The honestybox does seem a little pessimistic from what I’ve seen - unsure of their actual testing method - and they do some curious DNS lookups 
A Huawei Australian Executive has punched the nose of the Australian Govt and said that the nbn™ is a failure to deliver. While this may be an expected criticism as it comes from Huawei, the critique however seems to stand on some merit. The article certainly picked the FTTN as a major issue but the Fixed Wireless was also outed by Mr Soldani. Further into the article the push about Huawei came to the fore as Mr Soldani stated that it “makes no sense for Australia to continue to exclude the world’s leading 5G technology provider from the marketplace – especially when we have a proven track record of delivering the kind of quality services that Australians so badly need”. But aside from that again the performance (or lack thereof) of the nbn™ to deliver a “World Class” service was hard to argue against.
To read the article see:
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Meanwhile back on the farm!
3-4,000km from the nearest NBN node might be the perfect answer to getting the best Internet service, at a reasonable cost.
Starting in the small regional township of Queenstown. Currently they only have a shoddy 1Gbps service that costs between $75NZ and $100NZ per month. Shameful 
What next?
Australia could do worse than dissolve parliament and become part of NZ. Next the Trans-Tasman bridge and tunnel link with Chinese sponsored island rest stops every 50km.
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Hi,
I’m a telco expert for the last 35 year. In the past the power specs (TX Power and RX sensitivity) of modems were quite important to ensure cable losses and such can be negated with the application of the right modem. I have many customers who now move over to the NBN (forcibly) and the default modems supplied by their ISP is not suitable for longer cable runs for FTTN applications. In my humble opinion I have never read anything relating to modem specification and this modem is better than that modem due to higher TX power levels and RX sensitivity. Surely this is a critical piece of equipment and if the ISP’s provide cheap low spec modems it will definitely add to the speed and customer satisfaction problems.
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Welcome to the formum @JohndP. It has been a while but that aspect was indirectly mentioned a while back as an SNR setting in some (then ADSL) modems.
My understanding is the SNR setting essentially does that. When the SNR is changed for ‘more performance’ the modem runs hotter indicating higher power levels. My old Billion has a dark spot from heat 
At the time forums also mentioned that (ADSL) ISPs were not always happy about the customer setting his/her equipment like that, but some of the friendlier ones would set their own side to ‘performance’ if asked.
I can understand the NBN is after bland reliability such as they are able to provide, and the defaults are meant to deliver that, are they not?
Since FTTN has reared its head it is good you re-introduced this aspect for those so afflicted.
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Thanks for the welcome. I’m just fed-up with my friends and customers complaining about their NBN service. Yes SNR ratio does have an effect but this will generally only affect the RX side. What we need is companies coming to party and clearly stating what is the particular modem TX power stipulated in dBm so the consumers can be on the look out for more powerful modems to possibly solve issues with long cable runs and thus higher cable losses.
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When helping a friend setup a FTTN modem I was trying to establish where the Node was and rough distance. It appears the map of phone pillar areas is no longer available but I found a link to the data set in another forum.
http://nbnmtm.australiaeast.cloudapp.azure.com/mybroadband/
I didn’t know how to digest a geojson dataset but I did work out a kludge with Win 10 PC. Seems straight forward but it does mean installing software so do it understanding the risks.
- Download data file linked, this unzips to 550Mb of data.
- Install QGIS https://www.qgis.org/en/site/about/index.html
- Unzip the data file and drag and drop into QGIS window, data file is huge so takes a while to load and refresh when view is changed. Only shows boundaries of what I expect were pillar areas and mostly now node areas.
- To get roads go to https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=5/-24.507/138.208 and zoom to area of interest and hit export, if the area selected has too much data export will fail so zoom a little closer and retry. When successful it will download an .osm file.
- Drag the .osm file created into QGIS window. You should now have several layers that can be selected/unselected in the lower left pane of QGIS. I didn’t have road names but could work out by comparing back to the OpenStreetMap window.
It worked for me.
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If the phone lines are underground you can figure things out by getting information from “Dial Before You Dig”
and then confirm where pits, pillars, and cabinets are by looking. Each FTTN cabinet has an ID label on its outside, and each FTTN cabinet is near an ex-Tesltra pit or pillar for copper wires.
The scale on the Dial Before You DIg diagram lets you measure the length of the copper wire run from the cabinet.
Using this method I was able to measure copper wire distance to three “nearby” node cabinets; and from watching when they were installed and knowing where the exchange is, I know which direction is ‘upstream’ to the exchange and which direction is ‘downstream’.
Cabinet 1 is in another street and a bit over 300 metres from me (between me and exchange). This is the cabinet I hope I am connected to, but when asked point blank about it NBN and my RSP both refuse to answer.
Cabinet 2 is in another street and about 500 metres from me (between me and exchange).
Cabinet 3 is in another street and about 510 metres from me (downstream).
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Choice publishes Broadband provider performance reviews based on ACCC data. I can’t find any reference to how this data / tests / reviews are derived. In particular tests for Fibre to the Node connections seem to be questionable. A provider is apparently rated on achieved speeds and latency. But providers have no control over distance from the node, which is the main determinant of speed.
In my case I have a 50mbps plan with Internode (not reviewed by Choice, disappointingly) and get only 26mbps. But this is the theoretical maximum for my distance from the node, so … why should my ISP be marked down? How do I meaningfully compare ISPs? Surely only latency and speed below theoretical should count.
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I just ran Speedtest on my PC a couple of times and both results were over 50Mbps download and over 18Mbps upload.
We have the Internode NBN50 plan and we are 400 metres from the node.
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If you have a look at the ACCC’s page on Broadband performance data, there is an explanation there of their measures.
If you want to know how these are calculated, go to the ACCC’s How are MBA (Measuring Broadband Australia program) speeds calculated?. You will see that the results are statistical averages based on real life results captured from a cross section of volunteer users.
You may be right that all RSPs will deliver a lower than advertised speed to you if you are a long way from the exchange or if you have a poor quality line.
As to how to choose, go to CHOICE’s review of the best NBN plans and select the highest rated plan in the speed you want, as they are most likely to deliver the advertised speed (allowing for distance and line quality limiting the speed) based on the statistal analyses.
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You are lucky. I am 900m from the node.
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Thanks for the link. My point about how the reviews are carried out was whether or not the data used and hence review conclusions included allowance for the node-consumer distance. If not, it tells you little about the provider in any individual case, and may still be in error when aggregated if different providers have different node-consumer distances on average.
The linked explanation suggests that my concerns are at least partly covered by " That is, we remove results for volunteers who never come close to achieving the full speeds of their selected plan at any time of the day." So they have tried to limit consideration of performance to network bottlenecks, not consumer line quality.
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That line alone tells you the results are falsely skewed towards the high end as they drop the low outliers who would show the average and median is actually lower than stated. Don’t want to show poor results then cut the poor results out.
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Have you approached Internode about this?
It looks like they have sold you the 50/20mbps speed tier but delivered a cheaper and lower one (25/5mbps) to you.
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They may have taken a 50 Mbps plan to get the maximum rate they could considering the performance of their line eg 26 Mbps on their current plan compared to about 20 Mbps on a 25/5 plan taking into account the overhead losses on the 25/5 plan loses at least 2-3 Mbps. They may be happy to pay more for that extra 6 Mbps they get. Their upload speed may be even far better on the 50/20 plan as often this is the case and may also suit their needs.
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I merged @JMR’s topic into this older one, that has a significant amount of related information.
If I were @JMR I would have my plan changed, and a refund/adjustment requested for plan-to-date since ‘NBN & any RSP’ apparently cannot deliver a 50/20 to his premises. ‘Splitting performance’ at 25 against the delivered 26 and paying for 50 would be curious to me, but some plans are only a few dollars a month more, so it is possible some customers might.
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I do know a few who take the 50/20 plan only because they achieve around a max of 30 Mbps and don’t want a reduced speed that will come with a 25/5 plan. Sad in that they pay for a performance they never achieve and that they must pay this extra to get the slightly higher speed. I wonder if the speed you get might be the best basis for your charges eg if only able to get 20 that’s what you pay for, if 26 then that is the basis for the calculation rather than a somewhat artificial tier.
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@PhilT I am aware of the alternative plans and speeds, my current situation is the end result of acres of to and fro with ISP and Telstra and NBN indirectly. When I changed to this plan, 25Mbps was not available with my ISP. Then it became available but the NBN upgrade came too, and at one stage NBN were saying “only customers who are not getting their plan speeds would be eligible for upgrade (to FTTP or FTTC not sure which) connection free of cost”. So I stayed with the 50Mbps. Now I see they are saying “to get free upgrade connection you will need to agree to upgrade your plan”. If this is true I should go to the 25Mbps plan. But ISP says typical night time speeds are much slower on 25 plan cf 50 plan i.e only 16Mbps vs current 26. I’ll change to 25 and find out.
As for merging with other topic, it doesn’t matter really but my post was commenting on a Choice article, and wondering how useful these Choice reviews were, not meaning to get into detail of speeds etc.
@grahroll I agree that paying for what you get would be a better idea, but can imagine the complexities of different billing rates for everyone down the line as you move further from the node would be all a bit too much. Hopefully the NBN upgrade in the next few years will solve most FTTN customers’ woes.
As in my reply to PhilT, I’m comfortable with my plan vs reality and understand the pros and cons. I was only aiming to comment on the Choice review and wondering how realistic Choice’s conclusions were about comparisons between ISPs.
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Distance from the Node is certainly an issue, but it shows the problem the MTM nbn™ has in regards to equity of access. How does one generally know the distance they are truly from the Node? As the crow flies or some quagmire of up and down streets until it hits the user’s premises? Your 900m may be greater in the conduits or maybe even less depending on what path it takes. Some people are 400m walking from a node yet 1km or wire sits between them and the node, yet others only 200m because of the path the wire has been laid. It, even with line tests is a best guess at distance, line quality, numbers of joins in pits etc can turn a 100m actual length into a 600m result.
FTTP as has oft been discussed would make this point moot, FTTC would make it less important but still may add some difference depending on the copper quality and the connection in the pit. Fixed Wireless if on a congested tower is terrible, but a Tower not so overloaded would give different results making that in the same way you see FTTN, a flawed result unless you know the load on the Tower. A street of HFC might be good if few are sharing or it may be congested and so results lower. So I think it was as best a test as it could be in the circumstances.
My point about removing outliers is about the ACCC program and then we also have it’s complete lack of testing of Sat and FW.
The Internode testing (or lack thereof) comes down to who signed up and it needs some numbers before it can be used as a published result. So if there was a lack of numbers some may have been tested but no results would have been published. The user who had the device however would have received personal results of their connection, this was implemented later into the testing program but was very useful to some of the individuals. Would I have liked to see more, absolutely. Was it possible? I think funding largely constraint that and it was funding issues that saw the ceasing of the Honesty Box program.
Perhaps we may see a re-emergence if further funding can be sourced and if enough then a much wider reporting base can be developed.
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