NBN Co Gungahlin pilot meeting tonight

welkin31 said :

A report on what is happening right now in the Wollongong area as the NBN rolls out. $140 per month does not jump out at me as being attractive.
Join the NBN or you’ll be digging deep

EXCLUSIVE by Geoff Chambers
From: The Daily Telegraph
June 17, 2011
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-nsw/join-the-nbn-or-youll-be-digging-deep/story-e6freuzi-1226076678641

Yet more scare mongering. Note the ‘up to’ $140 a month – that is for a high end service, not for the type of service most people would be interested in.

Have a look at http://www.internode.on.net/residential/fibre_to_the_home/nbn_plans/

That’s Internode’s plans for the trial stages of the NBN rollout, and their entry level prics is $29.95 a month. That plan doesn’t have massive download quotas, but they’re not ridiculously small, and the download speed is faster than the maximum possible on an ADSL2 plan. Their $139.95 a month plan is for 200 GB, with 100MB/s download speeds – ie, using the full capacity of the line.

Again…more scare mongering and negative press from the News Ltd. papers, who have been waging a crusade against the NBN from day dot. The fact of the matter is, if you decide not to have the NBN connected to your home, while there is a massive effort being undertaken in your area to connect up homes, then you deserve to pay if you then change your mind later.

welkin31 said :

A report on what is happening right now in the Wollongong area as the NBN rolls out. $140 per month does not jump out at me as being attractive.
Join the NBN or you’ll be digging deep

EXCLUSIVE by Geoff Chambers
From: The Daily Telegraph
June 17, 2011
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-nsw/join-the-nbn-or-youll-be-digging-deep/story-e6freuzi-1226076678641

What a ridiculous article.

They are there in massive numbers – other night they said in Armidale they had 170 staff working – and they say connect now and it costs you a big fat $zero.

But you say “Nah thanks – Tony told me it’s only about pirating movies and I don’t need it.”

Then after they’ve all left you have a change of mind. Let’s say you decided to sell your house and the agent tells you that your place ain’t so attractive because it only has 1500Kb ADSL. And you expect they should just load up the truck and come back to do your place – for free??

There is one journalist in serious need of a reality check donation.

I’m just saying is all…

A report on what is happening right now in the Wollongong area as the NBN rolls out. $140 per month does not jump out at me as being attractive.
Join the NBN or you’ll be digging deep

EXCLUSIVE by Geoff Chambers
From: The Daily Telegraph
June 17, 2011
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-nsw/join-the-nbn-or-youll-be-digging-deep/story-e6freuzi-1226076678641

Chop71 said :

So if it is free why does places like Armidale and Tas have very small sign up figures? ie 9 ppl out of a whole town/city. Seems strange that a $40 Billion project with very few people taking advantage of it.

Also did they mention time frames for completion to areas like Woden, Belconnen and Civic

Partly because getting fibre connected to the home is on an ‘opt in’ basis, rather than ‘opt out’. So people actually had to be proactive to get connected.

I would think that those figures are likely people actively connected to the NBN via a service provider, and not people ‘NBN Ready’ – ie, with fibre connected, but inactive.

Or maybe they’re just readers of ‘The Australian’, who seemingly have a daily quota on negative stories about the NBN.

So if it is free why does places like Armidale and Tas have very small sign up figures? ie 9 ppl out of a whole town/city. Seems strange that a $40 Billion project with very few people taking advantage of it.

Also did they mention time frames for completion to areas like Woden, Belconnen and Civic

Mysteryman said :

I’d rather they had nothing to do with Telstra at all, to be honest. In my mind, Telstra are the reason Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure is lacking. They had the monopoly for a long time and did very little to better our broadband or mobile communications when they had the chance, even though they were still charging quite a lot for the basic services they were providing. They placed RIMs in many new suburbs around Canberra, consequently limiting the broadband speeds to that of obsolete technology. Then they decided they didn’t want to be part of the broadband rollout because it didn’t suit them. Then they wanted back in.

I’d have preferred they were left behind and we moved on without them.

We are.

The fact of the matter is though, that Telstra own a huge amount of infrastructure that is currently housing copper, that can easily have fibre run through it. By purchasing that infrastructure, it means that we don’t have to dig new pits and trenches next to the ones that are already there – for a massive amount more money than it will cost to buy Telstra’s existing infrastructure. Replicating that infrastructure will take a lot longer as well.

magiccar9 said :

Gungahlin Al said :

Chop71 said :

What do they charge to sign up?

Zip. Free Network Termination Unit (read: modem/router), fibre to the wall of the home, but you’ll need an ISP account of course.

Yes, but from what I’ve heard there is going to be a limited amount of service providers. Little competition means highly inflated prices. Back we go to being a nation known for our poor technology uptake. For my 2 cents worth, the government should have been investing their ~40B in wireless technology.
Reports are coming out every day telling us that we are moving to a smartphone/tablet computing era, smartphones sales are skyrocketing – yet the government still thinks we need “high speed” land line connections! The US is moving past 4G technology while we are still trying to grasp 3G. Come on! HA!

You do realise wireless spectrum is limited, don’t you? The more people using it, the slower the speeds will be.

Fibre is actually capable of up to 1 GB which is much more than is required now and isn’t affected by the amount of users. What is the point of spending around half the cost of the NBN on infrastructure that will just cost a lot to be updated in a few years when it is already falling behind?

Something Tony Abbott doesn’t seem to realise (seeing as he knows nothing about his own policy)

magiccar9 said :

For my 2 cents worth, the government should have been investing their ~40B in wireless technology

And that’s why you’re not in charge. The frequnecy spectrum is a little like land, there’s a lot of it but certainly a finite amount and there’s a finite amout that is actually useful. And just like land, no two people can be on the same patch at the same time.

There’s enough pressure on the frequency spectrum as it is at the moment, without trying to connect everyone at high speed. Anyway, those base stations have to be connnected back to something, which is via either more “wireless” (point-to-point links) or fibre. So if you’re going to run fibre to the multitude of base stations that would be required (every 1 or 2km), then you might as well run the fibre to the home.

Fibre also has much more scope for technology advancements. Recent experiments have hit 26 Terrabits per second over a single fibre. All it needs is for the nodes on the end to be upgraded. Wireless technologies are starting to get very close to the limit for bits per second per Hertz, and it’s the amount of Hertz available that is very limited between 400MHz and 3GHz.

magiccar9 said :

Reports are coming out every day telling us that we are moving to a smartphone/tablet computing era, smartphones sales are skyrocketing – yet the government still thinks we need “high speed” land line connections! The US is moving past 4G technology while we are still trying to grasp 3G. Come on! HA!

Yes, smartphone sales are skyrocketing, but the applications the NBN is aiming for (blue sky stuff) aren’t aimed at smart phones. Anyway, there will still be commercial networks to take care of the mobile stuff and they are about to get more spectrum. To be padantic, no one in the world has introduced true 4G as originally defined by the ITU (they have since redefined it due to pressure from carriers), so the US certainly isn’t moving past it. To Australia’s credit, Telstra was the first in the world to deploy HSPA+.

magiccar9 said :

Gungahlin Al said :

Chop71 said :

What do they charge to sign up?

Zip. Free Network Termination Unit (read: modem/router), fibre to the wall of the home, but you’ll need an ISP account of course.

Yes, but from what I’ve heard there is going to be a limited amount of service providers. Little competition means highly inflated prices. Back we go to being a nation known for our poor technology uptake. For my 2 cents worth, the government should have been investing their ~40B in wireless technology.
Reports are coming out every day telling us that we are moving to a smartphone/tablet computing era, smartphones sales are skyrocketing – yet the government still thinks we need “high speed” land line connections! The US is moving past 4G technology while we are still trying to grasp 3G. Come on! HA!

This whole ‘we should be relying on wireless’ argument is one of the most ridiculous in the entire NBN debate. Wireless is great for mobility, but to suggest that we have the spectrum and capacity available to put everyone on a wireless connection – whether at home, or out and about – just doesn’t add up. How many people do you know who are comfortable living next to a mobile tower? Because if we go fully wireless, you can expect them to be everywhere.

The sooner people stop thinking that the NBN is just about their connection to the internet, the more rational this whole debate will become. The connection will – eventually – be your link to television, movies, the internet, your telephone line, video conferencing (whether to work, to study, or to talk to friends and family), and stuff we haven’t even thought of yet. Think about the copper network we currently use – nobody would have imagined that it was going to be our internet connection when it was originally laid.

I think there will be plenty of competition when it comes to service providers as well. Possibly not as much in the very early days, but as more people are connected, service providers will begin to release more plans. In the early days, I expect that if people want to sign up to plans that utilise the full potential of the new connection, that these will be quite expensive. But most people will have access to plans with similar limits, and likely far greater speed, that are priced at about the same level as existing ADSL plans.

I’d rather they had nothing to do with Telstra at all, to be honest. In my mind, Telstra are the reason Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure is lacking. They had the monopoly for a long time and did very little to better our broadband or mobile communications when they had the chance, even though they were still charging quite a lot for the basic services they were providing. They placed RIMs in many new suburbs around Canberra, consequently limiting the broadband speeds to that of obsolete technology. Then they decided they didn’t want to be part of the broadband rollout because it didn’t suit them. Then they wanted back in.

I’d have preferred they were left behind and we moved on without them.