Technology & Social Media NBN Co. - is it just spin or results?

May I read what I want please?
What do you make of the cost:
"To put that in perspective, each connection so far, has cost NBN Co $18,454."

 

Lazy is a bit of a broad brush.

My house is NBN ready but given Telstra is the only company with sufficient throughput at the exchange to actually provide NBN speeds during peak usage times it means they are the only viable provider. Now I can pay twice as much, with a 24 month contract and pay $500+ of setup costs and have the same speeds I have now or I can pay 3x as much to get the NBN speeds but given I'm completely unwilling to go on a 24 month contract that's kind of a deal breaker and given I refuse to pay double for the same service as well that's a complete deal breaker.

Now if they get the exchange upgraded to a level to make alternative providers an option or, pipe dream engaged, Telstra start to offer reasonable packages instead of gouging every cent they can then I'd be perfectly happy to get on board the NBN but as you've said, it's firmly in the wants more than needs category currently and at nearly $3,000 in extra costs over the next two years to do it (and a lower download limit at that) I just can't see any justification to be getting on board any quicker than I absolutely have to because I can get a lot more out of that $3k than I will out of having the NBN over my ADSL2, I can download all the same things regardless so it's purely impatience that I'd be spending 3k on.

And there in lies the problem, for the billions that are being spent they've not managed to actually provide a better service to a huge portion of the population. The product is so expensive and generally not any better that 2/3 of the people with access to it aren't even taking it up. The NBN should not have been an opportunity for companies like Telstra to reverse a decade of competition that had finally got them to offering only vastly overpriced products instead of completely and utterly overpriced but because of the complete ineptitude involved in the entire process that's exactly what they've been able to do and now the ultimate outcome is that Telstra have managed to move the NBN prices back in line with what they were gouging out of everyone back in 2005 before they had any real competition.

The NBN is one of those truly great ideas, a genuinely good innovation, that has been gutted, raped, pillaged and undermined by Australian politics to the point where it's a shadow of what it should have been, it's cost 10x what it should have, it's taken longer to get to the current point than the whole damn project really should have and by the time it's finally finished it's basically going to need upgrading again.

It's a genuine shame because it was a great idea executed just about as poorly as is imaginable.

 

It is a shame, but it's typical. Every project goes over budget and over time.
The Westconnex is another shining example. Already $7B over budget.

 

I just got it connected at my place. Through Telstra, opted for the 25 / 5 plan.
Currently connected at 27.5 / 6.
I am about 100 metres to the node.

I was about 1km to the exchange on ADSL2+ and only getting 10mbps on that. Its nice having 2.5x faster internet.. but I remember back in 2007 having cable connected at 30 / 2 or something.

 

What's the difference in price on that compared to TPG unlimited?
I only notice slowness when going through my phone.

 

I pay $93/mth. I was paying $83 on ADSL. Telstra tho.. not sure about tpg.

 

NBN is cool. 95 Down / 37 Upload. Telstra

 

Yeah I have it. I switched from ADSL2+ to NBN25/5. I only live 200m from the exchange so the difference in speed is negligible, it is slightly more stable.

My biggest gripe (and it might just be my ISP), is with international streaming. Within Australia I get 22-25Mbps, but from Perth to USA I'm lucky to get 5Mbps. My Netflix and Hulu services don't go great on HD...

 

That shouldn't happen I would imagine there is flooding on the akamai server possibly (or the AWS server if they have changed to that, I am not up on these services anymore)? I wouldn't have thought this would be an issue though. Are you trying to stream at a particularly busy time?

It may be worth giving your ISP a call to ask if they can analyse the issue, they may be able to work some sort of wizardry.

 

Where are you? This is a known problem on several of the Perth exchanges, particularly the Applecross one where only Telstra have sufficient access to the international pipes to actually get decent speeds.

 

Applecross...

 

My dodgey NBN install is now being rectified via more tax payer funded $. The original fly by night contractors are long gone, $ in hand, with a new contractor being paid to fix.

They shook they're heads when they saw the dodgey work, sighed and said they've seen quite a bit of this sort of thing.... way to go NBN co.

The NBN is a positive step for Oz but the roll out is another massive fail in a long list of Govt stuff ups. They should stick to politics aka bickering like a pack of self-important children in parliament & let industry manage & execute programs of work. That way we might actually get some decent value from our tax dollars.... one can only dream

 

Nah, I was simplifying my original post because I'm sure most people in this forum won't understand (I barely understand it myself) when I say,
"In some POIs, Applecross included, where an RSP/ISP use Telstra Wholesale MLL for backhaul there's a local bottleneck on international data. It's not noticeable on P2P, but it is very noticeable on single-threads. It's all to do with how Telstra resell and control/restrict their bandwidth, as buffer overflow causes packet losses, which combined with the high latency connection (international) result in data retransmissions that collapse the TCP window."

Right now the only way to get around it is to use Telstra directly, and I just can't bring myself to give them my $.

 

My house in Adelaide has FTTP so I can get excellent speed and latency. Its what the NBN should have been.

All that really competes is HFC cable from Telstra at 100/3 megabits which is what I had in Sydney, but its dynamic ip