I thought I was having a problem at the other place because every second click on a link would time out. Email was really slow too.

This turned out to be entirely my fault - I had managed to give the modem and an internal gigabit switch the same IP address, so they were fighting. There's also a patch to make Windows 7 networking more reliable, so I applied this, then uncovered the duplicate IP problem. After that, the NBN worked very well indeed.

Quoting GTC, "From the Barix website: "Thank you for being part of our mission to make audio transmission simpler ..." I'd be writing to them about that."

Done so already and had a positive return Email. Barix Support is VG unlike many other suppliers of similar sorts of stuff.

Apart from the time lag to and from the USA server the audio quality at just under 128kbps is equal to what we hear locally off air which surprised me for an MP3 transmission.
It is probably about a 10 second delay we hear if you switch between the Off Air and Internet feeds.

Glad that lot is over...next trick is to migrate the studio and all its Codecs across to a new NBN router and still keep the station On Air whilst that goes on.

Think I will give my brain and blood pressure a rest for a week or so before making the Studio move to NBN.
Lindsay

I'm in HFC territory. Back in May (post #232) Telstra told me to hold off trying to connect to the NBN until further notice. Today they wrote to me "we are pleased to say your home is now ready to connect".

I'm not going to jump into that until I've spoken with my neighbours up and down the street about their connection experience. If I'm last to connect, then so be it.

GTC, hanging back will be a wise move. Regardless of the connection quality the speed is simply better on the old Bigpond cable connections. My brother in law is still on Bigpond and will change only in the last week or two before switch off, which is January, next year. Once he's on the NBN he'll lose 15% of his speed and it'llcost between 10 and 15% more.

All that grief, despite the change of his connection merely being the flick of a switch because the physical cable connection from the nearest node to his flat is exactly the same. It's just the dimwits running the wholesale service letting the side down.

he'll lose 15% of his speed and it'll cost between 10 and 15% more.

So much for The Clever Country.

The providers are at it again.
Next door had a call from a provider stating his landline was to be closed and he had to shift to the NBN or lose his phone and internet.
The closing off date for this street is actually Jan 2021!

Anyway he is not tech savvy (still does his banking at the bank and PO, goes to "centrelink" for state services ect) so he said yes and to give the NBN and Telstra their due, the service was swapped over seamlessly, his 1 PC and 1 phone still work as before. And why not, they have had 10 years practice so it should be seamless. He reports download speed of 19Mbs as against 5Mbs with ADSL. The connection is FTSW (fibre to somewhere) the last leg being the same old crappy Lead Sheath 1950's bundle from the exchange down to plastic cracked 1970 pairs into our street.
We receive regular calls from god knows who telling us the same story, phone cut to be off no internet unless we sign up STAT.

Meanwhile, the local Telstra shop tells me as it really is, hang onto my two 4G network services (phone and dongle modem) and just let the old phone and ADSL modem ( a Billions cat5/WiFi) go along for the ride until the Bundle corrodes so badly that they all give it away and wait for the 5G service to settle. Then shift to a 5G hub plus a couple of phones. That wont be long methinks, the ADSL now drops out reliably overnight requiring modem re-boot and I have 4.2 + 0.7 Mb from the ookla test!

Fred.

QUOTE: Telstra chair John Mullen has savaged the NBN as a massively expensive waste of resources that has entrenched a slow, state-owned monopoly, rather than a competitive high-speed broadband network.

Speaking at Telstra's Annual General Meeting, Mr Mullen said the NBN was simply too expensive for many retail service providers (RSPs) who were now looking at other technologies, or facing the prospect of going broke.

Mr Mullen noted most retailers were unable to cover the costs of selling NBN products.

Here we go, and why are we not surprised?

QUOTE: The NBN is close to completion and that means the Government will need to offload it, but there is no way any rational purchaser would fork out the kind of money the thing cost to build, particularly given it will need to be upgraded to a full fibre network if it is to compete viably against new technologies like 5G.

....

It may seem like a rerun of an old horror movie but Telstra, the company that did everything it could to thwart a fibre-optic cable rollout in order to profit handsomely from it, may end up playing a key role in the NBN's future.

I can understand Telstra's position - they'd rather the NBN be a monopoly in their hands just like the copper network was and they be the ones that profit from it, plus the countless government subsidies under the former universal service obligation (USO).

Telstra was going to build a national fibre network (at a slower pace than the NBN) but bowed out when told that a new government-owned body would be doing the job. It didn't stop them spitting the dummy when they discovered that the billions would be going elsewhere.

That said, even though we'd still be stuck with Telstra, the 900kg silverback gorilla, I reckon they would have done a slightly better job than NBN did with the network upgrade. On the downside, not everyone would be able to access it. It would have pretty much paralleled the urban cable networks and then the capital works money would conveniently run out just like before.

Last week I received a letter from Optus (a real letter), stating that 5G is now available in my area, and I could get 138Mb download speed with no data limits for $70 - which is the same as I pay for NBN now. Sounds enticing, except I don't trust Optus - they've been caught out several times in the past for lying and being sneaky.

It seems that 5G will eventually be able to do 20Gb speed, when the technology gets there.

It didn't stop them spitting the dummy when they discovered that the billions would be going elsewhere.

.... but then they sold the NBN the redundant copper network for $11 billion.

It seems that 5G will eventually be able to do 20Gb speed

I find it hard to imagine why any normal person would need that speed. I don't even need 25Mbps, but then I don't watch Netflix, etc.

If the take up of 5G is high, then NBN will be scrambling for sales and we'll be back where we started. Definitely looks like the government is going to have to write off the NBN debt and hand the mess over to Telstra.

Groundhog Day.

There wouldn't be a server on Earth that could dose that speed out to an individual connection let alone anyone able to receive it so having a phone which can receive it (assuming it's possible) seems a tad pointless. I can view 4K video from Youtube on a 42Mbit 4G connection without buffering or lag. That suits me fine.