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Nothing is being fixed for the areas initially promised. My area, rural, was supposed to be the first to go fibre.... but Oz is huge... and so they chickened ou

Nothing is being fixed for the areas initially promised. My area, rural, was supposed to be the first to go fibre.... but Oz is huge... and so they chickened out and gave the rural guys nothing. The main house still only has ADSL1 (8Mb/s peak, & generally sits around 2Mb with a lot of noise). As such, I use a tethered 4G connection for all internet in my cabin. However, to cater for rural areas, they rolled out Wireless NBN, which is just a dedicated 4G connection and 50% more cost over standard NBN... staying on 4G is cheaper and has a closer tower (so the signal is better). Starlink is starting to look better... (if only I trusted Elon Musk).

Nursie 4y ago
> gave the rural guys nothing And even semi-rural, just outside the main cities, you might find yourself with "Fixed Wireless NBN" that promises to hit 25Mbps at least once per 24 hour period. Broadband in Aus (I'm a recent migrant) is so far behind Europe and so expensive!
shoo 4y ago
the original FTTP plan was never going to FTTP the entire country. most of australia - in the spatial sense of "most" - is sparsely inhabited and fixed-line is uneconomic. the original plan was always satellite + wireless + FTTP, based on density and perhaps a bit of political pork barrelling, and it is quite likely that the original design of which regions would be serviced by which tech was also somewhat optimistic, and might need to have been adjusted, even if the FTTP plan wasn't torn up by the liberal-national coalition (the original FTTP plan was replaced with a "multi technology mix" plan -- the new federal government argued that their plan would be cheaper because instead of laying new fibre, just buy the existing degraded legacy copper lines from telstra, and also buy and reuse the HFC from telstra and optus. so instead of spending tens of billions of dollars of public money building brand new infrastructure, spend tens of billions of dollars of money and reuse existing degraded infrastructure! think of the savings! from memory getting the HFC regions to actually work was a bit of a fiasco, that part of the rollout was heavily delayed. anyhow, it is great to see the coalition lose another federal election, albeit entirely unrelated reasons)

Nursie 4y ago

> gave the rural guys nothing And even semi-rural, just outside the main cities, you might find yourself with "Fixed Wireless NBN" that promises to hit 25Mbps at least once per 24 hour period. Broadband in Aus (I'm a recent migrant) is so far behind Europe and so expensive!

shoo 4y ago

the original FTTP plan was never going to FTTP the entire country. most of australia - in the spatial sense of "most" - is sparsely inhabited and fixed-line is uneconomic. the original plan was always satellite + wireless + FTTP, based on density and perhaps a bit of political pork barrelling, and it is quite likely that the original design of which regions would be serviced by which tech was also somewhat optimistic, and might need to have been adjusted, even if the FTTP plan wasn't torn up by the liberal-national coalition (the original FTTP plan was replaced with a "multi technology mix" plan -- the new federal government argued that their plan would be cheaper because instead of laying new fibre, just buy the existing degraded legacy copper lines from telstra, and also buy and reuse the HFC from telstra and optus. so instead of spending tens of billions of dollars of public money building brand new infrastructure, spend tens of billions of dollars of money and reuse existing degraded infrastructure! think of the savings! from memory getting the HFC regions to actually work was a bit of a fiasco, that part of the rollout was heavily delayed. anyhow, it is great to see the coalition lose another federal election, albeit entirely unrelated reasons)