Yeah the recommendation to set up your own wireless network has been made on this forum before. It isn’t that difficult and will cost a few hundred to some thousands depending on what speeds you want so what equipment you need, how many are connecting and if you as a person or a group want to become a small scale RSP so you can buy off bigger RSPs if you need or want to.
Some Ubiquiti and similar tech can provide better than gigabit services (see as an example https://www.ui.com/airfiber/airfiber5/) with distances between devices (PtP or Point to Point) as long as there is line of sight of 100+ km in the 5GHz band. This gets a signal to an area where that can be shared to many others within 20 to 30 km of the central hub with speeds of around 100 Mbps (likely less but not too much less unless a lot of users). Even if speeds were 40 Mbps this compares well to 50/20 Mbps nbn™ plans. Some businesses already provide these as commercial services and you can find out if they can support your location. If the NBN Co had been allowed to stick with FTTP many of these services would have fallen by the wayside but in areas where Satellite or FW is the NBN Co offer or you are stuck on a very poor FTTN then perhaps moving to this sort of service is very worth while.
Which would appear a great option rather than satellite or for those on the fringes of the FW network footprint. Line of sight is not so good in the back of the Sunshine Coast with mountains, hills, forests and a lovely bunch of activist locals who oppose any elevated infrastructure where it stands up or out. They are really nice people.
Does the same solution translate effectively to the higher density NBN FW tower where upwards of 100’s of connected customers might be considering leaving the 1,000 or so the local NBN FW tower services?
Currently approximately 2,300 NBN FW sites (based on registered service frequencies) and 284,596 connected premises pet NBN at the end of June 2019. It is no surprise some sites are pushing towards 2,000 users.
Current take up of FW is only 43% vs 58% for the NBN fixed line options. The circumstances can only get worse if all those holding back from FW are forced onto it. Originally premises in the NBN FW footprint were not able to retain their copper or ADSL services. That has changed for the moment, however our ISP will only guarantee 512kb as that is the revised service guarantee for the copper lines.
P.s. The third party solutions sound great! In our local the provider would either need to run a fibre link 1750m to the end of our road, or co-locate with Optus 6km away on a hill, and hope we could get a council approval to build over 8m high to clear the trees in between. Yes a local network sounds great with 20+ potential customers within a 250m radius. But is it Foxtel and can I buy it from Telstra might be the deal breakers for most?
A separate point is a <2,000m FTTC service can provide for our property and two neighbours all from the one street side Telstra pit! Not yet an option according to the NBN technology upgrade site.
Should the NBN Co be adding more fixed wireless or offering up more fibre?
It’s significantly cheaper on average to run FTTC than to provide FW, although the following graph from the Dec 2018, FY2019 half yearly report evades the comparison. The answer is in the preceding commentary.
P.S.
Yes, a direct comparison is more complex. The NBN Co chooses to not provide more detailed lower level costing. Arguably for competition or commercial in confidence excuses. Speculatively to avoid more embarrassing and telling observations.
The NBN Co admits in the most recent reports and Corporate plan the average cost of delivering FW is expected to increase as it adds the more difficult and expensive last customers to the network. It has also excluded the added costs of the current in progress upgrades to address congestion issues and ensure FW can achieve 6Mbps service speeds, most of the time! One guesstimate is that it will increase the cost of delivering FW by a further $2,000+ per connected customer. The bill is not in yet, nor is the final number of customers settled. The NBN Co is however reporting 654,000 FW premises are ready to connect against an estimate of 600,000 in the corporate plan. Originally approx 400,000.
Trouble is that all this was foreseen before the MTM NBN and the LNP knew the risks but they didn’t really want a publicly owned network that worked (even if eventually it become privatised). They prefer private enterprise to patch up the faults, and provide the solutions and so they kill off the nbn™ network by using the “thousand cuts” technique.
How meaningful is “average” in this context? Once you get to places where FW is even being considered, every place is different.
By your own observation that the FW “average” cost will increase as more difficult-to-connect customers are added, wouldn’t the same apply to FTTx i.e. average cost would increase?
The only really meaningful comparison would be e.g. total cost to add locality X using FTTx v. total cost to add locality X using FW (assuming that said locality is currently not served by NBN Co at all).
I would expect that CPP would be lower for satellite than either FTTx or FW, again limiting the discussion to the places where these choices are even being considered.
and because of an overriding patronising attitude from government in general / NBN Co ?
The mention of remote education in that article rang a bell. State and territory governments subsidise a dedicated port on the satellite NTD, specifically for education. It seems education is similar to Netflix in its demand for data.
Not my observation. Factually what the NBN Co has written into its current Corporate Plan. At a guess (my opinion if you like) the remaining towers to be completed may be either more expensive than typical and or have fewer premises in their footprint. Only the NBN Co knows for sure! It’s not sharing that level of detail.
The reality is the NBN Co filters the data to a high level. ‘Average’ is all we have. It still invites serious questions. There will be premises where The alternatives to FW are more expensive, and others where they are a lower direct cost, and the NBN chose not offer the alternative. In adding those premises to a FW service the apparent total cost of the fixed line services has stayed within budget for a small incremental cost of adding one more customer to an already exisiting FW tower footprint. The value involved in that trade off is not apparent to the public directly. The outcome is congestion of FW, and a ballooning cost to mitigate delivery of a 6Mbps service.
My opinion or guess. The final CPP for FW could easily reach $6,000. This excludes the cost to the nation of providing ongoing copper to 400,000 customers in the FW footprint who elect not to connect to the NBN. Some will also choose to retain their ADSL services!
It might serve to skip to Sect 2.4 at p56 to get at the smattering of factual content vs marketing assessments. Or p63/64 to read the about the expected CPP for each technology.
It does have competitors sadly. Many more are possible as well. TPG, Optus, Telstra to name a couple of bigger ones have their own dedicated Fibre networks that only link to the nbn™ network so traffic to and from can be shared. TPG, Telstra and Optus I understand have funded their own undersea cables to Asia and certainly Telstra to the US. ABB also have an international connection but I think it is leased capability then is a self owned network once on a mainland site. The reality is that NBN Co are driving a very sick horse as they didn’t go majority FTTP because the LNP didn’t allow it.
Considering the mess the LNP government mandated for the NBN I am not sure ‘sadly’ is an appropriate word. This government is not going to change anything; it will double and triple down how good it is and how much they saved compared to what they pull from their nethers about the ALP. An ALP government likewise would be unable to change it because of the escalating costs and the guaranteed attacks they would endure about ‘better managers, surpluses, and so on’.
If one or more of Telstra, Optus, TPG, and any other carrier came to the figurative rescue by building a competent national network it is firstly what the LNP would have preferred in the first place, and secondly it might force the NBN into a position of focusing on being an interchange service which they could probably do fairly well, not a monopolistic supplier to the flotsam and jetsam of RSP-land.
The mess called NBN will probably take decades to evolve with the wild card being how that happens when the cost to the public purse keeps getting bigger every year and our mostly self serving pollies behave as they do.
The “sadly” was because of what was lost in vision, hope, opportunity. I am not sad there are competitors, well to be honest a little but only because of what I wrote in the previous sentence. If we had been given as was first promised, today we would not be arguing or complaining about Netflix taxes, streaming, poor FW access in built up areas, disadvantage, the digital divide where one side or one end of the street gets FTTP the other FTTN or even FW or satellite and so on goes the litany of issues. We would have modern services working as they should with little chance they would be so overloaded with traffic that they fail to provide the telecommunications that 50 odd billion spent so far should have made bullet proof. It instead provides a cobbled together mish mash of aging, failing technologies.
The MTM NBN should be used as the example/definition of what failure to realise potential is. It should be used as the mark by which you know you have failed miserably. It, the MTM NBN, is the abysmal depths of failure to bring Australia into the future. It has put this country so far behind in this area that just as it may take decades for the nbn™ to evolve as you said (or perhaps devolve) it will take decades to overcome the disadvantages the current mess of tech puts us in currently. When you rate 60 something down the list in the World and have pollies telling how World Class we are with the MTM NBN you can almost taste not only see and hear the disconnect between reality and the verbal Diarrhoea. NBN FW as it stands today is not what it should be, it is congested, covering far too much of what it shouldn’t have to and just currently costing far too much. Satellite is a similar thorn that is used far too widely, and has the extra disadvantage of lag to the whazoo.
I’m looking at the options and alternatives. It might take a little bit of time.
For city and town folk the chalices have mostly been passed around. For regional/rural Australia some (20% nominally) have accepted the thimble of hope (Skymuster). The egg cup of renewal (FW) for many offers only a cracked and empty shell.
There remains unknowns around whether the Nationals are trying to achieve some gains for rural areas. Either in the form of an updated USG (Universal Service Guarantee) for rural and remote Australia, or in progressive upgrades to rural services. A guess is any change will prioritise business outcomes over residential while bolstering ongoing commitments to maintain the copper network. New copper for old, bring out your dead cables, I here in the streets?
P.S.
I can’t wait for the new FW to arrive. Does it still have that modern invention of the pedals to generate the power , and where’s the tuning knob? Apologies, wrong party, that was the Country Party.
“Don’t you worry about that!” Now?
The light at the end of the tunnel. The on paper book value of the NBN, expressed as assets less debts is down to $8B per the March third quarter report and loosing more than one $1B on operating expenses annually. It will soon be in negative equity to borrow a term most mortgagee home owners can relate to. When there is a more reliable current expert analysis on the future sale prospects I’ll add it to the Community Topic asking “Should the NBN be sold”?
Yep if you plan and pay for faecal material you get faecal material delivered to put it nicely, that’s what the FW debacle amongst all the other MTM NBN debacles gives us all…
If one of us has a problem with their telecommunications to the rest of us, we all suffer. It is not a them vs us, it is a shared problem. If my friend wants to share some online time with me or send me his/her latest family video, or wants to send me an urgent email or vice versa and because the system is so badly put together that we can’t achieve this or achieve it easily then we have all lost. This is not just the person on the poor connection, it is all our poor connection and so we have all lost.
It might force the NBN to do a lot of things. It might force the NBN to relax their restrictive and unreasonable rules. With no competition they can ignore the customer.
The NBN was always going to be a mix of technologies. It is just a question of degree, cost and outcome.
Alternatively, let’s stop using the term NBN as it is currently used and use the term NBN only to refer to the FTTP/FTTC parts of the network. After all, the rest is barely broadband if using an updated definition.
That would save Australia billions in health costs, compared with creating a nation of couch potatoes.
Yes it was always a mix but not the greater mix we have today. The plan that went to the people under Labor had no HFC (originally looked at but removed), no FTTN, no FTTC (but I can see a use for it in very limited capacity as a tide over). The MTM NBN was the label given to the LNP plan and is used here to differentiate between what Labor sought and what the LNP gave us. NBN Co also refer to the LNP version in “Rolling out Australia’s broadband access network requires a unique mix of technologies. We call this the Multi Technology Mix (MTM)” and see What is the nbn™ Multi Technology Mix? | nbn.
I understand your view and what and why you say it, I just make the reference to be fair to those who do not understand the difference.
Except that we paid for gold plated faecal material! Spent more, took longer, and is so much less than it could have been.
…they would roll it out twice in a few affluent suburbs of a few big cities and leave the rest of the country to languish, just as Telstra and Optus did with HFC. None of these companies wants the hassle of delivering services to customers spread all over the country, nor do they want to invest in anything that takes longer than a couple of years to provide returns! This is why we needed a national governmental approach in the first place, and why it is so disappointing that our money was squandered in creating such a mess.
I’ve been suffering extended service outages recently, so I checked back on planned outages, as advised by my RSP. This is what I found:
Start: Fri 13 Sep 2019, 07:00 am AEST AEST/ADST
End: Wed 18 Sep 2019, 08:00 pm AEST AEST/ADST
Duration: 5 days 13 hours
Start: Mon 16 Sep 2019, 07:00 am AEST AEST/ADST
End: Tue 24 Sep 2019, 09:00 pm AEST AEST/ADST
Duration: 1 week 1 day 14 hours
Start: Wed 25 Sep 2019, 07:00 am AEST AEST/ADST
End: Sat 28 Sep 2019, 08:00 pm AEST AEST/ADST
Duration: 3 days 13 hours
No wonder it feels like I’m slotting things in between outages.
To be clear, the notified periods aren’t solid service disruption. They’re just warnings about when service might be interrupted. Once upon a time, they’d give some indication about timing and duration of a disruption. They no longer do that, probably because they rarely if ever got it right.
All of this is attributed to maintenance or upgrades. How much have our infallibly-superior managers wasted by trying to do things on the cheap?
That’s the trouble - we are left with an extremely patchy ‘broadband’ network when we could have had a proper NBN for the same cost!
The only positive I can see from this mess is that the NBN in its current state is pretty much unsellable - although given the mate’s rates for some of our other infrastructure I won’t say totally unsellable.
