The "Never Never Broadband Network" - NBN complaints

I’m six kilometers from the Perth CBD and my suburb is not even on the three year build plan, we have slow DSL 1 connection as we’re five kilometers from our exchange, with no improvement in sight we’re stuck in DSL hell, anyone else in the same situation with the NNBN?

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Hi John,
pretty similar situation with our home connection in the suburbs of Sydney, although our cable run to the exchange is just over 2km. Nothing for us on the three year plan, and the copper that runs to our property is regularly affected by wet weather. The last visit from VisionStream, on a sunny day, revealed no issues, and our ISP asked us to call back when the rains next cause our connection to become flaky. I was amused that the VisionStream technician suggested that I could take a crowbar and lift the covers from some Telstra pits - basically, go looking for the fault myself ( and hope no neighbour sees me as a terrorist/hacker … ) :smirk:

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Hey Scott,
It’s a terrible club we belong to particularly when we yearn for more. I’ve been looking into fixed WiMax wireless of late in Perth but our location is such that none of the fixed wireless providers cover our residential location and we can’t even get a stable 3G signal inside our home so 4G / 3G wireless is not an option. It’s 2016 and we suffer on 2mbit / 800K DSL service with four super heavy internet users. Countries around us must laugh and wonder what are they doing in Australia, very little, very slowly we can reply.

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Indeed it is, John. I’m worried that we’ll eventually only be offered NBN via an upgraded Optus coax/fibre strung along our street power poles.
I’ll be in South Korea later next week. People there will not only laugh. They’ll be stunned if I explain what we have to put up with.

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HFC is in the west part of my suburb but it’s not near me so I expect we’ll get a NBN node somewhere in my area to service us. I’ve even wrote to the current communications minister who initially said I’d get HFC but when I pointed out it wasn’t in my area it was back to the NBN Co website for confirmation I’m not on the roadmap.

Wow enjoy South Korea, I was recently in Singapore where my free hotel room Wifi could best anything in Australia. Your right they’d just laugh.

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VOIP and internet irregularity have been the bane of my life since moving to a very fast growing area of Perth metro (Southern River). Yes I am similarly some 3km from exchange and do not appear on the NBN map. Friends in the hills out of SW country Bridgetown have NBN yet their area is underpopulated.

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John,
I understood NBN have now declared all areas for technology choice - just not necessarily build time. So are you maked in an area to receive wireless, or fixed line under NBN ?

The service guarantee does work - if you cannot get a “business class” service today - stable DSL or wifi offering 512./128 or better, then you can apply for NBN satelite. I am on the Interim Satelite Service today, awaiting my swap to the new Sky Muster, and I am in NW Sydney - 6km from the exchange, and black spot with flaky wireless (usually drops to Edge).

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How does your satellite service work for streaming youtube or movies?

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I am still on the Interim Satellite Service (ISS) - waiting for my migration over to the new Sky Muster NSS.

Originally it was great on ISS, but they overloaded it with people, so speeds aren’t wonderful just at the moment.
If you were joining new, you would go straight on to the new NSS, so my experience wouldn’t be relevant to you.

NSS deliberately is being sized and built to support VoIP, and that has pretty tight tolerances on packet delay, jitter and loss, so I expect it will be fine for video, particularly with a minimum speed guaranteed of 12MB, everything should be good.

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Hi John
there are things called cellular mobile repeaters on eBay. They consist of an antenna that you place on your roof pointing to the cellular tower a co axial cable that connects to an amplifier inside your house and another antenna also inside. These kits are ment to provide you with a strong stable signal inside your house.

Also just to make things more difficult Data is 4G and with some networks you could have 4G coverage inside your house but no or poor 3G coverage.
I have not tried one of these amplifier kits they around $200 and are specific to a mobile company. You would need to tell your vendor who you are with and where you are. Go with a local supplier so you can return it if it does not provide the coverage you need .

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Hi Trevor3 and Shane,

Thanks for your advice I may think seriously about the wireless repeater.

The really galling thing is in my suburb there have been two greenfields developments and of course they have NBN services and they even appear on the NBN Co map as available. It’s like a hot poker in the face to disadvantaged long term residents.

Regards.

John

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John,
Another solution might be a mobile hot spot modem with an external antenna.( on your roof) this would be a cheaper solution and you would not have any licencing issues.
This will improve your 4g signal, but you need to be aware that not all external antennas do 3G and 4G.
Once you get it working you can cancel your adsl service.

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Thanks Trevor, I’ll give that some consideration. Interestingly a fixed wireless provider responded to my request and he thinks they may be able to reach me from a tower in the Perth hills so I replied to his post so I’ll see what comes of this first as we may get a good result which is really what we’re after from the NNBN.

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At 10km from the CBD in Perth we are also in the limbo zone of No Bloody Network. I checked the roll out map and it is valid until 2020 and our suburb not on it. My kids drive back to uni to watch pre-lectures and book library space to do tests and exams as the internet (which is apparently ADSL) is so slow that it freezes their tests and exams and times them out.
Some days we struggle to load the bank home page to pay the bills.

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Hi Sharewood,

I totally agree we’re in the dead zone, I firmly believe we have to take it upon ourselves to source an adequate solution as the governments don’t appear to last long enough to deploy this infrastructure which should be bipartisan, agreed and built.

Interestingly in the last few days there have been some announcements in the press from start-ups in the eastern states looking to deploy both wired and wireless to outpace the NNBN and capture market share. Perth has a desperate need for good coverage as the NNBN I my view will never to make to those in the too hard basket.

Regards.

John

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I’m near Midland and in the same predicament. My ISP told me not to expect NBN for another 4 to 5 years! :angry:

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Hi W.aetos,

Have a look at Red Broadband, there a fixed wireless provider in Perth, they don’t appear to be able to service me but maybe you can use them. You can check out their customer forum on the Whirlpool site. From the customer feedback it appears there a small wireless ISP growing fast as some customer are experiencing some bandwidth issues but they appear to be responsive and engaged with their customers. They use WiMax as the delivery method so it differs from your regular 3 and 4G providers so you’ll need a small dish to receive the signal.

https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=2412839

I’m still hunting for a solution.

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I think your chances of a decent NBN availability anytime soon has got more to do with how marginal your electorate is, because IMO it appears to be a more important factor than whether your area requires or ‘deserves’ it.

Some of the newer Telco’s are moving quickly to cherrypick areas of high urban density in the large east coast capitals to install a competing network but due to their economics it is likely to remain confined to those areas where a relatively small amount of infrastructure can service a large amount of people.

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Hi @tndkemp,

I totally agree one look at the Perth NNBN deployment map clearly shows this fact. I think given the current churn in our political environment coupled with the continual point scoring over the NNBN it’s become trivialised and if the NNBN has another restart or reboot I think it will drift into the ether.

I feel it’s bigger than political point scoring, it just needs to be completed quickly with a quality product that has headroom for expansion so we can all exploit the potential business and societal changes it has the capacity to deliver to our great nation as the pace of change quickens.

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We got VisionStream back today. No thanks to our ISP iinet who had promised me that the next time I called, they could get Telstra straight onto it, without involving VS, and without me having to repeat my whole story again and again and again. No port reset, no isolation test, no “It must be your modem that is the problem”. No.
When I called, the task had been closed after only one week - they told me it would stay open until I was happy, but they closed it within the week and marked it resolved.
So, yet again, VS technician comes out. No surprise, the fault that was supposed to have been fixed by Telstra is still there - excessive resistance and 20V from who-knows-where on our copper pair.
I’ll bet I can guess what happens next: iinet call me to say that Telstra have fixed the fault, and then after hours or days we get repeated drop-outs again.
What happens after that is that I will contact the TIO - the ombudsman.
It makes my blood boil that the last century copper is going to be “maintained” by Telstra for years and years if the current plans for the NBN are stuck with.
And what alternative is there ? Because we are within 2km of our exchange, it is assumed that we have access to a satisfactory ADSL2+ connection. We could switch to Optus coax - and I’ve told iinet that that is what we’ll do, but I suspect life will be no happier if we do.

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