Leader of the national broadband network for Australia blaming government for slow speeds and dropouts on Copper pushed by the Australian government
Australians -> She’ll be right -> falls behind -> wonders why.
Skip past all riffraffs
So, what name will Elon choose this time?
So, i just got an email from internode this evening.
Offering me a $134 refund because i can’t get my “listed speed”.
i’m on a 100/40 plan and get 75/34 roughly. the lower plan i’d need to drop to is 50/25 or something. fuck that.
wondering if i can take the refund and change plan back 
Ring them up and ask for if they don’t, complain and they might cave and give it back
Typical government more worried about keeping their party in than actually bettering the country.
If the original plan was followed through with there would be FTTP so there would be far less issues.
Instead they cheaped out to “save money” and got a system that is outdated before it’s in the ground and everyone just has to wear it.
You would think they would look at how successful fttp is in New Zealand. Speeds up to 1000/500 available to more than half the country. Goal is over 80%
I used to install NBN Satellite internet in rural NT. The entire stack had no idea what was going on.
I remember seeing an ad for internet in Hong Kong back in… 2010? Thereabouts.
1gig up/down, unlimited data for $39/month.
That was 8 fucking years ago.
Yes, yes, we’re in a country with large amounts of isolated people and low population density.
However, for the 97% of the population in urban areas, if you’re running cable is may as well be fibre.
Any tech with more than a week of dealing with telco services could have told the government that the existing copper network was old and busted. But hey, the reason NBNCo bought it was nothing to do with technology. I’m sure it would have been much more to do with propping Telstra up by buying the old shit network off them.
Telstra are laughing all the way to the bank.
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Internet access speeds are one of those problems that’s super easy to solve as an 5-50 people organization, but super hard to solve as an individual or anything bigger.
Fiber works for low population density, given how there’s ample land that’d be easy to use to distribute fiber.
Alternative are solar+battery powered multigigabit radio links - the kind usually used for remote LTE backhaul.
In dense population environments, you lose radio (can basically only use it as a backup for high priority management traffic).
There’s nothing really stopping anyone living in rural or suburban Australia from setting up an a PTY LTD (similar to LLC) and from starting to stretch out some IP network links, if they have the time.
There was a guy on reddit who became his own ISP for his neighborhood. He ran fiber and everything to each house. In cost in total about $200,000.
Unfortunately these stories are few and far between. I don’t know about anyone else but I don’t have the funds to become my own ISP just yet.
If honest people with a few more brain cells ran the show there wouldn’t be these problems.
Has anyone here got any stories about how they have tried to make an impact on the ISP landscape for the better? Surely there is more we can do than just throw salt and try and educate the ones living under a rock.
It requires infrastructure. That requires resources to clear all the red tape.
The only way around it with a low resource barrier is setting up an RF mesh network, but this requires group momentum to keep it going.
If you’d like to do more research on it, head on over to reddit and look at the sub /r/darknetplan and search for hyperbolia.
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Here in Australia the ISPs aren’t as sinister as the ones in America. Although I have seen more ISPs merging…
There would still be red tape but not backed by giants like comcast
Thanks I’ll check it out. I have looked into mesh networks before. The issue is like you said group momentum. It’s not so easy to convince the general population. After all some of them voted to cut off the arms and legs off the scheme to get us out of the 20th century.
Even the CEO of NBN admits FTTN is a disaster.
Yup, because like the rest of us, they all hate (and have been screwed by, for years) telstra too.
I laugh when people talk about setting up an isp. The last mile is usually the bottle neck yes, but if you’re looking at doing that, either you are going to pay a lot to whoever owns the infrastructure to either access their pipes to lay your own fibre or just pay them for data throughput. Good luck doing that.
Then you have to pay another company to handle international traffic. Then if something goes wrong, I hope you’re good at problem solving.
When you pay for internet, if you have a good isp, you’re paying for the maintenance and reliability
A typical GPON is 2.5Gbps down / 1.25Gbps up per fiber, majority of ISPs do somewhere between 16 and 32 customers per fiber. There’s an easy/progressive upgrade path to 10gpon.
Typically you’d plan for 32 housing units as if all are connected, and then assuming 50% connect you land on 16. Or if there’s a building with 10+ units, you pull a whole line to the building, and split it there.
As an ISP you need to be able to provide at least VoIP services with emergency calling to have a chance of supplanting existing copper.
For about 1000 customers in a neighborhood, $200k in capex to build + $200k/year to build/operate sounds about right.
Once built, you need to grow to about 10k to be sustainable, or raise prices/get cash somewhere else.