It sucks! Pages with lots of separate bits of content can take quite a long time to load, often over 30 seconds
I’ve just acquired a 2nd hand 4G phone, and discovered download speeds up to 5X faster than I get with Skymuster (best so far 111Mbps), and uploads speeds more than 10X faster (best 65Mbps so far), along with ping times >30X less (20-24ms vs ~700ms)… in places where I have 3 bars of signal. Unfortunately that isn’t at home, but even so the performance is far superior to nbn satellite.
I think I’ll be hotspotting my phone for much of the time when home, and am in the process of changing to a phone plan with 30GB/month as I type this.
I went from satellite to fixed wireless. At first, the fixed wireless was so poorly implemented that the raw speed was slower than I’d been used to on satellite. Ping, however, went from ~600ms to ~30. The service felt faster.
Meanwhile, people with “Unmonitored medical alarms” will apparently have to pay for the changeover to NBN:
“Should we treat phone and internet access as essential infrastructure, rather than as consumer products?” Would anyone who is both sane and decent deny that telecommunications access is essential?
The sad thing is that while many customers are cynical enough to take any such statements with a grain of salt, there will still be many that believe the most hyperbolic of marketeer claims.
I’ve been with ABB on FTTN NBN for several months now, and while I’ve never assumed they can magically offer congestion-free internet, I can (from personal data recordings) say that their service on the Maitland NSW POI has been excellent, with over 99.96% uptime and excellent ping times and speed.
However anyone’s experience will vary, more depending on their own home setup than anything any RSPs do.
I had a discussion with one of the local Telstra shop staff today re FW and NBN. One interesting bit of advice concerned what you needed to do to keep your copper phone line.
It was suggested that even if you were an existing Telstra bundled phone and ADSL broadband customer the transition to FW on the NBN would assume you would take up the NBN VoIP service. Once transitioned your copper phone was gone. To avoid this it was suggested you needed to put a separate order through the Telstra system first to keep the phone in place and then make the NBN service order data only. Telstra would however keep both on the same bill and packaged rate once the transition to the NBN FW was in place. Go figure?
However where Telstra had been bundling home phone, internet and mobile in one bill with a discount for single billing, the future was that the NBN would be billed separate from mobile services. Understandable as they are clearly seen as two very separate businesses?
" the upgrade was made possible through new optical transmission technology from equipment maker Coriant’s CloudWave Optics. Technology that supports per-wavelength transmission rates of 200 gigabits per second. The new technology has the capability to be upgraded to 400Gbps when needed."
That’s the thing with optical fibre. Once it’s in the ground, upgrades generally involve no more than replacing what’s at the ends of the fibre. Of course, we need enough fibre in the right places. Our current government has screwed up on both counts:
There’s a line from a speech by Paul Keating that resonates:
“We have to decide, as from now, that access to the national information infrastructure will be no less a general right than access to water, or public transport or electricity.”
The plan that Labor took to the 2007 election was far from perfect, but it did strive for equality of access. To me, that implies equal data volumes and access pricing. Equality of speed is probably not a realistic expectation, at least, not in the short term.
Then this turned up in my inbox: https://www.skymesh.net.au/blog/windows-10-update/
For those on “unlimited” data plans, gargantuan Microsoft updates that the user can’t control are not a big issue. Much of the nation doesn’t have the luxury of “unlimited” data though. It looks like the world has outpaced the NBN as it’s being built. Whether Labor would have adjusted their plans and given us better outcomes, we’ll never know.
If you experience a similar drama to the one I had In March, it will be a living nightmare.
The Windows 10 update failed to install correctly on our desktop but did install correctly on our laptop.
The desktop would spend all day downloading and trying to install the update until our monthly data quota of 50Gb was exhausted, so I had to purchase aa extra data pack for 3 months.
Nothing could fix the problem, so in the end I did a clean install of all software.
We’ve blown through our nbn satellite monthy allowance a couple of times due to multiple attempts at big windows updates that have failed… probably due to ongoing dropouts.
I am having second thoughts. Maybe it will be better? My current ADSL is running at 0 bits over any unit of time you want to specify, and my phone is gone. The repair circus got nudged along this morning but it is running like a wounded rock so far.
That’s about a tenth of our average monthly usage …
I’ve repaired a couple that others said were beyond hope - nothing is impossible, but the fresh install is sometimes/often much quicker, with the advantage it is ‘fresh’ :-).
