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throwaway2037 • today at 12:29 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

    > I don't even get the NBN despite having fibre to the premises!
Woah, this is crazy. Personally, I have read so much about the Aussie NBN (The Australian National Broadband Network) [1]. (Dear nerds: If you don't know about it, I highly recommend you read about it!) I am utterly jealous that you lot pulled it off! (Not perfect, but pretty damn good.) Can you share more details about why the building does not have high quality NBN connections? The whole dream sold to nerds about NBN was basically 1Gbit fibre for everyone in a big/mid-sized city (and suburbs) and "decent" Internet (100MBit+) for everyone else in the bush.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network

Replies

inkyoto • today at 1:28 PM

> […] why the building does not have high quality NBN connections?

Because their place of residence is connected to an embedded network that has eschewed the NBN Co and chosen to connect to a private fibre operator who sits outside the NBN. They probably also pay more compared to NBN for the same speed.

Not every embedded network supplies fibre, but some do, and that appears to be the case in their situation.

By the way, NBN has recently upgraded the network to 2Gbps, with 10 Gbps having been trialled but no availability date set as of yet.

Nursie • today at 1:16 PM

At least part of the story is a cautionary tale about electing the LNP. The NBN was originally going to be as you describe, but then Tony Abbot came along, under instruction from his pal Rupert Murdoch, and threw a major spanner in the works.

He decided it was waaaaay too expensive and big-governmenty to do that and besides, Uncle Rupert had a satellite tv business to defend, we don't want him to have to compete with the likes of Netflix now do we? So he told Australia that it was too much money for a "glorified video delivery service" and that 25Mbit was enough for anyone for the foreseeable, and threw out the original plans.

The plan was downgraded to "Fibre in some places, we'll reuse copper where possible". This ended up taking longer and costing more than the original plan, delivered worse service, and we're only now getting towards where we should have been under the first plan. A lot of the work has had to be repeated due to the initial poor rollout and then needing to upgrade as that 25Mbit started looking woefully inadequate. Just last year a further $5 billion was pledged to replace more FTTN/Copper with FTTP.

It's still more expensive than other markets I'm aware of, a lot of people who aren't far from cities and major towns are on wireless connections (theoretical 400Mbit, actual ~150), and the real bush "Sky Muster" system tops at 100/5 (actual ~55-83) and is having its lunch eaten by starlink.

tl;dr the Liberal (conservative) party got in and fucked it up.