SkyMesh is currently investigating Fixed Line services being offline on the following areas:
Berkeley Vale
Eastern Creek
Hamilton
Maitland
Mayfield
Tamworth
Backhaul for my fixed wireless service is through Maitland.
UPDATE 1:15PM - Services are offline due a fibre break in Chatswood, Sydney. Fibre technicians are currently onsite investigating.
UPDATE 15/12/18 9:08AM: Our upstream provider advises that fibre repairs are still ongoing due to a large fibre break as a result of construction works.
UPDATE 12:06PM: Our upstream provider has advised that services has been restored to some CSAs, and repairs for other CSAs are still ongoing. Crews are working in parallel to splice 1488 fibres.
UPDATE 2:45PM: Fibre crew continue working on damaged cables. #2 of 5 cables has been completed(120 fibres). On Fibre #1 (312 fibres) they have spliced from fibres 1 to 79 which has restored some services. Restoration work ongoing.
So; five cables in one duct with no redundancy. I wonder how much can be attributed to the original plan and how much resulted from subsequent Conservative cost-cutting.
two routes for data between any two points on the fibre network.
The 2015 rules changed that, supposedly in the interests of “cost efficiencies”. As far as I can tell, they saved nothing (actually seem to have cost more and taken longer) and made the infrastructure less robust.
Qualified? That, I can’t say. I was discussing technical aspects of do-it-yourself optical fibre a while back, with someone who’s involved in the UK’s B4RN. He said that he’d learned to fuse fibre from YouTube. Of course, he still had to source a fuser (to weld fibres in proper alignment). At the time, a basic fuser cost about $5,000, IIRC.
Probably won’t be the same for fibre. Copper degrades markedly after about 30 years. The anticipated service life of fibre is a century or so. Of course, the size of a network is limited by how much can be replaced within its service life, so there’s likely to be a lot more fibre around than there ever was copper.
I was hoping to communicate fibre would be just as likely to be accidentally dug up or cut thru and fibres damaged as has happened in the past with copper. Any buried service is susceptible.
As this recent example demonstrates the more we rely on the high data capacity of fibre the greater the impact.
I guess it depends on what proportion of the work in question was repairs (replacing damaged copper) and what was maintenance (replacing aged copper).
I was once told that the PMG took the 'phone network from poles to trenches because doing so reduced the damage bill by 75%. Service life increased by a factor of three. If you want repair and maintenance contracts, then campaign for overhead infrastructure.
The saving grace is that, if we build out fibre to the optimum, the network will be three or four times the size of the old copper one. Lots of contracts, but you’ll have a lot of ground to cover.
NBN Co has announced a significant restructuring and relaunch for its fixed wireless services that will see the product reach for 75 Mbps downloads in the year 2020,
“Reach for”? Spin knows no bounds!
NBN Co will have to withdraw its current wholesale 25-50/5-20 Mbps products by the end of 2019.
NBN Co claims it will be better at utilising its accessible spectrum and will have the potential to offer a 75/10 Mbps service in future.
Initially, NBN Co will offer a new wholesale product dubbed “Fixed Wireless Plus” with potential to hit 60/20 Mbps. The bundle will cost the same - $45/month – as NBN Co’s current Fixed-Line 50 bundle.
“Potential to offer”?
So, at some time in the future, I might potentially be offered 75 Mb/s – or maybe 60. How much of what is potentially offered will actually be delivered – and for what proportion of time?
Hmmm … just noticed that this is comment #666. Is that an Omen?
We are staying with our elder daughter and her family for Xmas at their home in the Sunshine Coast hinterland west of Nambour.
Their ADSL service ranges between 2 and 4 mbps download speed and 0.4 to 0.8 mbps upload speed.
The NBN will only be rolled out to the other side of their street so even the present NBN Fixed Wireless would be a massive improvement to what they presently have.
And to add insult to injury, mobile phone coverage is practically non-existent and the TV reception drops out when it is overcast.
The joys of a system that values profit over all else.
One need only consider Australia’s wonderful implementation of pay TV - Telstra and Optus rolling out cables side by side in half-a-dozen ‘profitable’ suburbs and leaving the rest of the country alone. Of course, the NBN will now not use most Optus HFC because of its degraded condition. (There is no need to further discuss the state of Telstra’s copper.)
The catch with the Sunshine Coast, is that most of the votes are on the coastal wealth and glitter strip. The hinterland has many obsticles to mobile phone reception. Many residents are still without effective mobile coverage despite complaints through their local Federal MP’s.
NBN fixed wireless faces the same issues. If you can’t get a reliable mobile phone signal the NBN with fewer towers is even less likely to offer service.
Additionally there is a very vocal community on the range at the back of Nambour who are against mobile and wireless towers. Concerns include loss of visual amenity to their general area and importantly for some radiation hazards from the transmissions. Many have access to FTTN or choose an off grid life style. Various groups continue to challenge through the planning process and courts the construction of towers, even on large open plots far away from housing.
These actions have delayed towers that would serve the greater good of the rest of the community, many more than those objecting. Despite what all that others see as a poor plan for the NBN, ultimately the Federal telecommunications powers have been progressively trumping community objections. It is just taking a long time to do so to go through due process.
Many of the affected areas were always likely to be on FW under the original pre LNP design for the NBN. For the NBN Co and gevernment hopefully their persistence succeeds. The alternative of putting even more onto Satellite is unthinkable, assuming you have line of sight past the trees to one.
P.s. of course Fttc it FTTN would be better! But at what cost to the NBN?
No more radical than pulling all the copper out of the duct, replacing it with FTTP or FTTC, and asking all on that line to do without for a few weeks.
Perfectly doable in an area with good mobile coverage.
Not so easy if you have live our of town and have none.
Neither are likely. There are limitations from who owns what towers and the towers having suitable space. Although it would be logical for any newer towers to allow for co-location. Telstra is through it’s mobile data service as is Optus, an NBN competitor for low volume users. So would they be keen?
The Federal Parliamentarians out of their pockets, oops Federal Budget, oh OK tax payers, have provided Telstra funding for hundreds of mobile towers to eliminate black spots. There should be no excuse against shared use of these.
I agree that a certain type of terrain will present similar problems to similar wireless frequencies, but the actual results will depend on where the base stations are located.
My wife’s youngest sister and her husband live on a rural property some distance from Mareeba in FNQ, and their mobile coverage has always been marginal.
However, since they had their NBN satellite service replaced with the NBN fixed wireless service, they are achieving ADSL2 type performance.
Hopefully that will also be the case at our daughter’s home west of Nambour,
It appears they won that little battle for the budgie-smuggler-at-large. The kids holding up signs in 1995 would be in their late teens or early 20s by now - and their current fear is more likely to be around vaccines… another piece of scaremongering, but in that case by someone who should have known better. I think it’s safe to say that Tony never did have much of a clue about anything except how to whip up a scare.
Well done David Harley and the EPA for asking Telstra to ‘reveal the science’ - years after it had been revealed to all as a scare campaign with no scientific justification.
And of course, kids that age now carry around their own mobile phones - while back in 1995 I don’t even think I knew anyone who had a mobile phone.
Which could be read as an argument that the towers should be publicly-owned; that the private sector should have no control of vital infrastructure at all. But that’s a whole other thread.
The complete and utter failure that is our $51+ Billion National Broadband Network (NBN), is now two years behind scheduled completion and $900 million over budget.
All this for one of the slowest internet systems on earth.
To reference another highly respected source other than facebook: Apologies to all those loyal facebook users out there.
Sammy J in the “Twelve J’s of Christmas” has a figure of $62B!
Is a talented TV performer going to upstage the NBN Co with a better final cost prediction?
What was in the stocking Christmas 2015?
Alternately on one of the FTA broadcasters todays take on progress, without the need to join and login to the news item linked previously @n3m0. Confronting in it’s assessment.
The problem with satellites is distance - and the resulting latency. Yes, it may be possible to make communications incredibly secure, but you wouldn’t surf the web using satellites if you can possibly avoid it (sorry to all the NBN customers who have been forced on to satellite). The distances start affecting the speed of your traffic, and even at light speed you can have a noticeable delay.
There might actually be a few, but when one party’s main platform is to stop, dismantle, or change anything and everything the other party started, an election is the end-of-life as well as the beginning-of-life. Until the parties evolve where they inherit and make the best of the previous government’s policies and works rather than destroy them because they can, planning? Impossible.
One potential remedy, because the parties will not easily evolve, is to enable making programs with guaranteed ongoing funding that transcend elections so the other side cannot screw with them, and make a period prior to elections whereby the incumbent cannot sign contracts over a certain amount with validity beyond the election.
The last case in point is illustrated by the last coalition government in Victoria that signed a major contract 2 weeks before the election; the project was a major policy disagreement. They had no business signing it, the ALP won and stopped it, and the ultimate cost was reportedly about $1 billion before it was over. One can debate the cost or that project but the bottom line was it was one of the top election issues. The coalition people responsible felt no remorse for their gambit, while the ALP campaigned against the project from the get-go and always stated it would be cancelled if they won.
It’s an interesting mindset that whines about the cost of investing. Actually, to me, disgusting is a more apt description.
What will the NBN really cost? My answer to that would be the price of building it, minus the price of not having it. Put another way; the price minus the value. I reckon the answer is “Less than nothing”. Of course, if some treacherous maniac sells it off like they did the old copper network, then we will pay dearly.
