. In fairness, people are using more NBN data but cellular has still been going in a better direction.
This is because:
@Zarlia: oh yeah it was crap not debating that.
On ADSL2, if you were next to the exchange your theoretical max speed was 1Mbps on annex M (which was VERY uncommon) it was around 3 from memory.
I think cable can go up to around the 5 mark, however it's quite uncommon.
NBNs minimum guarantee is 25 down 5 up, so significantly better than what you could obtain pre-nbn. Don't get me wrong, it's a joke they're using VDSL2 but it's workable if it's stable and you manage traffic properly.
I can't speak for everyone,
This renders everything you said moot.
but I was more than happy with the ways things were before NBN came along
And that's the problem with this country; I, I, I. There's never a we because then you are accused of being socialist. You were happy but you were in a minority.
The NBN should never have been built.
No the NBN was needed in most areas of the country. Sure you had decent internet, but not everyone did.
NBN should never had been changed from the NBN 1.0 design.
A design that provided 1000mbps speeds to just about everyone in the country, had a battery backup for the phone, could have up to 4 NBN services. Had a business model that would have paid BACK the money.
governments should simply stay out of areas where private enterprise is best served to do the job.
private enterprise cherry picks the high profit areas….. So you want to be locked into a single private enterprise company?
I never said that. I want private enterprise … i.e. open market competition … not a "single" provider.
Then you'll have a single provider. private enterprise doens't like overlap, its loss money. monopoly of areas is better for their business models :)
LOOK! A FLYING PIG!
Oh so you voted for him, cool
Let them pay for it. Like I did
You paid what? You had been in a area that had good internet, you didn't pay for it to be installed.
Then you'll have a single provider. private enterprise doens't like overlap, its loss money. monopoly of areas is better for their business models :)
Not sure how you arrive at that conclusion when comparing that parallel mobile network? Seems to be several players there …
Oh so you voted for him, cool
Who do you think I voted for? Rudd? Gillard? Abbott? Turnbull? Morrison? Obama? Trump?
You paid what? You had been in a area that had good internet, you didn't pay for it to be installed.
I paid for the best service available in my area. It's kind of like moving to woop woop and then expecting to have all the choice of restaurants (or any other services) available that you have in inner-Sydney. As an individual, you make your own decisions based on trade-offs.
You want to live in the sticks? Fine. But you don't get all the services available in big cities (like super-fast internet that works efficiently based on population density).
You want to live in the inner-suburbs of a big city? Fine. But you don't get all the advantages of living in the country (like low population density).
@Seraphin7: you're a strange person who has no idea how the world works, and what being a social society providing equal services to all means.
you're a strange person who has no idea how the world works, and what being a social society providing equal services to all means
Unfortunately, that's not the way the world works. Never has been. They've tried that in North Korea. Seems to not quite be the utopia it's cracked up to be.
@JimmyF: Unaustralian?
What does that actually mean? That you disagree with me, but have run out of real argument so have resorted to name calling?
What does that actually mean?
Its a term been around for 100's of years, dates back to 1850s…… Go look it up.
That you disagree with me, but have run out of real argument
Not at all, you can't argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience! Which is what you're doing, so I've stopped.
@JimmyF: Glad you've stopped by. Let's do it again some time.
Don't give up so easily next time. With a bit more hard work, you might have some substance to your statements rather than simply arguing along ideological lines and name calling. Keep trying and you'll get there.
We had slow ADSL close to 20 years. NBN may not be perfect, but it’s moving in the right direction.
$50bn nudge. That is like paying for an aircraft carrier and getting a tug boat.
Spending $50b on the NBN is a bargain compared what it may cost in 20 years time. The rate of inflation over the pass 20 years is 62%. It would cost >$80b if the NBN were to be built in 2040.
@whooah1979: It would have been a bargain if Turnbull hadn't intentionally crippled it. As it stands, it's going to cost the gap in your $80b+ over the next 20 years doing bandaid fixes and upgrades because it was botched the first time, just like everything else the LNP touch.
Great, so in Keilor East I can get internet that drops out when it rains because “market forces”
Radio waves are also affected by bad weather.
The point of the NBN was supposed to make money from FTTP but with this change in technology at this state won't make enough money for the investment that has been made. Personally, if we didn't build the NBN, many people would be stuck on ADSL with some people's connections with really slow internet speeds and possibly dropping out often. I also reckon there needs to be a plan to upgrade parts of it.
This was me. Optus adsl was maximum 9Mbps (but usually less) with lots of drop outs. Vodafone NBN (HFC) is about 45Mbps, 9 times faster for only $5 more a month. Vodafone NBN has 4G back up as well. Personally I’m happy with the NBN so far.
The cities would have become a free for all of fibre building. The country and city edges would have missed out and required gov incentives for companies to build over, either fibre, wireless and quite probably a heavy increase in mobile cells (mobile telcos getting their networks subsidised).
Better or worse? Probably cheaper, maybe not better.
Anyone that thinks NBN is bad didn’t experience the ADSL nightmare.
never had adsl but adsl2 was great for me, it's actually faster and cheaper compared to nbn for my usage, if nbn gets any worse i'm going straight to 4G, they literally just jacked the 12mbps plan by $5-10/mo this year
By definition, unless you opt for a 12mbps plan the minimum speed that NBN has to deliver is higher than the theoretical maximum of the technology you can achieve on ADSL2.
yeh i get its great for some people, but for me i was getting 18mbps adsl2 and that's more than enough for my use
You're right, I didn't because my phone line was too long to support it.
In Russia I had ADSL in 2005 then Ethernet FTTB in 2008. I migrated to Australia in 2012 and it looks like someone had pressed the pause button here around 2007 . Internet is crappy and expensive, and a constant running joke.
Dp you rush B in 1.6?
It was over 2 kms to the nearest node at my old house. God it sucked. HFC is a dream by comparison
Pre-NBN I had to go with Vividwireless 10 down 1 up.
Now ~80/29.
Night and day difference.
I'm on skymuster satellite and it's expensive, download cap sux, it's over subscribed and laggy as a two cylinder 1975 fiat bambino. Fiber optic goes right though my property but they will not let me connect. $90 per month for 25/5Mb (never actually get that unless it's 3am) and 100GB download limit. We all got screwed - some of us harder and longer than others.
Elon's Starlink is meant to solve all that.
Unlike politicians, Lord Musk never over-promises or under-delivers.
To be fair at least Lord Musk actually delivers on some things.
We all got screwed
I didn't. I've had reliable and fast NBN for a couple of years now. It's many times faster than ADSL, and about the same price. I can pay more for even faster speeds if I want, but there's no need yet - only two of us live here and even though we're both IT professionals who use a lot of remote access, video conferencing, cloud backups, and other bandwidth-heavy applications along with the usual video streaming/downloading everyone does, our current speeds are fine.
There are many other people like me. You probably don't hear about them because they either aren't nerds and don't care, or they're happy with their internet so aren't complaining.
I can pay more for even faster speeds if I want
You just forget there is poorer people than you. In addition you are not "we". Generally price vs quality of NBN is poor.
If you're truly an IT professional and you're happy with the NBN in its current state, you're either less of an IT professional than you think or you are a masochist. On principle alone it's a slap in the face to the Australian taxpayers.
More and more Australians will switch from the shitty NBN to 4G/5G as it becomes cheaper and faster, and as mobile telcos package it with their cellular plans. NBN prices will skyrocket as fewer and fewer customers remain to prop it up.
The same thing has happened with electricity in many parts of Australia — more and more people bought into first Solar PVs, then battery systems (and soon home wind turbines) — over several decades, leaving the grid with fewer and fewer retail customers, driving price creep to all the remaining households.
leaving the grid with fewer and fewer retail customers, driving price creep to all the remaining households.
People are still connected to the grid. Retail customers the same. It is generators that make less.
Thats part of the problem. When solar is available the generators make no money, but during peak times all the solar users are drawing off the grid as well
Same things going to happen to Private health insurance.
Although in the case of PHI it's purely down to greed from the insurance companies and the government forcing the higher paying taxpayers to subsidise their existence.
Oh an the transferral of wealth from younger healthier Australian's to older, more demanding (health wise) pensioners/seniors
This is not true.
Only 2% of the Aus population are off grid. This proportion has barely changed over many decades. The vast majority of off grid energy generation and use are from remote mining applications, not households.
Price creep has come from a combination of (needed) replacement of ageing transmission & distribution infrastructure + over-investment in some areas of the transmission network + privatisation of energy retailers/generators/transmission/distribution + failure to replace very old coal fired power stations that have either shut down, are going to shut down or have become less reliable.
The whole 'everybody is going off grid therefore increasing prices for remaining customers' thing is just a prepper/greenie wet dream that has no factual basis in reality.
Source: https://theconversation.com/a-high-price-for-policy-failure-…
Source: https://arena.gov.au/renewable-energy/off-grid/#:~:text=Only….
Just like how apps began to be used for making calls and mobile phone companies couldn't make any money from calls and went broke… No wait that didn't happen, they switched plans to unlimited calls and upped the prices of their plans cover the missed revenue.
Expect lower electricity usage revenue to be offset by an increase in connection fees. (And if you think going off grid will save you, think again, if the grid fails financially the government will just subsidise it by increasing your taxes.)
The house always wins in the end.
I would jump on an economical unlimited 4G plan if there was one available and dump the NBN. I just ran a speed test NBN: 56Mbps vs 4G: 308Mbps (straight difference of 5.5 times). I hate the NBN, we're all locked in because of market availability and a legislated "monopoly".
They followed a one size fits all formula that was doomed to fail from the beginning. When the world was going wireless, we went wired despite of the fact that Metro areas could have easily been serviced via wireless technologies while spreading wired networks to outlying areas. Some people must have made alot of money personally and I hope it's outed one day.
The amount of towers required to have a reliable service.. 5G is a shorter range than other bands. If you live close to town it could be ok. Just ok.
Now.
Think of services like doctors, OT, paediatricians NDIS services. NDIS providers and health services have moved to Telehealth.
Government tenders.
It's costs 100 K minimum to the taxpayer to open in a metro region BEFORE any services are even delivered. Remote we are talking upto 250k for one staff member servicing a massive region.
Employment services, WorkCover
It costs a huge amount of money to leverage over an office network to operate remote services. This results in less competition.
We hit fibre, it would have been cheaper overall to the taxpayer. Because of the above reasons. The cost of maintenance and eventually have to upgrade to fibre as Copper goes up in value means we got screwed. Multiple mix technology has resulted in higher maintenance costs.
Yeah you lost me at the hypothetical situation which didn't actually materialise. In reality everyone around here is happily msging and tweeting using their 4G (if not 5G) using towers which were (hypothetically) not commissioned by tax payers money and even people in the regional area are touting network coverage because of Telstra but guess what, even now they don't have a fibre but they are able to use a satellite link. So yeah, some people made a whole lot of money and I hope they are outed (and jailed) one day.
FYI: just to clarify the speed test I shared was from boost 4G.
I wasn't talking hypothetically. If you open a big city office and can service national, remotely it's cheaper for the Government or corporation if your business is in services.
They do this in a call centre.
Now with NDIS and Covid face to face services have moved to Telehealth. As in right now.
It's not download speed it's upload as well. That's what's required to maintain a consistent connection. 4G isn't consistent.
@Cheapsize: Its consistent otherwise it wouldn't exist. It's definitely more consistent than the NBN. Before NBN and ADSL I was using a 4G mobile router with a simcard. It was expensive but it was consistently better.
Nah not true. Cellular is inherently capacity constrained. Still only carrying 12.3% of total traffic this year, the rest is carried by fixed networks. This won't be changing anytime soon, 5G or not.
Source: https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/m/en_us/solutions/service-provid…
The rest of the world hasn't gone wireless anymore than we have - the countries with the best internet rely on fixed fibre networks for backhaul and direct connection. A huge amount of work done during the NBN rollout was installation of backhaul capacity, which ironically has been heavily utilised by the cellular networks that you think are going to replace the fixed lines. Not a single country on earth that has adopted video streaming services en masse does it over a cellular network, its impossible.
At the end of the day the front-end debacle is still unjustified. No one denies backhaul work as it's needed and would have to be done regardless of the approach. I was talking about using the one size fits all approach for the front/consumer end that turned into the mess we call NBN.
Still waiting for a good 4G/5G plan so i could dump nbn entirely.
FTTN, 20+ dropouts a day and Superloop claims it's normal lol
5G is, in the other hand, awesome (for now) https://imgur.com/a/JA0z2OC
I had about 1 dropout every 20mins, video conference was not possible either. disconnect every 5mins.
iinet managed to fixed it though
Atleast someone's doing something.
I just don't understand why we let a bunch of politicans that can barely work their email weigh in on the decision making process of implementation of a highly technical network infrastructure rollout instead of relying on experts and empirical data.
I don't get why old people are still in parliament…
easy answer $$$
Someone had to buy shitty telstra copper.
Why do you compare Australia to Korea. Let’s compare with Russia, where the population density should be closer. Internet in Russia is much cheaper and faster, with good competition from providers driving prices down.
I have TPG FTTB 70 Mbit at the moment and that’s what the internet in Australia could’ve been if not socialistic NBN project started and killed all competition.
You can't compare the metro density, most of Russians live in 9 storey apartment blocks kinda similar to our housing flats:
https://ubr.ua/img/article/38835/71_main.jpeg
Where you would usually have 100+ apartments in one building. ISPs can easily connect up to 100 customers by hooking up one building.
This is completely different to Australia, where most of the dwellings are free standing single storey units.
Is Australia so unique? If so then ok, it deserves NBN.
My point is create a competitive environment and economically viable options will be provided. Or create a government monopoly and you get NBN.
Great! You just have to live in a very select few suburbs and you have access to super fast speeds! Stuff the 90% of the rest of the population, why do they need fast internet?
Socialism ends when you run out of other people’s money.
My answer to the people in houses - use ADSL etc before it will be economically viable to get broadband. Chances are technology will provide you with options at some point, like a 5G mobile connection. Or pay for your connection like you would for electricity.
I just miss features like communitynet https://www.adam.com.au/about/announcements/viewer?customer-… and peeringsa.
There was a whole Peer2Peer network for Internode and Adam users to send files to each other data free, whole of SA was a LAN party 10 years ago. At one stage Adam even ran a private WOW service for South Aussies.
Remember that black spots in your home can ruin your 4G speeds.
NBN in my experience has been getting stronger every year.
I'm getting 100mb/s down 20 mb/s up consistently every day now, very happy with NBN!
The problem is that it isn't consistent at all. I get 40/7 and I have one of the fastest out of the people I know. If everyone was getting 100/20 then this wouldn't be as much of a problem but most people get significantly less
FTTP, FTTN or FTTB? And are you on 100/20?
FTTN and while we are on 50/10 We have asked about upgrading to 100/20 and they say our max speed would be 52/7 so doesn't really seem worth it considering I'm really more concerned with upload than download.
FTTN
i had adsl2 for almost 10 years rarely a dropout
in the past 2 weeks i've had 2 days where nbn was down 8+ hrs during the day
yep I have that issue with mobile 4g in a new area. I only have 4g in the front court yard, dining room and garage. rest of the house is dead
My FTTP internet speed and latency
I have FTTP. It is exceptionally good and it should be rolled out everywhere. There are multiple problems with 4g, such air latency, congestion and black spots that just can't replace a rock stable fibre internet.
noice
Correct!
Almost always people don't consider latency when they compare 4G to home connection. It makes it useless a number of uses.
My speed is 90/30 and it is not FTTP, it's FTTB by TPG. Has been available since 2014 in select areas with $60 unlimited price.
2x the upload speed of fiber NBN. Available 6 years ago.
Unfortunately the government put the brakes on fair competition with NBN, which stopped the expansion of TPG solution.
Ive got 1gbps internet in Japan, FTTN, for 4000 yen per month (~$55AUD). In the countryside, and it went from very slow internet here to FTTN in a very short time.
Im planning on moving to Hokkaido in 12 months, where 2.5gbps is around 5000yen / month and 10 gbps is currently rolling out for 5500yen.
There is no way they would allow that kind of speed here. ABB can’t even handle 35TB without whinging.
Yeah Japan is a fair comparison where it is a big country. If they can do it, why can’t we. Our plans are so overpriced.
My issue is the pricing of those NBN plans, it’s too darn HIGH. If they could reduce NBN 100 mbps to $39/mth, and increase the bandwidth so everyone in metropolitan Australia can connect to the NBN at 100mbps instead of the shitty speeds like 12mbps or 25mbps, then it would be a success.
Currently paying $69 for 25mbps with Aussie BB and just finished my 1st free month. So expensive compared to my monthly $5 mobile phone bill. Going to switch to kogan.
My suburb was rolled out for the NBN late last year, took so long. Not good enough. /endwhinge.
100 Mbps for even $50 pm would be nice.
But 25 is enough for netflix isnt it?
Stop being a puppet of the former prime minister. Think forward Nez Zealand and other countries have much faster broadband obviously Australia is still behind. The government needs to step up the game and get FTTP to everyone, so more people demand higher bandwidth at lower prices with more competition. Finally will draw the prices down.
AND 25/5 NBN is not enough for uploading, xbox, and much higher sized file downloads
I switched to Optus 4g wireless last year due to adsl being too slow (especially uploads), currently get around 80 mbps average, don’t want to move to nbn after reading all these stories.
4G plans are an alternative to the shitty NBN, but then again high pricing. Those Optus 4G plans aren’t cheap, say if a family needs 500GB per month. How much do you pay?
Kogan SIM cards are an option but constantly changing out sims every 60GB and registering your license details is not fun.
I pay $54 for the 500gb plan.
Nice. Is this an Optus plan?
Which 4G plan you are on? On the Optus site, it says $119 for 500GB. https://www.optus.com.au/about/network/coverage
@Flowerbomb: My original plan was $85 Wireless Broadband 500GB with the huawei B525 Modem.
Got bundled discount(20%) because i had a mobile plan which i changed later to a jb telstra plan, plus they gave another 20% discount for the length of the plan brings the cost down to $54.
Looks like they have changed the plans recently, currently it says $75 for 500gb
https://www.optus.com.au/broadband-nbn/4g-home-internet/huaw…
We had our NBN connected via 2urdstra and it didn't work for 3 weeks. kept ringing up the Philippines help desk and the same spiel can you turn the modem off then on etc (every time). I just decided to complain. Next day tech arrived and turned out the connection out in the pit was connected to the incorrect house by you guessed it No Basic kNowledge - NBN.
.
@knk: Wasn't me was a friend so idk exactly what they had at the time but point still stands that we definitely needed an upgrade, its just that what we got wasn't really any good.