Read these articles from Whirlpool Industry News of 4th November …
I sure know who I am going with after November 15 !!
2 Likes
They look very attractive, but early adopters are usually the real beta testers. No matter how polished a “product” may be, when opened to real customer is when testing really starts.
I have iPrimus ADSL (billing, management) who subcontracts to Optus (equipment and connections) who subcontracts to Telstra (lines to premises), if that makes the point. Many problems require attention by the equipment operator, and many with the lines owner. The escalation processes are often not crisp, to be kind. Will MyRepublic be different as owner-managers of a routing system dependent on underlying infrastructure provided by the NBNCo (or others for now) who in cases also appear to depend on Telstra in places?
Waiting for the “second or later wave” in your area could be rewarding for patience and frustration.
3 Likes
Having just changed to NBN from ADSL, one thing seems abundantly clear - your ISP more than ever is simply a re-seller.
In the past, you might have been better off with Internode, iiNet, Westnet, etc - companies who tried to provide better service and better backhaul, who had to varying degrees their own DSLAM’s in exchanges, tech support until late at night, and the ability to actually DO meaningful tech support beyond “have you tried another modem” (because we all have 3) and “how long is your cable” 
.
Now it seems very different - ISP’s appear to be completely at the mercy of NBNco for any meaningful troubleshooting - well, it would be meaningful if NBNCo could back it up with something called meaningful troubleshooting - and accordingly ISP’s are ratcheting back service levels, probably because NBNCo doesn’t provide anything meaningful coupled with the good ISP’s being snapped up by the churning giants like TPG. For example, eons ago you could get fairly good tech support from Internode until quite late at night, and at times on weekends (I don’t recall specifics). Until fairly recently (this year I believe) you could get better than level 1/frontline support until 2000 CST. Now its 1800 or 1830 CST? and completely hamstrung by the NBNCo service filter.
On top of that - people experiencing “get NBN now” and finding they can’t get it. Big delays in service installation, and a huge failure rate on initial cut-over, and sometimes up to 3 or 4 appointments before the service is running, each time being told your “appointment” is a 4 hour window (that’s a time-frame, not an appointment), that someone over 18 years old needs to be present, and seemingly a zero percent chance of anyone even making contact during the allotted time-frame, let alone actually showing up. In our case, 3 weeks of no internet after the so-called cut-over, 4 appointments where no contact was made and nobody attended the premises (even though on one occasion they claim they did attend, gain access, and test the wall socket - apparently without our knowledge!).
Add to that the installers having hand-written install sheets and minimal English skills (as reported by a friend who stopped by a node, I’ve never even seen them) - what could go wrong? Admittedly I am in regional Australia, but a sizable town.
Lessons I feel we have learnt:
- Don’t expect your cut-over to be scheduled in a timely manner
- Don’t expect the “cut” part of your cut-over to be immediately followed by the “over” part of your cut-over. You could see a gap of “weeks”
- Don’t expect any kind of testing of the new service, quality control, etc.
- Don’t expect to ever see an NBNCo contractor
- Don’t expect to get meaningful responses back from your ISP (they are almost certainly as frustrated as you)
- Don’t expect NBNCo to prioritise fixing their mistakes, they just make a fresh appointment and you’ll need more time off work to be there when they don’t show up.
This is of course all anecdotal - but of the dozen or more cut-overs I’m aware of two (2) went without a hitch.
The other question raised is what value does the ISP bring to the equation now? I know they provide the back-haul from the NBN interconnect and upstream/peering/etc, email and some local mirror/etc, but it really seems like the reason to go anything but “cheap and nasty” has all but gone. Sadly …
1 Like
Hi I live in a Rural area with <600. We have an NBN tower and had it for nearly 2 years. Everything went well - a short wait time for installation. Techie arrived bang on time all went perfectly well. No problems at all.
I did find that more built up areas like the suburbs and regions are hardest hit for a variety or reasons including but not limited to : Lack of infrastructure or a shortfall of infrastructure to handle number of users ( towns of high growth have this)… and with the competing service providers (resells) they have so many new customers they can afford to be lazy and fob off prospective new customers. A neighbour to me was told by one service provider they cannot have the NBN, only ADSL2+ as they cannot get WiFi from the NBN tower. Strange because there is a strong LINE OF SIGHT from their rooftop to the NBN tower!!!
I suggest you shop around - and going by the terminology you have used - you know what you are talking about. Plenty of companies wanting to put you onto the NBN…
Best wishes it all comes through for you.
I have no intention of changing to NBN fraudnet. I have had cable for about 10 years and a recent upgrade of my modem from Telstra (free) has increased my speeds considerably. I now get 112Mbps almost all the time. I have had notification from NBN that it is time to change, but when I go to the site my suburb is listed as ready in 12 months. This NBN is not only a fiasco but an embarrassment on a global scale. Sadly, the government that trashed a future-proof network has again been elected and an equally incompetent opposition given even more seats. And now we have to also contend with a tin foil hats party too. While we have a political incompetent house of reps the NBNCo can offer substandard service without fear. This situation will continue while the majority of Australian users of the net do not have a clue what they using or have even a basic understanding. We get the government we deserve and it also appears we get the network we deserve…2nd rate.
2 Likes
Agree with draughtrider. Ours at home was all of the above in multiples - 6 months from first request to final installation. Lost count of number of times waiting at home for someone who didn’t turn up. Several visits where they couldn’t install because “I thought… was already done” and “we can’t do that, it’s someone else’s job”. Fortunately no service failures since, touch wood.
Ominous. Better stay with what’s working for a while, even though we have a habit of early adoption.
1 Like
I keep track of the NBN abortion pretty closely. Our town is being kitted out at the moment for mainly FTTN and we expect it to be completed by EOY. I have been really worried about what ISP to go with for NBN, one reads so many tales about bad CVC bandwidth contention ratios with most ISPs, resulting in scumbag FTTN performance. However I have been heartened in recent days after reading very good reports of user experiences with Tangerine Telecom, so much so that they are top of my prospective NBN ISP list as of today. I’m on Dodo ADSL2 at the moment, getting quite reasonable 9-11Mbps performance these days, but I fear that moving to FTTN could result in speeds half that.
Providers (ISP) needs to pay a massive amount for each Megabit for a user.
If 1:1 ratios are assigned to every user ISP signs up, they will go bankrupt very soon.
hypothetical scenarios, but not unrealistic, some ISP may decide to buy 100Mbit and wait until they get 500 users before ISP buys another CVC.
Also, I believe CVC is a region specific, ISP needs to buy CVC for a certain area/state, so even more reason to limit and buy as little bandwidth from NBN
as NBN is giving out more discount for larger ISPs first, your best bet is either stick to ADSL2, or get NBN from a lrager providers.
Hi, we had the NBN fiasco too! Yes we we went without the internet for 3 weeks and now we are still paying for nothing! My husband can’t be bothered talking to annoying people OS about the problem. When we decided to have NBN we had the technician come out , that part in retrospect was easy. Then our internet didn’t work, so then 3 people later someone recognised the problem and said our modem was the wrong one ( one Telstra sent to us months ago). My husband then was sent to a Telstra shop to replace our modem but they had no modems apparently there was no supply at all in Brisbane.
So then , we waited several weeks and yes we had to be home for the delivery which came 2 weeks earlier than expected and was left on the doorstep . Oh well I live in a nice neighbourhood. It also turns out to be a faster modem so finally we are happy . I have to say the service given by Telstra is extremely poor and I wonder if this is to do with trying to connect the OS dept and workers on the coal face and it all gets lost in the translation.
SeF
We had no internet for months when we moved to our current address thanks to it being listed as an NBN ready zone yet our house had no connections put in because NBN Co didn’t have permission to use the Telstra owned telephone poles in our driveway. All connected now and working well apart from the useless Telstra supplied modem/router which periodically locks random devices out from the Internet connection, requiring a restart.
For those of you here saying they’ll never switch to NBN, it just doesn’t work that way. 18 months after your area has been zoned as NBN ready the copper wires you currently use for ADSL and for your landline phone will be disconnected permanently and you’ll be at the mercy of NBN Co while you wait for them to get around to connecting your house up to the new service. So I recommend you switch as early as possible to avoid delays when your old service gets mothballed and you end up with no landline or Internet services at all.
Another telco horror story. Another day this government turns a blind eye. One has to wonder who owns the current Turnbull government but it is clearly big business as the government not only does nothing to bring badly behaved big business into line but continually seeks to allow more and more indiscretions as well as public money to flow to big business.
If you think some of these accounts are bad then spare a thought for us. Optus cut us off through its own negligence. We fought for over 2 months to be reconnected and dealt with imbeciles from India and lying staff in Australia who acted like despots when asked to fix the company’s negligence. In the end mandatory compensation was not paid on another lie from Optus.
The whole telecommunications industry is fraudulent and NOTHING IS EVER DONE about it.
2 Likes
A little known fact is that a lot of the hardware they tried to get on the cheap from China doesn’t work properly. If they had bought Siemens or Ericsson, for example, there wouldn’t have been the same problems.
1 Like
One of its owners is Rupert Murdoch, whose business model would be dramatically threatened by an effective national broadband network.
7 Likes
But on the plus side, the Chinese government has a backup of all your data - just not sure how you restore it when you lose it 
4 Likes
For what it is worth we had an almost faultless cutover to FTTN. Like many people I was nervous about cutting over from a great naked ADSL2 service (18 Mbit consistently) as I’d read about many cases of terrible service and very slow/erratic speeds. We had had VOIP for about 8 years so there was no concern about porting phone numbers etc. We are also uses of Fetch TV and Netflix. I pre-ordered a new ISP-supplied router (required for VDSL) that also supports ADSL2 - that was delivered on time a few days before the scheduled cutover (7th July 2016). I plugged in the router - worked perfectly.
I was advised that cutover would be between 9am and 2pm and decided to stay home that day. At about 10am the router re-synched and I was on the NBN. The only issue I had was that the speed was not set to the 50/20 Mbit plan I’d asked for - that was resolved by the ISP. We’re about 440 metres from our node and our connection is stable at around 48Mbits down (I think 18 up but can’t quite remember).
We have not had issues or erratic or slow speeds since cutover - maybe we’re lucky in that respect. I’m happy to say who we use if anyone want to know - didn’t want to sound like a sales person (but it’s not Telstra or Optus).
1 Like
What about cable? Will they chop that too?
I complained to my ISP, ANT Communications the other day about the crap satellite service- lots of no service periods, and they said:
“The NBN LTSS is having trouble at the moment but NBN is working, pushing out frequent software patches to the NTDs (that black box on your wall) and their ground stations.”
and regarding having to re-send emails multiple times due to “incorrect greeting” errors:
“We are aware of that email error happening some times, it seems the TPEP, the thing that makes the LTSS fast, some times stuffs up with its compression and puts a garbage symbol in the initial opening of communication which must be exact or the email program will reject it. Every case I’ve seen the next attempt gets through.”
It fails to send one the first go every time, sometimes it goes on the 2nd attempt, but I sometimes have to try up to 7 times.
The slow page loading/or not loading 1st go issue is as I thought, due to the very long latency/ping times, over 600-700ms.
I’m using my phone as a hot spot quite a lot, the Optus wireless data on my phone plan isn’t the best, but it is better than NBN satellite.
2 Likes
@pandrew3, anything that is supplied via the old copper phone wires will eventually be replaced by NBN cables and once they’re in place you will have 18 months to switch over before the copper wires are permanently disconnected. If your cable is supplied via the copper phone wire network, then yes, even cable.
