I read the financials as $3,181,572 plus a co-Contribution by the NBN and Barcaldine Shire Council. This suggests the total cost is more than $3.182M.
It would be no surprise
Exceptionally generous if the additional $20,000 per household is largely from this source?
It would set a precedent for every other community in Australia for funding, electoral preferences excluded. It may by many be seen to equate very directly an expanded mining future with good outcomes for rural NBN services!!
The price of upgrading the other 425,000+ NBN Satellite premises and 620,000+ NBN Fixed Wireless premises to fibre. $21B plus co-Contributions from the NBN and your local council. How hard could it be?
Anyone who has looked at Alpha on Google Earth will realise it is small enough to be served by an upgrade to NBN Fixed Wireless with a Million dollar tower capable of handling 800+ customers, or Telstra 5G on its handful of street corners. Looks like the lamb and beef patties have made room for pork on the local BBQ.
81 places have won grant funding to a total of about $91 million.
As the banner about it states Alpha is getting funding under the program but I couldnât find a list of the 81 successful places. But from the blurb you can say Alpha is one of them. Though on the program page they say they will release a list soon
Barcaldine Regional Council
Alpha Satellite to Fibre to the Premise Technology Switch
Fibre Broadband
Alpha
QLD
The project will upgrade the NBN access technology in the Barcaldine Shire town of Alpha from Sky Muster to Fibre to the Premises. The upgrade will support the operations of local businesses and community organisations, as well as improving access to telehealth and education services for residents.
$3,181,572
I donât know if I mentioned here or anywhere else: last week, NBN was working in the street, doing âthingsâ in the pits. I asked what they were up to and was told we were to be upgraded (no time frame) to FTTP. Iâll probably die whilst waiting, but at least something is moving, without our having had to pay thousands of dollars for it.
Well I finally cut over to NBN two months ago from my trusty ADSL service.
In my street it is FTTC (thankfully our area was never inflicted with FTTN).
The cutover was painless. I get around twice the download speed compared to ADSL and seems constant no matter what time of day. Havenât had a single service interruption so far.
The monthly cost is less than ADSL was, and I have my landline phone back in use again with untimed local calls.
I just went for a like for like NBN plan comparable to naked ADSL.
No need to pay more for a faster plan like NBN50 or NBN100 when I donât need that speed.
Or pay more for unlimited data per month when I know I use less than 100GB.
We were the same. There are few households which need fast speeds (50 or 100), but some like to keep up with the Joneses thinking faster is better. Faster is only better if one has the capacity to use the additional speedsâŚotherwise chose NBN packages which suits oneâs needs.
BTW, we signed up for 50Mbps because it also services our family business. 50Mbps is sufficient to run all our smart devices as well as meet the needs of our guests.
With our household regularly running 4 UHD streams at the same time, plus handsets plus 3 to 4 PCs gaming, researching and other tasks plus IoT devices in the house eg the air con controller we found 50 Mbps didnât cut the mustard but I donât think our household is a typical one.
FTTP is a boon to speed possibilities, stability, reduced packet loss and future upgradability. The other connection choices create problems for households including the options for speeds being limited, noisier lines/connection, need for power even if just to the node in the street just so a household can remain somewhat reliably connected. A benefit of FTTP is that it is usually supplied with a UPS system direct from the ISP at no initial cost, no other connection type benefits this way(the UPS battery replacement when needed however is customer cost). This supplied power backup means a phone can be used in an emergency when power supplies are down for several hours.
The future upgrading of uses, improved clarity of streaming eg 8K means that currently 50 Mbps might serve well but it may not be enough moving forward. Yet many even now struggle to get that 50, which is limiting for future needs and a sad indictment of Australiaâs current nbn⢠service.
We had a hard time so went Wireless Internet that supplied a 100 Mbps connection up and down, prior we used 2 ADSL modems and had two lines supplying the house, but that was about 2000 until 2011, Floods in 2011 put us in a suburb that only had Mobile wireless with no ADSL but we started sharing our house with grown up family members so we sought out the higher speed dedicated wireless, which we used up to getting FTTP. The company that supplied our wireless now provide a 250 Mbps connection but the price is at a point that is not competitive with our FTTP connection cost at the moment. It also doesnât have the fall back power supply and no connection during power failures FTTP provides.
For the planned 5G network upgrades mostly in cities the copper network is not going to cope with the traffic and relies heavily on fibre so they have to upgrade many areas to FTTP so they can sell the 5G to users as a worthwhile investment.
Thank you for the link as mine doesnât stand out in my previous post about the Switch upgrades (I think mine was a direct link to the PDF).
