did I get lucky and strike people that knew what they are doing?

Sounds like you did. My experience was 'why did I bother coming in here?'. Got the issue sorted out via telephone, but said "complaint" at the prompt and was connected to a person here in Oz.

Received a letter from NBN stating that my connection is ready to be used. They also say that the old system will be disconnected on or after Feb 14, 2020. So, there's plenty of time still.

Got the issue sorted out via telephone, but said "complaint" at the prompt and was connected to a person here in Oz.

You did well. That's usually when calls get shifted to Bombay.

The news today is that Optus is now offering 5G fixed wireless at 50Mbit in a few lucky suburbs of Sydney and Canberra. It's a trial for now bit will expand if there's no hitches.

I'm on Optus 4G at this moment and get 27Mbit. Even though the 5G offering is almost double the speed it won't do anything for me that doesn't already work well, such a video streaming. I can watch YouTube and the feeds from Channel 7 flawlessly, for example.

Speaking of Bombay, article in today's Daily Telegraph (hardcopy version) says Telstra is creating a recruiting centre in India because it can't find technicians onshore. I had to laugh out loud. Telstra retrenched all of its in house technicians and replaced them with contractors.

You are quite right there. Telstra, in its former guise of Telecom once employed around 96,000 people. A good number of those were linesmen and workers on the tools in exchanges. Telstra sacked 2/3 of its entire workforce and are now a shadow of their former selves. Whilst it is easy to get a computer to take over the role of billing, you can't get a robot to open a pit, pump the water out and then put new scotch locks on hundreds of terminations.

Telstra knows there are thousands of qualified linesmen right here at home. They just want to do things on the cheap. Telstra (and many other companies) crap on about "this is globalisation" but Telstra isn't a true global company in the way that BHP is. Having a few offices in other countries and a few hand-selected business customers doesn't make Telstra global. It's just an excuse to pay people as small a wage as possible and to give them training that isn't relevant here.

Where I work, there's a lot of linesmen coming in to the building to change various customers over to the NBN and repair the occasional fault. Most of these people cannot speak more than a smattering of English and they are from companies like NBNCo, Telstra and TPG. They struggle to complete our 15 minute (small by industry standards) site induction and I do not understand any of the questions they ask because they are all in pidgin English.

Australia has an unemployment rate of 5%. I'm not against immigration but before we import more workers we need to put to work the people we have here. Some of those 5% that are on the dole will be ACMA licenced cablers or former Telstra linesmen. Telstra (and others) - employ them!

We are about to migrate to NBN Co which is planned to happen next week on Feb 14th sometime between 7am & 2pm.

We made a shift to Aussie Broadband as iiNet my current ISP flatly refuses to allow 2 VOIP services at the premises claiming NBN say people can only have ONE.
Seems to be utter bull twang to me as one can go out and purchase a Cisco ATA and plug that into the Ethernet port and some models support 4 or more VOIP services. To do that you have to use another phone provider like Aust Phone Company.

Was NOT an issue with Aussie BB and currently we get around 8Mbps download and 0.8Mbps upload over just on 3Km of cable so shortening that down to barely 500M we expect to see around 20Mbps 4Mbps UP. PLUS the monthly cost is cheaper than what we currently pay iiNet and it all comes with No Lock In Contract.

Modem router is in the post already pre-configured and once the current system goes down then all I have to do is disconnect the ADSL line filter and plug the Modem/Router into the cable pair and wait for it to stand up and get settled.
That we are told MAY take 24hours to happen and once that's up and going the 2 phone numbers will be activated which it seems I need to dial in some codes which they will send via Email and then we should be running on NBN Co.

Initially when we moved to iiNet just over 2 years ago their service was quite reasonable but it has dropped off of late and comparing ho Aussie BB goes about doing things I think iiNet could take some lessons.

There COULD be a problem as we are now getting some serious hum on our analogue phone line and I have proven that to be the second pair into our house is in contact with the phone pair (IE the Blue /White is in contact with the Red/Black pair). I can see 48V on one leg and around 250K earth on other leg and whenever I measure those figures one can hear the meter prods getting in contact with that second pair be it on Ohms mode or DC Volts.
Highly unlikely to be the feed in from the street as that was replaced about 4 years ago so suspect that it is in length down the street as we once had 2 analogue phones here with the second one being for my business at the time.

So the NBN linesman if there really IS such a thing nowadays might have some fault tracing to sort things out if that contact really upsets the NBN connection. Might NOT all that much but might degrade the speeds Up & Down....time will tell.

As time goes on its going to be a veritable nightmare sorting out faults as I describe as once there is a lack or battery & earth on the cable pairs faults are going to be WAY MORE difficult to track down.

In the old Magneto phone days it was VERY difficult to locate faults as I describe but once the towns were converted to Auto or CB working we often knew in the exchanges that customers had line faults well before they bothered to make a Fault Complaint.

I will keep you posted how the switch over goes and what sort of speeds we end up with.

Two or three friends who also went to Aussie BB rave about the better service so time will tell for us!!!

Check your wall socket for the source of the hum. We had a similar situation in the place I am in. Both pairs are active and at one stage the connections in the wall socket has that much green gunk leeching out of the copper that it bridged out each pair and on both lines we were getting dial tones and ring tones/engaged tones at the same time. If you see any green gunk, it has to be cleaned out. Best way (if you know what you are doing) is to replace the socket and pull some more cable out of the wall, cut away the damaged cable and make new clean terminations - or get your phone provider to do it. The first socket is the point of demarcation so if the first socket is unclean it should be free of charge. Subsequent sockets - they or an ACMA cabler can charge you a fee to do it.

I get faster ADSL 1 than my Father inlaw does on NBN fixed wireless (which is my only option for NBN). marvellous really!

Fibre to the node performance is all over the place:

QUOTE:
[6 Feb 2019] One in 10 Australians connected to the National Broadband Network is not getting the speeds they are paying for, and some telecommunications services are so congested in the busy hours that a third of their customers are having this problem.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s quarterly speed test found 13 per cent of services provided over the NBN by telcos were considered “underperforming” as they could not get the maximum speeds in the evening.

Customers who are not getting the speeds they are paying for may be eligible for refunds.

. . .

Download speeds during the busy evening hours remained strong across the board, with TPG having the best performance at 86.1 per cent of the total plan speed delivered from 7pm to 11pm, Aussie Broadband at 84.8 per cent and Optus at 83.9 per cent. The lowest performer was Dodo and iPrimus at 78.9 per cent.

For the busiest single hour, TPG once again came out on top at 71.8 per cent, followed by Telstra at 69.8 per cent. All other providers were above 60 per cent apart from iiNet at 48.3 per cent. Upload speeds were above 80 per cent across the board.

While telcos don’t always know until after they connect a customer to the NBN exactly whether a line is capable of delivering what they’ve paid for, there is testing after a household or business is connected.

Classic traffic management issues. If you make it better, traffic will increase and use up your trunk capacity.

That's one good thing about being the last on ADSL - you have the whole thing to yourself. When I first went to ADSL2+ I was getting about 4MB down (rather than the advertised "up to" 24MB), now I have 7.5MB .

Classic traffic management issues

NBNCo has been claiming for quite some time that the ISPs are not purchasing sufficient capacity, in order to keep their retail prices artificially low.

Reading the comments in this forum, I feel very lucky with our NBN performance. We are on a FTTN connection, but the node is only 200 metres down the street. We are helped by building our house in a new estate 11 years ago, so the copper in the street is only about 12 years old.

At 8:30 pm on a Saturday night, our download speed is 44 Mbps and upload is 18 Mbps. We are on a standard speed plan, however I think Telstra threw in a speed boost option as a marketing thing.

Harold

Is Australia using Huawei equipment? Supposedly their equipment comes with preinstalled back doors and spyware?

Is Australia using Huawei equipment?

Massively: https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/huawei-s-history-with-australia-20181207-p50kyj.html