Aussie Broadband is one of Australia’s oldest small NBN RSPs. Their Managing Director invited questions from the Reddit community. The exchanges give insights into how the NBN operates and how an RSP is run (or perhaps should be).
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An interesting link, occasional use of the ‘F’ word in the posts excluded.
It’s a bulletin board with a wide range of content. It does appear to have strayed from a Q&A in many examples. Not what I was expecting to read, without some filtering, to skip past the floaters.
Some are interesting.
Many are just others passing their views about the NBN .
It could perhaps also be seen to encourage others to choose Aussie BB as a customer.
What should I think?
I don’t.
Many of the exchanges are one way grumbles.
I’m getting over the NBN, and coming to terms with both major political parties avoiding it as an issue in the approaching Federal Election.
What we have with the NBN is a rubbish solution, for some but not all Australians. That’s based not on what others think we should have been provided, but on the general community accepting what they have received. Issues and concerns re the NBN have dropped from the local rag, the regional paper, and rarely find a spot on the national news outlets.
There are those on the Redit post asking about uploading at speeds of 100Mbps to 1Gbps. I wonder what everyday personal need we would all have to require such speeds. Perhaps in the future. For those that do have a genuine need today it would be great to hear they can do so.
But should it be at the expense of the rest of the NBN customers to subsidise such an outcome?
Or should such needs be met with a $1,000pm high speed plan. I gather high speeds and data high data capacity services are available to any business that is prepared to pay for the benefits! You just need to put the money up instead of asking for it for free?
I noted one response on the Redit BB suggested there was a large number of customers who would only ever have at best or require a lower cost 50Mb service speed. It was suggested that loading those service costs with the added costs of provisioning for higher speed plans to serve other customers needs would not be an acceptable outcome.
Discussion considered the options for an NBN RSP to offer higher speed general services to customers eg >100Mb. Under current NBN CVC pricing it is very costly. There are various comments that current Government thinking plus NBN CVC pricing (NBN Co) is deliberately capping speed plans available. Although with less than 1in 5 premises (fixed line) connected by FTTP, most premises will never have access to higher speeds.
What I learned from the posts suggests there are two major considerations with the NBN.
Access. IE The maximum speed technical available at a premise.
Consumption. IE how much data a user can download or upload.
The current CVC pricing and NBN capital expenditure program in attempting to force an equal outcome for all NBN customers has failed. For those wanting higher speeds, access is limited. Although reasonably, paying ten times the rate for a 1Gbps plan compared to 100Mbps would seem proportionate. Especially to a customer who is paying a high price to get at best 50Mbps.
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The current 50 Mbps plans are currently good value for money at the current levels of use but will be dismally inadequate as tech evolves that uses greater and greater bandwidth eg standards of 4K and 8K streaming in the future instead of the SD or HD (at best) quality many of us use now. Even the paltry 15 Mbps that Mr Turnbull said would be well covered by the 25/5 plan has now been shown to be a failure to understand the need for growth of speeds/bandwidth with 25/5 seen as a bad outcome. It is hard for me to see other countries jumping on Gb speeds and even 10 Gb plans at prices that shame our 100 Mbps. That many in those countries use those plans seems to really highlight that we have become inured to under performance for our dollar or perhaps we are so concerned about the spending of that dollar figure we forget the poor outcome we get for that dollar in comparison to those who achieve vastly more.
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I assumed everyone knows the nature of Reddit. My error, I guess…
Not quite sure where you’re going with that argument. Since when did ignorance prove anything?
I have no idea what people are using ever-increasing bandwidth for. Demand keeps rising anyway. My ignorance has no effect on it whatsoever.
Never is a very long time. The anticipated service life of optical fibre is a century or so. That also is a very long time. If the current NBN project is the be-all and end-all, then perhaps never. Otherwise, maybe not.
We’re defeated, only when we give up.
Agreed, Consider it a Tactical Withdrawal! 
Much depends on the next federal election results.
P.S. There are many who may not go to Redit or other BB’s including Whirlpool. I guess I expected that for the offer of a Q&A they had a tighter more controlled format than a general BB discussion. All BB’s have strengths and weaknesses in who uses them and how they are managed. Redit can be quite useful, as is Whirlpool. Equally some of the advice and discussion can be confusing or misleading.
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