Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 170 posts

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#51

Post by bhalley »

contingencies wrote: post #42
bhalley wrote: post #38

Tasmania got very lucky with the rollout, we are mostly covered with FTTP, Fixed Wireless and only some FTTN. We are also lucky enough to have a local business (Launtel) pushing the constraints of the NBN by offering Gigabit at prices that aren't unreasonable ($14.50/day). They are treating it as a new pricing model, why bill the same as ADSL when there are no costs associated with setup and plan changes? They are bi…

Wow. Just wow. My advice is buy cheap real estate and start an internatianal incubator. The weather alone should keep people indoors and focused... only half joking!

It was like I had jumped into the future when this was connected.

The Tasmanian Government is actually offering grants to incubators at the moment http://www.startuptasmania.com/incubator-support

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#52

Post by neumann »

DigitalSea wrote: post #3

I truly fear the day the NBN comes to my area. I am currently with Telstra and fortunately have HFC, I get pretty reliable speeds between 112 and 115mbps, with ping of 9ms. I am a developer and I rely on my currently decent connection to make money, video call clients in other countries, transfer large files (to and fro) if speeds were to suffer resulting in the inability to communicate properly, it would be crushing…

Really? What's your up rate? I am with Telstra HFC and get 2Mbps on the upload on home plan. NBN gives 40Mbps.

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#53

Post by robryan »

owengriffiths wrote: post #4

This article didn't mention what Australians are choosing to do when they have a range of speeds. According to the figures NBN released 80% of customers aren't even paying for the top speed they could. Similarly, this piece from Vox notes that fast internet just is not nearly as valuable as proponents claimed. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/only-17p... https://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/17/132…

That is probably largely down to cost. People don't want to pay $99/month.

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#54

Post by flukus »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #12

The tl;dr is that Australia started a fibre-to-the-premises project for the whole country (93% of premises, plus rural 7% on wireless), then a conservative government got in power and decided to deliberately destroy it. To do this, they changed it to fibre-to-the-node (DSL) instead. Instead of gigabit to the home, they're spending more money providing people with connections anywhere between 4mbps and 100 at the abso…

Don't forget the National Party who were instrumental in kowtowing to the liberals to build what they originally coined as "Fraudband". They had a once in a lifetime opportunity to deliver a decent internet service to much of rural Australia and they threw it away because it was a Labor idea.

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#55

Post by boyter »

gtkspert wrote: post #37
Gatsky wrote: post #13

By 'fit for service' they mean 12Mbps down, or average copper wire speeds. What's the point? Although the original goal was great, in hindsight it appears that it could not be delivered anywhere near the original budget. For context, after a prolonged period of centre-right government, a centre-left government was elected, led by Kevin Rudd. He had a progressive agenda, but due to a combination of his unmitigated ego…

Where do you get your cheap 4G/LTE? Best I can find is prohibitively expensive, especially if I wan't to stream 4K content...

Vivid Wireless offer unlimited 4G data capped at 12 Mbps for $90 a month. Its on the Optus network so your experience will depend on what the coverage is like where you live.

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#56

Post by Gatsky »

flukus wrote: post #36
Gatsky wrote: post #13

By 'fit for service' they mean 12Mbps down, or average copper wire speeds. What's the point? Although the original goal was great, in hindsight it appears that it could not be delivered anywhere near the original budget. For context, after a prolonged period of centre-right government, a centre-left government was elected, led by Kevin Rudd. He had a progressive agenda, but due to a combination of his unmitigated ego…

> For my part, I'm dropping all wires and switching to 4G/LTE, where I can stream 4K content, get decent uploads and still pay less than I would on the National Broadband network. If everyone does that you'll be lucky to stream youtube videos at 240p. Wireless bandwidth is inherently shared between everyone, wired is dedicated.

Yeah, LTE capacity can definitely not meet everyone's needs. But in my part of an Australian major city, the only wired option at the moment is NBN over HFC, with a set up fee or a long contract, at a time when all the retailers are trying to undercut each other by buying insufficient capacity.

Under these conditions, LTE is the clear winner. That may change as you point out.

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#57

Post by NamTaf »

Retric wrote: post #20
ClassyJacket wrote: post #12

The tl;dr is that Australia started a fibre-to-the-premises project for the whole country (93% of premises, plus rural 7% on wireless), then a conservative government got in power and decided to deliberately destroy it. To do this, they changed it to fibre-to-the-node (DSL) instead. Instead of gigabit to the home, they're spending more money providing people with connections anywhere between 4mbps and 100 at the abso…

Wait, if the Conservative party decided to destroy it how is that the fault of the Liberal Party?

Australia has what's referred to as 'big-L' Liberals, who are the conservative side, as opposed to 'small-l' liberals as you'd commonly describe 'liberal politics', i.e. progressive.

Our centre-right party is the Liberal party, our centre-left is called Labor.

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#58

Post by robryan »

DigitalSea wrote: post #3

I truly fear the day the NBN comes to my area. I am currently with Telstra and fortunately have HFC, I get pretty reliable speeds between 112 and 115mbps, with ping of 9ms. I am a developer and I rely on my currently decent connection to make money, video call clients in other countries, transfer large files (to and fro) if speeds were to suffer resulting in the inability to communicate properly, it would be crushing…

Having switched from Telstra HFC to NBN HFC my biggest complaint is variable latency. Ping to the same servers tends to vary from 20ms to 120ms. I haven't looked into too much but probably coincides with peak hours in the evening.

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#59

Post by zmmmmm »

Gatsky wrote: post #13

By 'fit for service' they mean 12Mbps down, or average copper wire speeds. What's the point? Although the original goal was great, in hindsight it appears that it could not be delivered anywhere near the original budget. For context, after a prolonged period of centre-right government, a centre-left government was elected, led by Kevin Rudd. He had a progressive agenda, but due to a combination of his unmitigated ego…

I think you are going way too easy on the current government. "Stuffing around" - more like active sabotage. Their policy has been consistent in the NBN all the way through, and has defied all independent technical advice. It was a political solution that never made any technical sense.

Re: How Australia's $49B internet network came to be ridiculed

#60

Post by boyter »

aplummer wrote: post #34
ClassyJacket wrote: post #12

The tl;dr is that Australia started a fibre-to-the-premises project for the whole country (93% of premises, plus rural 7% on wireless), then a conservative government got in power and decided to deliberately destroy it. To do this, they changed it to fibre-to-the-node (DSL) instead. Instead of gigabit to the home, they're spending more money providing people with connections anywhere between 4mbps and 100 at the abso…

This is an extremely biased and misleading take on the situation. Look at premises passed when the LNP came into power. https://www.nbnco.com.au/content/dam/nbnco2/documents/nbn-ro... Total activated in mid 2014, ~250k. That is completely nuts, you make it sound like this was a steady ship the LNP tipped over.

They did have to setup the whole company, negotiate with Telsta, run the backbone's and set everything else up.

They were behind on connections its true, but that was largely due to Telstra having to remediate the ducts filled with asbestos which halted large portions of the rollout. Had they continued I expect that the ramp up would have been similar to New Zealand.

Post reply on HN