Optus ..... 25MB down 5MB Up. We live in a HFC cabled area.

We upgraded to 'above the Basic Pack' to get a faster speed. At the time, Optus included Home phone, Optus Sport and Fetch TV. The Home phone and Optus Sport are of no use/interest to us .... so we will 'exchange' these items for a faster speed again at some stage.

However, we will wait until NBN and Optus get themselves sorted out.

TPG still spam me with their FTTB product because I live in a block of flats but whilst it receives very good reviews compared with anything managed by NBNCo, it is no good to me because TPG will not offer a static IP like they do with ADSL. Very few NBN-supported connections offer one either so it leaves me wondering about the future of my ability to host this website myself.

I was quite pleased when NBNCo stalled new connections on Cable at the end of 2017 because I am certainly not in a hurry to move the site's server to the NBN. Anything that is big, expensive and is under the control of a government that micromanages it, you can bet your whole existence on it all going wrong.

I think the other big issue is that there are simply not enough large ISPs in this country. In terms of size, there is Telstra, TPG, Optus and M2. The latter three are all trying to be as big as Telstra by hoovering up the smaller players. Competition, as it was intended to be, is non-existent.

Competition, as it was intended to be, is non-existent.

Forget TPG if you want any sort of useful support. It's the Franklins of the industry when it comes to customer service.

Having slight hearing issues, I agree. TPG's staff are their biggest drawback. If anyone their spoke fluent English it'd be a big help. Fortunately I have had few reasons to contact TPG in my approx. ten years with them and prefer to use e-mail where possible so I don't have to listen to the broken communications.

Brad - I am with My Republic on NBN... Their gamer plans offer static IP. I think my 100/40 is 80/mo for unlimited data.

Feel free to contact me off list about hosting too, I do have a personal VPS as well as access to other technology at work that I may be able to assist with.

QUOTE: National Broadband Network chief executive Bill Morrow has warned there may never be a time when all Australians get the fastest available internet speeds, as such a project would cost “billions and billions” of dollars.

The cost of rolling out the required technology to enable Australians living in all regional areas to access 100Mbps speeds is so high, the NBN Co has "killed" any plan to provide it and has taken it off the road map, Mr Morrow said at Senate Estimates.

The NBN is obligated to provide all businesses and premises with access to at least 25Mbps peak data speeds, with the majority to have 50Mbps. So far, most connected households have opted for 25Mbps plans although the trend is improving for faster speed tiers.

“Regional Australia had near nothing with broadband access, today the number of stories that I have heard and witnessed about them suddenly having satellite capability and suddenly having 25Mbps has changed their life.

Family has a property in Oberon about 2.5hr West of Sydney. Fixed wireless nbn connected there using Smellstra. Speed tests are at the full 25/5mbps.
My dad is over the moon because his TPG adsl at his office in Telopea near Parramatta Sydney, gets all of 3Mbps.

And that's for a business.
If the power was half better up there we'd be inclined to move the servers to the country!

National Broadband Network chief executive Bill Morrow has warned there may never be a time when all Australians get the fastest available internet speeds, as such a project would cost “billions and billions” of dollars.

What that imbecile fails to understand is that the crap we are getting from this non-entity also costs billions and billions of dollars. If it is going to cost billions and billions of dollars, why aren't they throwing in some quality into the network's backbone?

A work colleague asked me the other day to clarify this scenario, they discussed with their ISP. They were told that during the peak period their speeds would fall on the 50Mbit plan to around 40Mbit. They said what about the 25Mbit plan? Would they still get the full 25Mbit speed? the ISP said no, it'd be around 15-20Mbit.

It's a crock of beans. Everyone is being shafted 20% of their peak possible speed simply because the ISPs aren't purchasing the required bandwidth and the network's backbone cannot handle the volume of traffic. Government efficiency at its very finest.

It's a crock of beans

It's false advertising, plain and simple. There are probably weasel clauses in the fine print but, legally, they should not be able to advertise headline speed rates that they cannot deliver.

In most cases, the NBN network will deliver the speed you sign up for. (I'm keeping FTTN distance issues, and HFC issues aside here).
There are internal monitoring systems which detect contention on the network, and if detected, it will typically be remediated relatively quickly.

The NBN speed problems are with the Layer 3/4 networks of the retail providers, and not with the NBN Layer 2 network at all.

The biggest issue is that the RSP's don't buy enough backhaul from NBN to service all the customers they sign up. It's not helped the fact that the original plan had a total of 4 Points of Interconnect across Australia, and now there are 121. This means each provider needs to bring a connection from the POI back to their main network, sized for the number of customers serviced from that POI. The CVC pricing is rediculous, and typical overcommit is around 10 times (ie. 400x 25Mbps customers connected to a 1Gbps CVC).
It's no different from dial-up days, where a provider would have 3000 customers, and only 10x ISDN E1 circuits totalling 300 lines coming into them. You'd sit there redialling for an hour before you got a connection.

Hence why we now have the advertised "Typical Peak-Time (Evening) Speed" - and this is ultimately what differentiates one RSP from another. Some providers are worse than others in this regard.
The ACCC cracked down on the advertising around 6-12 months ago, when everyone was offering 50 and 100Mbps plans, and no one was getting those speeds, and now each provider is required to advertise their typical speeds.

With that in mind, however, the whole NBN project has been a bleep from the first day. Everyone politically is to blame, the darn thing should never have been a political football, and whilst I appreciate the fairness of doing the regional areas first, the deployment should have been done with the capital cities first, so that the money was there for the rest of the project. Then there wouldnt have been all the delivery medium changes and we'd a mile ahead from where we are now.

So, I was visited by the NBN 457 monkeys today and came home to find this.

The red line shows what is supposed to be vertical (allowing for angle of camera).

The yellow arrow shows what is left of my drain.

That drain is one of your gullies by the looks of things. If they don't get the dirt out of it, the drains in the room it connects to (bathroom, kitchen or laundry) will eventually back up.

The pipework looks appalling. An absolute disgrace from an entity owned by the Commonwealth.

I'm very fussy when it comes to work on the surface - to the point where I would not allow it unless there was no other way. Most houses either have a subfloor area or wall cavities that can take new wiring. The trouble is, most of these D/H's simply do not care or don't have the necessary skills to hide wiring properly.

Photo will go up later tonight, when I sort out why FTP is not working correctly.

QUOTE: In a report released on Wednesday that reverberated throughout the telecommunications industry and in Canberra, S&P said official forecasts for the take-up of the NBN of between 73 per cent and 75 per cent by 2021 will be "difficult to achieve", raising the prospect the government will be forced to slash the value of the asset on its books.

It cited the NBN's controversial pricing structure, and rapid advances in mobile technologies - which could enable people to abandon fixed line internet connections as the factors behind a write-down, which would be politically sensitive and potentially affect the federal budget.

"We believe it is getting harder for the government to stand behind the presupposition that NBN Co will generate a commercial return on investment," S&P said in the report. "NBN Co's unusually complex pricing model is part of the problem."

The competing TPG fibre network has far better KPIs than the NBN. Sadly, it is only available to those living in flats and not in all areas. There is a TPG box (about the size of a shoe box) on the exterior of the building I am in. The installation quality is a lot better too. Fibre from TPG comes into the box and then the copper phone line is simply patched to it from the MDF.

I'd move across today, if TPG offered static IP addresses on their fibre plans. It's something I remind them about every time they spam me.

At least you have a cable coming *out* of your white box.

I still have not seen any action since March 2017, when they joined the street cable *to* the white box.