Possibly more relevant to this topic?
‘Down’ I think is meant to mean ‘Not Up’, but equally apt if you would like to say ‘not happy’ or your choice of expletives to describe your feelings towards the NBN when the service fails you.
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Looks like it could be a money spinner for whoever the government sells it to. Scotty and his mob will respond to this study that NBN is arms length from government and many voters will just accept that premise, shrug, and wander on in the NBN wilderness.
With my head about to go firmly down, it is not obvious how ‘super fast’ affects consumers once they can get what they need and use, while education and business and especially research can saturate whatever you put before them (if they can afford it). FWIW Back in the early to mid 2000’s CSIRO put data on a portable disk in Melbourne and couriered it to Hobart because it was faster and cheaper than transferring it on the network available at the time.
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I’ve heard it said many times that nothing beats the bandwidth of a suitcase full of drives - even AWS uses their snowballs to move petabyte-scale chunks of data from customers to the cloud - but of course one needs to also count the time taken to move the data to/from the suitcase (or snowball) … I’m sure there is some site out there where someone has done the analysis of wire vs suitcase transfer … (challenge accepted?)
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The American phraseology was that the highest capacity data bus was a Greyhound 
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Yep!
But love ‘the New Daily’ sense of humour to lighten the day.
Firstly they feature ScoMo with the ex Minister for communications, Mitch Fifield. What’s wrong with Paul Fletcher? Perhaps he is yet to discover what as a minister he is responsible for? Has anyone told the PM Mitch is no longer there?
Secondly the lead into the article states:
Internet users in Australia are being forced to pay some of the world’s highest prices for basic broadband connections, new research has revealed.
Followed up with:
Australia is the fourth-most expensive country in the world for a standard 100Mbps broadband plan, data compiled by discount site Picodi shows.
Basic broadband and 100Mbps don’t compute.
Basic per the NBN is 12Mbps, with less than half of Australia able to get the top tier speed of 100Mbps.
Yes, the NBN is talking up some slightly faster tiers, but only for a select few. Perhaps Picodi had difficulty finding any other nation with 12Mbps broadband for the comparison?
P.S.
Fortunately we still have a free weekly print edition of the Glasshouse Country News to keep up with all new developments. The war on 5G and climate science is hotting up, while it’s now too late to plant those summer vegetables due to a lack of rain and summer starting in August this year.
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Absolute classic.
Reminds me of the old joke.
“Cheer up said Fred. Things could be worse”
“So we cheered up, and sure enought, things got worse”.
Looks like the NBN is about to be stress-tested:
From Cnet regarding US plans
As you can see they have lower speeds but pricing is generally much lower than ours. I am not adjusting for Aus $s as this information relates to US incomes so a better reflection against their incomes. They also offer much faster speeds than we can get and even at those pricing is generally lower than ours.
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The US is more of a dog’s breakfast regarding telco/internet service than our own. There are many areas with a single hardwire provider that provides poor service at high prices, nobody else can use it (eg an RSP) so all the local competition is 4/5G or satellite.
For some unimaginable reason businesses often enjoy better service for lower costs than consumers, sometimes dramatically so. I am aware of one area where a business can get unlimited 5G unshaped data for the same monthly cost as a consumer would get 6 mbps shaped capped at 100MB/mo prior to dropping to dial up speeds! Capitalism at its finest.
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And of course many states have legislated to prevent their own municipalities (cities/towns/counties) from rolling out their own Internet. Truly, an amazing example of the proud tradition of ‘free enterprise’ and competition.
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The theory is that a publicly funded entity with subsidised costs should be not able to compete with private enterprise since it would not be a ‘level playing field’. If private can do it public should not. Reads much like a libertarian manifesto does it not? Our special sauce is the public-private partnerships where the subsidy comes from government and the profit goes to private pockets. Seems an equal or greater perversion than the US example.
‘We’ had (2000’s, federal mandate) and may still have a mentality whereby government demanded its agencies behave as ‘perfect customers’ - eg take what you get and thank the supplier with full payment regardless of how it went, and do your best to avoid making the supplier accountable for any and all shortcomings they might be responsible for; if the supplier under quoted to get the contract just renegotiate it at whatever high price they want. Might not be a perfect statement, but close enough for purpose here.
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Which is absolutely fine when the private sector is delivering, but when it is not the public sector sometimes needs to step in - as with the NBN. Of course, given certain ideologies we often end up with sub-optimal (i.e. crap) outcomes.
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You are too generous. However our crap outcomes seem to also be influencing bush fires through self combustion. Lots of crap, eh?
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Usage figures from Telstra.
https://exchange.telstra.com.au/download-records-2019/
Which might be a surprise but, as one Facebook user put it:
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I have come to the realisation that it needs to be sold if it is going to be sold, sooner not later. As long as it is the coalition’s political play thing and something they see its sole value as being ‘a way to attack the ALP’ nothing will get better. Thus the ALP could not even try to fix it because the partisans would accuse them of profligate spending blah blah and the dullards who vote would probably respond.
Private hands could not be a worse stewardship - and I could live to regret that belief - but the status quo is somewhat below a bad joke for most of us, whether considered by technology, performance, reliability, or cost.
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Must be big Fortnite players in Coomera, we guess?
The only problem with this assumption is that once an online game is downloaded it only takes a trickle of data - as in less than a browser will download if you have a lot of windows open but ‘inactive’. The Coomera downloads are more likely to be streaming video than playing online games.
A better comparison would be per application over the year, not having fun at gamers’ expense. (And no, I do not play Fortnite.)
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As much as I want a full fat fibre to our home, it’s a shallow but convenient suggestion. Worthy of the most skilled of our political masters of spin.
Fact. 300GB/m is less than 3hrs usage per day average on our 12Mbps ADSL2 service.
Conclusion:
Not quite “Fake News”.
Saying this reflects the benefits of FTTP is far from evidence that the 20% greater average data consumption is due to the technology provided by the NBN in the NT.
The NT average of 290GB/mth compares to averages of 240-245GB/mth in NSW and Vic.
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One could just as easily attribute the data consumption as being due to the remoteness of NT residents (Darwin has only 150k residents and cannot be compared to Perth with its 2m, thus showing the up-sides of supplying decent Internet to remote communities).
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And potentially the weather. Streaming may be a good option when sitting in aircon riding out the tropical weather.
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