Broadband Internet Provider Review

[Tungsten]

@Gregr

When I was compelled to transfer from ADSL to NBN, I went to my long-term provider and asked for like for like. I knew that the speed on my dedicated ADSL+ of say 7Mbps, and monthly usage of say 500MB was ample.
That is what I got, and was less than what I had been paying, since Telstra were now out of the picture.

Looks like you were either lucky, or were paying too much for ADSL. My experience was like that of this poster:

@WatchThisSpace

The move from ADSL to NBN was not an improvement for us. I had the same performance with a 200Gb allowance for $10/month less.

I had a similar situation, when we were forced off ADSL onto HFC NBN (with only 3 months notice, rather than the promised 18 months) the absolute cheapest NBN plan available anywhere was $15/m more expensive (if you include the requirement to rent a phone line in the ADSL cost) with less download and similar speeds than our previous 200 GB ADSL plan.

With no choice but to move to NBN, we just had to pay the extra cost for no extra benefit.

[grahroll]

@Tungsten

With no choice but to move to NBN, we just had to pay the extra cost for no extra benefit.

This is what Australia voted to accept when the MTM NBN was touted by the Liberals and Nationals. If instead most had accepted FTTP/FTTH of Labor’s plan then what would have been received would have been a superior service. It may have cost as much per month as the MTM NBN but reliability would have been far better than even the old school copper.

The cost we pay now for NBN is somewhat a result of the cost to build a national network, similar cost was borne by early adopters of telephony services. I would imagine that if we all had Fibre, in some years ahead the cost will reduce or become less impacting on our budgets. Sadly, FTTN, HFC, and similar copper at their heart services will remain a costly burden to bear. The tiers of service will also remain low as many are on MTM NBN services that cannot achieve anything more than low speeds (compared to those in the World who have embraced Fibre).

We locked in poorly performing for the cost services. Australians burden to bear for poor choices.

[syncretic]

@Tungsten

With no choice but to move to NBN, we just had to pay the extra cost for no extra benefit.

That may happen in some situations but not all.

In my case, taking phone and internet together, the cost is less and the performance better with NBN (fixed wireless) than the interim satellite service (internet) and copper wire phone.

The NBN is far, far better than the previous copper wire phone and dial-up internet service in both performance and reliability. Taking inflation into account it is not much more expensive for a much superior product.

I realise not everybody obtained that kind of result. The comparison depends on what you had before as well as the implementation you have now, both of which are variable from one location to another.

[mark_m]

@grahroll

The tiers of service will also remain low as many are on MTM NBN services that cannot achieve anything more than low speeds (compared to those in the World who have embraced Fibre).

The situation for those on wireless and satellite is similarly compromised, but for different reasoning.

Both of the core political teams accepted there would be some need for satellite and wireless NBN services. The quality of the services provided was compromised by the final design promising high. Realising failure setting low standards for the minimum service to be delivered compared with fixed line alternatives followed.

The compromises permitted the NBN to connect more customers to limited infrastructure. The economic rational justified delivery at a reduced investment cost per customer. Although NBN customers on satellite and FW typically pay the same for less compared to most NBN customers on fixed line.

The NBN - Government has been forced into making further investment adding more FW infrastructure to reduce the ongoing issues of congestion arising from poor decisions. The latest announcements include further additional capital to extend fixed line services to selected satellite and FW customer areas.

@syncretic

Taking inflation into account it is not much more expensive for a much superior product.

I realise not everybody obtained that kind of result.

I think that underlines one of the most common complaints with the NBN. Not all customers have equal outcomes.

P.S.
I’d agree now into the second month of NBN Fixed Wireless service the internet has been faster than the ADSL2 over copper. Is there any advantage of a faster connection? With multiple users, device updates and connected cloud services - there has been far less time spent making tea or coffee.

As far as cost is it less expensive when combined with a phone? It depends on whether one maintains the copper line phone service at significant extra expense, opts for the lower cost of an NBN VoIP line, or takes a punt on the mobile service always being available.

[syncretic]

@mark_m

It depends on whether one maintains the copper line phone service at significant extra expense, opts for the lower cost of an NBN VoIP line, or takes a punt on the mobile service always being available.

I was very pleased to see that last of the copper wire connection, each time we had heavy rain it was dodgy and after many supposed attempts to fix it had failed I could see it was never going to be any good. I now have VOIP with unlimited national calls for peanuts and a cheapie mobile plan for emergencies.

The main issue is that VOIP is power dependent so now the phone goes off when there are power network outages. I have a battery but it only lasts about 3 hours and I don’t see it as worthwhile to pay for a bigger fancier one. Some people need to be connected 24/7 - not me.

[grahroll]

I for one wouldn’t replace our nbn™ service to go back to copper. That being said, I’m on Fibre to the House and that is a service that is rock solid in performance.

For those whose distance from an exchange meant 1, 2 or 3 Mbps on ADSL then anything like even 7 Mbps or 10 or 12 now, have had massive increases in speed. Those who got 12, 13 or 20 Mbps previously might feel somewhat cheated if their result is similar for a bit more per month cost.

If someone is happy with 12 Mbps and limits on capacity, then the bit more they pay is an extra burden I can understand. For many more, extra speed and more capacity is a boon that allows them to do more of what they want.

To maintain a few on old copper ADSL services should mean they are charged the cost of maintaining those services, over time this cost while currently low would become exorbitant and even prohibitory. What ADSL used to benefit from was the number of services using it, even if the service for some was abysmal they had connections (well some had no ADSL service and relied on far more expensive options to get connected).

What nbn™ promised was a World class service, what was delivered was far less than the promise and regardless some will always be upset with the service and some will be upset with any service they get. But if a better service had been delivered I think those numbers would be less than those who feel jilted at the moment.

@mark_m

Wireless and Satellite was as you know a compromise regarding connection vs remoteness and cost. It was meant to provide a service to those who in any other situation who could not get a Fibre connection. It was a significant but still low proportion of the population who would have received these services, often it would have been the first real connection to the internet they would have received that was not totally self funded, eg there were satellite services previously for remote places but the infrastructure to use the satellite was totally the cost of the user.

Wireless with a minimum of users could have been a fairly speedy and robust service, instead numbers placed on it overloaded that infrastructure. As you note it now requires more cost again to reduce the inequality.

Inequality exists, making a it as minimal an impact as possible is what costs, particularly with the MTM network as it is a very costly mix to maintain and MTM has built in throttles to service that many are now experiencing.

[PhilT]

@mark_m

I think that underlines one of the most common complaints with the NBN. Not all customers have equal outcomes.

For balance not everyone had the same outcome on ADSL either. Distance from the node determined speed and everyone was in the same lotto.

After spending over $50 billion some unlucky NBN customers have no better than before, or not much better, while others did well. Some random differences in the dreaded FTTN,



all being in the same LGA a few blocks apart. The data is from a plugin called NBN availability check that supports most of the real estate sites, and displays this information with the property. I do not know where the data ranges come from or its veracity.

[mark_m]

@PhilT

not everyone had the same outcome on ADSL either. Distance from the node determined speed and everyone was in the same lotto.

Understood,
Not one to purchase lotto tickets!

As to broadband internet providers,
Of what we complain about with the quality and type of service do they genuinely have control over?
And
How much that we would prefer was better is beyond their control, is actually down to the NBN Co and Government?

No RSP can make any more of the NBN than what they are provided. Although some such as TPG/iiNet are now offering up the alternative of fixed wireless broadband using the Vodafone network. The offer we had for Brisbane was at less cost than our current NBN 12/1 minimum speed HFC service. Incidentally the same speed our old ADSL2+ service delivered to the same premise. We’ve retained the same ISP following the necessary NBN conversion.

[longinthetooth]

One of the general lessons the switch highlights is the difference between ECONOMIC versus FINANCIAL decision making of parties in Government.

Labor proposed the NBN based on economics, ie, the application of finance for community benefit. Economics is always a balance of community benefit vs costs of alternatives. Labor put Community benefit as the primary driver.

Conservatives are essentially financiers, they measure success in term of bank balances, and costs are their driver. Hence, the consequence was a cheap and cheerful, essentially degraded, service, with very few getting Fibre to the house, and regional and remote getting a very mediocre service. Short sighted because it will have to be upgraded instead of doing a proper job in the first place.

[drnetty]

Agree with this…I have FTTN and my plan was downgraded by my ISP when they informed me that the max speed available to my premises is 17 Mbs. Usually I am getting between 7 and 12.
So I’m on a 25/5 plan as it is the slowest available.
I work over the internet moderating webinars and sometimes when my speed is below 5 Mbs I get a warning from the webinar hosting software that my internet connection is not up to standard. I will need to disable the camera and hope I dont drop out. I can generally stream tv okay but sometimes the unit just doesn’t want to connect, or drops out in the middle of a show. I live on my own, have the usual tv, smartphone and computer connected. Maybe 5 devices, sometimes one or two more. But i would dearly love a faster, more reliable service. If it was available i would certainly use it. Problem is, i probably wouldnt be able to afford it!

[PhilT]

@drnetty

Usually I am getting between 7 and 12

If you have a strong and reliable mobile signal it might not be as much of a stretch now as it would have been a year or 2 ago…

https://www.whistleout.com.au/Broadband/Mobile-Broadband-Plans-SLP

[longinthetooth]

The ACCC has an interesting site, that I think Choice ought to comment. It recommends 4 performance levels, of busy period performance, conceptually seems fine. But their levels don’t relate to the 3 Plan levels available to consumersl, hence, actually creating a more complex decision situation for consumers.

Broadband speeds

What I was unable to find was a minimum acceptable performance level, for the 3 Plan levels, at the NBN level, rather than the RSP. As PhilT has pointed out the RSP can only sell what the NBN supply. It seems in drnetty’s situation, NBN are a long way short of an acceptable basic 25/5 service. Its not much better than ADSL. Without a measurable SLA it is virtually impossible for a consumer to complain.

This an aspect Choice ought to be vocal.

[drnetty]

Unfortunately we are years away from 5G. I generally have 2 bars of 4G reception but it can be worse. This is Wodonga, not Melbourne!

[PhilT]

@drnetty

This is Wodonga, not Melbourne!

My mobile coverage in Eltham (NE Melbourne) is generally 1 or 2 bars and often unusable unless I put the phone on the window sill or go outside, Telstra and Optus networks alike. I understand your pain!

[grahroll]

The minimum promise is 25/5, though it can be a pain to get it rectified. There is no separate minimum for higher speed plans, it is purely the 25/5. Of course if you are sold a plan that your service cannot ever achieve the ACCC has taken RSPs to task over this. But if any plan at a minimum achieves 25/5 it meets the minimum rules under SIP.

“ The new Statutory Infrastructure Provider (SIP) regime requires NBN Co and equivalent companies to provide a download speed of at least 25 megabits per second and an upload speed of 5Mbps during peak hours.

From July 1 [2020] that speed is to be available to all whether they live in the city or the outback.”

From Finder.com (NBN legally has to give you 25/5 speeds: How the new laws work | Finder)

“ My provider says I can’t get 25/5 speeds. What can I do?

Under the SIP regime, NBN Co is very much obligated to provide them to you, but it will depend on your circumstances. Obviously, if you’re signed up to only a 12/1 plan at this time, it’s not as though you can then complain to get 25/5 necessarily for the same price!

However, if your infrastructure and connectivity cannot support a 25/5Mbps connection on a sustained basis, you should have prime grounds to enforce work being done to rectify that.

Bear in mind that you would almost certainly need to be able to provide evidence that your line could not sustain those speeds over time. Just having dips in connectivity in peak periods under 25/5 probably wouldn’t count and NBN Co may suggest you try another provider if that’s the case anyway.

In any case, if you’re struggling with speed issues on your current NBN plan, your first port of call should be talking to your provider about those issues and identifying if it’s an issue of network provisioning on their part, the infrastructure to your home or other interference factors.”

SIP obligations | ACMA

[brisdaz]

@longinthetooth

I suspect many clients would in practice find that a 25/5 package would fully meet their usage, ie, many times faster and better than ADSL. Hence, is the promoted service fit for purpose, and good value.

Many people don’t realize the benefits of faster speed though until they use it.

Technologies such as video calling which have better quality and definition may require 10 to 20mbps upload.

[CaptJack]

Interesting discussion. There are a few points which might help people understand this a little better.

The concept of the NBN is twofold: (a) separate wholesale service provision from retail service; and (b) replace the ailing and obsolete (so-called) copper network with fibre, where it’s cost effective.

Objective (a) more or less acknowledges the flaw in the Howard government’s communications “competition” strategy, where Telstra was gifted a large piece of public infrastructure in order to inflate its stock value when floated for (partial) public sale. This created a monopoly and crippled competition. The government raised $8 billion from the Telstra float. It cost $11 B to buy back the last mile wires and ducts from Telstra for NBN. In other words, Telstra sold off the most problematic part of its network infrastructure, along with a monopoly right, back to the government. A win for its shareholders.

(b) replacing the (so-called) copper network with fibre is a long term investment. In-ground telecommunication wires were designed for analog phone signals. Digital signals over wires travel as high and low frequency sound signals, which (IIRC) travel electrically as current modulation. Electrical signals over wire attenuate relatively quickly compared to the length of the wire, mainly due to resistance. They attenuate further due to signal leakage (impurities in the insulation, or flaws in it, or joint loss). This attenuation limits the signal speed - much like a toy car pushed along a flat surface slows to a stop due to friction… Fibre, OTOH, carries light through a low resistance (transparent and reflective) medium, glass, with a slower rate of signal loss per distance. It takes much less electrical power to drive a light signal over fibre for 10 klms than it takes to send an equivalent electrical signal over wire for the same distance. Fibre in the ground will last (undisturbed) for a century or more, whereas the wires will corrode once the insulator begins to break down after a few decades, give or take.

A single strand of dedicated fibre can carry at least 180 Gbit/sec of data traffic if driven with adequate terminating equipment. In other words, it’s much more future proof. It requires far less electrical power to run a large fibre communications network than it takes for an equivalent electrical comms network. Most of that consumption is in the switching infrastructure.

The biggest cost of upgrading the Australian telecommunications network was the rollout of fibre, especially the last kilometer connections. It is much cheaper to run fibre to every house in an area in one hit than it is to do some here; some there. The Labor plan was flawed, because they tried to do the complete replacement too quickly. There was a shortage of skills required, leading to bodgy, over-priced work, and inevitable schedule delays. Otherwise, it was the right strategy - move everybody to fibre, except for those too widely dispersed to do so relatively economically. The result would have had a much, much longer service life.

The Coalition turned a once in a century capital upgrade into a short term hodge-podge of technology soup that will be obsolete within a decade, and requires a much bigger army of maintenance people to service. Political stupidity. Labor’s solution would have undoubtedly cost more and taken longer than the Coalition’s crippled approach. However, all that last kilometer wire still needs to be replaced, and all the node equipment has a very, very limited service life. It carries a much higher future liability cost. It is the economics of stupidity writ large.

IBM sells mainframes that range widely in performance. They build them fully configured. You pay for what you ordered. If you need an upgrade, you phone up, an engineer sends a code to the mainframe, and bingo, you now have the next model up, and a hefty new bill. IBM knows that on average, customer needs increase over time. They worked out that it costs more, and there’s much greater risk of introducing faults with in field physical upgrades - so they ship fully configured, and you pay for what you need. Additional performance is a phone call away. IBM is run by accountants, not politicians.

A data network is something vaguely like a road network, in that both are multiplexed. Data multiplexors can be time division or frequency division, but in either case they allow shared access to a transport network that appears to be dedicated, more or less. Traffic lights provide time division multiplexed access to an intersection. Frequency division is similar to having footpath for pedestrians; a cycle lane for bicycles; a bus lane for public transport; and general lanes for cars, trucks and motorcycles, with barriers that prevent vehicles from changing lanes except at traffic controlled intersections. The analogy gets a bit obtuse when considering end-user performance.

ISPs lease network capacity from NBN. I don’t know the granularity of it, but for TCIP traffic (internet) it is pretty much ALL multiplexed across the network. That means NBN sells a portion of its average carrying capacity to each ISP in an area. There are various trunk charge back mechanisms - it has probably changed since I was involved, and those details don’t matter. A single strand of fibre can carry a very, very high data speed, depending on the equipment connected at each end (the terminating equipment is the potentially expensive part). A small modem can receive speeds of up to 100Mbits/sec, and drive speeds of 20 or even 40 Mbit/sec.

Over FTTP, it will transmit at its capacity, and then the service will be multiplexed by the ISP’s allocation at the NBN connection point, via software and parameters. The speed that you buy will be a portion of the shared performance the ISP (RSP) has, which will be an average based on an algorithm. Your service can be upgraded to gigabit internet simply by NBNco replacing the terminating equipment, and possibly incorporating some currently unused (dark) fibre into the backbone, by plugging the ends in, and upgrading the terminating equipment in your house.

Over FTTN, the modem is limited by the line length to the exchange (node) which converts between electrical signal and light from that point. The same multiplexing applies from there. FTTP runs over twisted pair, with (IIRC) a pair for send and a pair for receive. The signal overcomes interference by being measure as the relative difference between the pair…it’s brilliant for analog phone calls…as designed. FTTN is conceptually the same as ADSL. It runs at higher speed, but over shorter distances, running a similar kludge, but more cleverly. It’s still a kludge. As you run faster and more clever data transmission protocols over twisted pair, from dial-up to ADSL to FTTN (VDSL), at higher speeds, you still get packet retransmissions due to line errors. The longer, and older or more degraded the line, the worse the performance. I took over four hours to upload a 20 MB report to a CBD solicitor’s website over FTTN one night, because FTTN was breaking down. It had to be delivered to the court by 9 am that day. I got to bed at 4:30 am. It was line errors, not contention, that caused the problem. Moisture in the ground; joins in the wires; packet failures galore; upload time-out.

HFC carries signal over (much more reliable and efficient) coaxial cable to a point equivalent to an FTTN node, performing the same conversion. It generally has higher performance and lower data loss, but similar vulnerabilities to FTTN - power requirements. Coax is shielded, and so not as susceptible to interference as twisted pair.

FW operates over radio, with (possibly with limited frequency division multiplexing), and certainly with time division multiplexing - mostly, that’s done by software. FW is very cost efficient over a wide area with usage low density and good signal. Once it approaches its usage threshold, its performance plummets, a it doesn’t matter what you do. They’d need to start making direct connections to overcome the RF contention. Mobile broadband is not really different to FW. It works on the same basis - RF traffic to a tower, with a performance plummet point - hopefully well above the number of potential subscribers connected.

FTTC is a variation on FTTN, but with much shorter wire operational distance, so less attenuation, and higher possible speeds.

Back-end (trunk) performance of the network is largely determined by NBN capacity; to a degree by the ISP’s proxy server and comms infrastructure capability; and thereafter, to the international network performance of whatever you connect to.

There will be some differences between the ISP sharing algorithms - some might a higher number of end-user subscribers, and then the software algorithm will queue user traffic for longer to smooth traffic peaks. Think of the number of light changes you wait for in a car at peak hour versus off-peak. What they are doing is sharing a resource.

I have a 50Mbit/sec download; 20Mbit/sec upload service from Internode over FTTP. My modem runs at 100Mbit/sec each way routinely, between it and wherever it measures its signal speed to, so I get more than I pay for, in a manner of speaking.

If you experience broadband issues because you don’t have a good enough signal, it might be possible to have an external antenna, or a dedicated, high performance broadband modem in a better position to get the signal. Then run WiFi from there. You’d have to check with your provider to find out if there are any legal restrictions. A repeater (RX/TX signal amplifier with antennae) might be illegal; IDK.

If you waded through this drivel, I hope it helped.

[Gregr]

Actually I did read through your ‘drivel’, and found it a very good essay.
Thank you for taking the time to put the info together.
I suspect you have much experience in all things ICT, including being ‘on call’ in the middle of the night.