As reported elsewhere, I recently managed to pull off a transfer from NBN satellite to fixed wireless. After some teething problems due to faulty equipment, the performance is quite impressive.
Initially, the fixed wireless was actually slower than satellite, but felt faster. Satellite’s ~600 ms latency makes a substantial difference, compared to the ~30 ms of wireless.
NBN Co is now upgrading some fixed wireless towers. By some reports, quite a lot of them. That they need to do that, this early in the game, says a lot about their planning. Maybe sharing “up to” 900 Mb/s between “up to” 2640 premises wasn’t such a good idea. Those figures come from their network design rules (page 45 in the 30 June 2017 edition).
A while back, NBN were touting their capacity to run gigabit fixed wireless. That is only possible where the tower is connected to the rest of the network by optical fibre. To quote from the linked article:
According to NBN corporate public affairs manager Tony Brown, only 20 percent of NBN’s fixed-wireless towers are connected by fibre, …
With demand continuing to rise, that’s probably going to have to change.
