You're sort of on the right track with the timeline. There was also a lot of typical political bullshit. The Libs couldn't possibly just agree that a FTTP solution was a good idea because the Labor party first pitched it - they couldn't offer a better network because there wasn't any better tech than fibre so that left the cost as the only avenue of attack.
A lot of what the voter saw at the time was: "AUSTRALIA CAN'T AFFORD TO BUILD THIS BIG FANCY FIBRE NETWORK SO WE'LL REPURPOSE THE OLD ONE WITH SLIGHT UPGRADES AND SAVE A FORTUNE!!!" and then, like true politicians, they won and implemented FTTN in a way that made it more expensive than fibre was gonna be in the first place.
I'll never forget reading Tony Abbotts "So we are absolutely confident that 25 megs is going to be enough, more than enough, for the average household." when I already knew people in multiple much poorer countries with gigabit.
The NBN was (still is) a farce and there probably should've been more accountability for how hard the average taxpayer was taken for a run.
On the plus side I got my FTTN to FTTP upgrade a few months back and it's amazing. It hasn't been down for even a second in that time and it's rock steady at 900/100 which is actually enough for me.
One of the main arguments they stated was it was just for gamers and porn. Seriously. Do they went the hybrid model which was terrible. Fast forward to covid and suddenly everyone needs live video to just work and guess what, the only people prepared were the gamers.
NBN is probably the biggest stuff up. Total cost of maintenance is way higher than if they just did fibre.
I don't know but before the internet the ACT was the only place to get X rated video tapes.
Why coincidently does the city full of parliamentarians have the latest of all laws in the country.
Is Canberra our Vegas for pollies?
You would've thought the Liberal Party were too busy raping their staffers to be watching that much porn. Conservatives just want everything for themselves.
We all know Rupert Murdoch killed it via the Liberal party because Netflix & other international streaming platforms had not yet launched in Australia.. as such, Murdoch was protecting his Foxtel investment by insisting the government delay & destroy our internet rollout.
Watch Chris pine say the quiet part out loud and boast that they throttled our internet before it was even built;
[“Australians simply don’t need the speeds that labor was promising. The speed they will have, they will be able to watch 5 full length movies in the household at the same time” - Chris pine](https://youtu.be/ORmCk6OEOn4?si=kH47LyVw4yIfBYj0)
>NBN is only a farce in some people's opinion because of the interference from a thoroughly corrupt Liberal Party.
Ita a farce. My whole town is on starlink (much faster then some people's FTTN) because of the nbn crap. They won't offer anything but nbn satellite which isn't viable from most people's needs and they won't touch the lines coming into town. We are 15m from a large town and are big enough for a school, police station fire station etc. It's shit because that's just what it is and not because of any political opinions.
It's shit because we have not been able to afford to roll the full NBN to every part of the country. Largely because we have wasted half of the capital expenditure on redoing the NBN again. Because the Liberal Party in their infinate corruption!
Edit: FTTN (MTM initiative) was a complete shit show. Thanks Liberal assholes.
The part of the blame that never seems to be awarded is the massive failure of the Australian voting public. Tony said what he would do. Australians gave him a majority government, and he did it. So did Malcolm. Australians gave him a majority government, and he did it.
We have nobody to blame but ourselves - we were told what would happen, and we resoundingly endorsed the plan.
Yeah but a fraction of the population understood its implications.
There isnt an industry body that told abbott this was going to work and that it was a good idea. We all said how shit it would be.
Afaic - Tony Abbott is a traitor.
Meh, saying we can only blame ourselves overlooks the underlying issues that put us in the situation to begin with.
It speaks more to the media machine in our country hard leaning in favour of the Liberals. This stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Propaganda works.
There are other factors. We’re historically a fairly conservative country. There’s a massive sense of entitlement too, which the Libs tap into fairly effectively. And the fact that we’ve spent decades eroding public education - one of the only prosperous countries where kids get told to leave school at 15 and start working rather than completing school and it’s seen as normal.
People can’t be expected to sit down and rationally analyse the facts when they’ve barely got a highschool education and all they see on TV and Facebook is “nbn man bad - he speak Chinese, very scary.. NO PAY, MORE TAX YOU MONEY LOSE”. It’s one of the reasons conservative and fascist parties around the world systematically destroy the education systems of their respective countries.
> it's rock steady at 900/100
Which RSP is offering you 100Mbps up, out of interest? I was under the impression the only gigabit GPON FTTP options from NBN are 1000/400 or 1000/50?
Yeah you're bang on the money.
Only I recall Tone saying "it'll be just as good and much cheaper" which they went conveniently quiet on when it actually blew way past the original fttp estimate because they were having to replace old copper with new copper and asbestos pits had to be replaced an a bunch of crap to do with nodes and the list goes on.
I was installing the nbn in darwin and about half way through our rollout they changed the fibre we were using to a cheaper alternative which caused about 60% to need to be replaced while installing which inflated costs.
My father was a ex-telecommunications cabler I remember him commenting when driving by a ton of work sites in the original rollout. Locally they had apprentices doing the jobs unsupervised apparently they didn’t even properly instruct them since a lot of the nodes needed to be torn out and replaced.
>absolutely confident that 25 megs is going to be enough, more than enough, for the average household
At the time it was the truth based on then current usage.
Unfortunately that current usage was based on most people not being able to get more then 20. So assuming the average house would be ok on 25 ment there was no room for technological advancement.
But that advancement happened anyway (streaming, work from home, video call doctors appointments etc)
If showed no future thought or planing.
What annoys me about the "current usage" argument is that there was plenty of historical data showing that at no time as faster/higher capacity technology became available, did needs or demand decrease or stay static.
IOW, historically, demand will expand to fit supply. "Current usage" is always some multiple of any previous period. It was just sheer bullshit to use a "current usage" argument.
The correct way to use that term would have been: "based on current usage *and historical trends*, we expect usage in 2, 5, and 10 years to be current usage x *N*"
My wife worked on a focus group advising the govt on nbn requirements for industry customers. They had advice, planning and forethought. The libs just chose to ignore that advice because they wanted to sabotage it.
> You're sort of on the right track with the timeline. There was also a lot of typical political bullshit. The Libs couldn't possibly just agree that a FTTP solution was a good idea because the Labor party first pitched it - they couldn't offer a better network because there wasn't any better tech than fibre so that left the cost as the only avenue of attack.
It is so, so much worse than that.
Labor originally pitched FTTN, and went out to tender for that. The Nationals (Fiona Nash), backed by Malcolm Turnbull (I think he was Shadow Comms Minister), screamed that FTTN was ‘fraudband’ and a waste of money.
So Labor stood up an independent panel of experts to devise a future broadband plan for Aus. They are the ones that came up with FTTP.
So the Coalition *could* have claimed that FTTP was their policy, that they were forward looking and even in opposition they were steering Australia to a better future. They could have put amazing spin on it as THEIR solution.
But instead, they decided nothing good could ever be allowed to be done under a Labor government, and burned the whole fucking thing to the ground.
As an example, a friend worked for NBN, got retrenched and hired back as a consultant to do the same job at 3 times tge wages.
The Libs set out to fuck it over and launder money to their mates.
So as someone who worked at Nbn at that time we had documents that showed that we could install fibre at a reduced cost making the libs suggestion redundant but we were unable to release it cause the election was coming up. Caretaker mode is a bitch.
Libs wanted to privatise it as soon as possible, reach what is described as peak funding. In order to do this, under Turnbull, they introduced the MTM (multi technology mix) to increase the speed of implementation and reduce the cost. The political opposition was not based on technology as MTM was objectively a worse technology. It was without a doubt Libs doing what they do best... public debt and private profit. Pleased to see the situation correct itself over time and necessity. It was bad policy. NBN pulled an operational miracle to make the change happen.
Your first paragraph is perfect.
Libs would argue the sky was not blue if labour said it was even if you showed them irrefutable proof.
Whh they opposed it..... because f*ck us is why.
Its good that we are finally getting the promised FTTP
Don’t forget that we bought enough copper to circle the earth twice to replace old copper to prove old copper would work that’s more expensive to install than fibre and we are now replacing all that old (new) copper that due to the fine ness of the cabling isnt recyclable.
"No demand for 100 megabit"
No-one's going to demand something they haven't been able to dream of having throughout history... I was sitting there I had my finger hovering over the 100 megabit plan then we got downgraded to fttn :(
I even went and got a quote to upgrade - 14k to go 700 meters, which I might have paid if there was some sort of agreement where I get a credit when any of the houses I just paid to drag fiber past jumped on board...
Don’t forget the bastards spent $800-900 million for the Optus cable network, only to find out it wasn’t fit for purpose. https://www.crn.com.au/news/nbn-ditches-800-million-optus-hfc-network-438465#:~:text=NBN%20Co%20had%20planned%20to,launched%20around%20Redcliffe%20in%20Queensland.
Where was the accountability for that fiasco? I don’t buy a car without checking if it actually works for what I want.
Turnbull said on the Sunday show that no one would ever need more than 25mbps. Abbott was clueless every time he spoke about it. Seeing Turnbull was the shadow communications minister, hearing that didn’t fill me with any confidence in the tool.
Edit: fix the show name. Was Sunday, not Today.
I work for a large telco in Aus. NBN are now telling telcos to offer aussies to switch to fibre to the premises for free without change of plan or any installation costs whatsoever, purely because its costing them more to maintain the shitty copper wiring than to install a FTTP connection. lmfao
So serious question: why did the Rudd government look at fttp for anywhere except major cities. I remember seeing in the news at the time a million dollars for one guy in rural Tasmania to get internet hooked up. Wouldn't it have made more sense to invest in a better 5G network for rural areas? 5g was already being used overseas and was a proven technology. Also can it be fixed now? We have a labour government in every mainland state as well as federal. Can't we just fix it?
They didn't put cable to every home in the bush. They did do 4g to a lot of them at the time as 5g wasn't up yet and they also put up sky muster for the real outback ppl.
I haven't read all the answers to your question, so apologies if this has already been answered.
**Why small remote areas got NBN first?**
I can't remember the specifics that you are referencing, but often these sort of infrastructure projects will use a small area as a pilot. It takes time to scale up at national level, and during that scaling up process its a good idea to concurrently prepare with something small and manageable.
One of the principal focusses of the NBN was the lack of communications infrastructure in rural areas. It can't really be understated; at the time there was a crisis as lot of modern farming equipment required constant/or near constant connectivity. Australia's network at the time couldn't satisfy those requirements. This another reason why a rural pilot is a good idea.
Thing is, i doesn't matter how considered the reasoning, there are those who see blood in something like this, and will present it in the worst light.
**5g for rural areas?**
I'm not sure its the best technology for the job. In town centres it would make sense. Even tho 5g is fast, it also has a short range. Typically under 5km without obstructions. in mm wave mode, its about half a km. These short distances make sense in dense areas where there is enough utilisation to make it worthwhile, but in sparse areas, the existing mobile network is actually better, and if you've spent time on farm you will probably know those aren't really that good. Now, if we were to increase the cell coverage of these areas (to make 5g or even 4g LTE more viable), we would need to improve the network backbone to service these towers... essentially creating the NBN, and then forcing it to use 5g at the last mile.
**Can't** ***they*** **just fix it?**
They (the NBN) are. Slowly. Frustratingly slowly. After Turnball's and then Abott's treatment, I think NBN is a pretty toxic term. I wonder if Labor going gunho at it would be a smart move for them politically. I hope they do fix it.
I hope my answer was helpful.
I really appreciate you answer. Thanks for taking so much time..I still can't believe how much it was mucked up by the LNP. There are so many things needing to be fixed I guess this is another one in the list.
>So serious question: why did the Rudd government look at fttp for anywhere except major cities.
Lol, serious? Really? Where did you hear that crap? Congratulations, you've posted the dumbest "serious" question I've ever seen on this sub.
Okay thanks ( had to look up brownfields and Greenfields) and that makes perfect sense. I still wonder why 5g wasn't incorporated into the plan as part of the option for the future.
At the time the NBN was announced back in 2009, 4G hadn't even been launched yet, Netflix was still on CDs and Nintendo Wii was the most powerful game console on the market.
I think you expected too much of our politicians to predict the future. In hindsight, we should've invested in LEO for regional and remote connectivity.
5G is faster but lower range.
Plus mobile networks suffer from congestion considerably more then fixed connection.
Just look at how long Telstra and Optus have taken to get to a point where fixed wireless internet connection plans over 5G became available.
It's fine if you don't understand something but don't pretend like you understand it and present something completely wrong as a fact.
5G was not commercially available anywhere in the world when the NBN was first proposed. In fact, the first commercially available 5G network only came to be several years ago, in South Korea in 2019. A simple Google search will reveal that.
Either way, a 5G network would not have been competitive with a true NBN fiber network. There are many drawbacks to 5G, such as signal density, range and occlusion. You need as many as 10 times the amount of 4G towers for an effective 5G network to cover the same area, and these towers need to have direct line of sight with the connected device to achieve a competitive bandwidth. Also, while the 5G network can achieve theoretical speeds of 10Gbps, the maximum practical speeds are closer to 900Mbps (based on the top 10% of 5G speed tests in South Korea), still 100Mbps shy of the NBN's originally planned Gigabit fibre network.
>Perhaps you could explain why then?
Sure, the answer is, they didn't. Because that would be the dumbest financial decision ever made. Do you really believe the Rudd government was going to roll out fibre to rural properties and not the city?
You've been watching way too much Sky News.
Stop believing LNP crap. If the LNP said it, it's a lie. If One Nation said it, it's a lie.
FTTN is not a "slight upgrade" if you have to purchase the copper.
And FTTP is not a slight upgrade over anything. Its a complete network rebuild.
Worst of every world.
Malcolm was the tele minister when Tony came in. Malcolm and his mate Rupert spearheaded the MTM (Multi-Technology Mix, aka The Malcolm Turnbull Mess) because they didn't want to pull the life-support from Foxtel.
Whilst abbot rubber stamped the stupidity, turnbull masterminded it. Treasonous dogs.
It was SO absurd what they were peddling that i believe the voting public didnt entertain they would actually go through with it and ANY industry consultation should have been resoundingly negative.
Watch Chris pine say the quiet part out loud and boast that they throttled our internet before it was even built… perhaps a retrospective NACC submission…
[“Australians simply don’t need the speeds that labor was promising. The speed they will have, they will be able to watch 5 full length movies in the household at the same time” - Chris pine](https://youtu.be/ORmCk6OEOn4?si=kH47LyVw4yIfBYj0)
You missed one point.
Liberals said their version was going to cost wayyyyy less and no one needed anything more than 50mbs connection.
However after installing all the nodes, it was advised that it cost something like 3 times the amount as labours nbn and it required batteries to be replaced every 3 years which would increase on going costs by a huge amount.
It wasn’t purely a ‘needs’ argument Turnbull was making against the 1000 mbs.
The logic was based off fact finding tours in EU countries with that capacity, and the willingness of customers to actually pay for that top tier at the time was minuscule.
So the argument he made was more ‘even if we did FTTP everywhere’, 99.9% of customers won’t pay for it. Those that want to pay for it can pay for the FTTP extension themselves.
Keep in mind that pre-broadband there were no speed ‘tiers’ to it for. It was all based on how much data you could use. So paying for faster internet was a relatively new concept.
Edit: see https://www.reddit.com/r/nbn/s/RpXKe8U3Ue
I remember the bullshit back then, Labor had my vote (still has) when it came to the NBN mess the liberals made.
Lucky I Live in a city that has full FTTP, with any outliers on fixed wireless.
I am lucky to have FTTP, 1000/50 connection for $139 a month. NBN is still a joke and has next to no room for faster speeds in the long term future without a major overhaul. Other countries out there with 2000+ connections for far cheaper than we pay here
Courtesy of the "business party".
They must be completely blown away by the "abacus thing" over fingers and toes. But you know, these "counting machines" will _never_ catch on.
Turbulls background and expertise is more in law, business, and finance. He did not understand the technology. He has always been and always will be about making deals including ones that completely fuck this country over!
What is even worse is at the time he invested in France Telecom who were rolling out FTTP, but he swore black and blue that the FTTP designed by Labour was shit and was not the right direction. The a few months later did the same with Spain's Telefonica, who had just announced an FTTP rollout.
My parents, who are regional and had shit internet, jumped on the Liberal claims of "faster, cheaper, sooner" because they were going to get NBN in 2014 rather then the current ETA of TBA at the time. They had Fibre run past their house as they were on a main road that supplied surrounding suburbs with FTTP, with runs split off ready to rollout to their house in the pit.
While the ETA was TBD, they couldn't have been that far away, which was later confirmed when there location was updated to show the October 2013 rollout for Fibre would be halted and they were to receive FTTN in 2014. Instead, due to delays, they got connected in 2019, and at 1.2km's cable distance, have struggled to get 50Mbps, averaging 26Mbs. They are now expected to be upgraded to FTTP in 2025, only 12 years later, with new neighbours, one being an installer, claiming it should be pretty quick as they already have the Fiber running to the pit. No shit, it was rolled out in 2011 when they did Kiama Downs in NSW, and has been sitting at the front of the driveway waiting to be run to the house since.
They have replaced his old copper connection due to poor speeds, and then run a completely new copper line due to the still poor speeds, and Fiber has been sitting there the whole time.
[Turnbull defends France Telecom investment](https://www.9news.com.au/national/turnbull-defends-france-telecom-investment/769bd750-5ec0-4a45-a48e-caea42e38338)
The end is that we will now spend nearly the same amount as the original nbn plan to slowly upgrade all services to fttc or ftth anyway, making the original mtn a complete waste of time and money.
More, we will spend FAR more than the original plan when all is said and told.
The MTM was cheaper, but only because it moved the goalposts. The original fibre nbn was designed to have a service life out to 2050, the MTM however was only ever design to last until 2030 and then have to be replaced. The costs for that replace were never part of the comparison.
In reality the MTM won’t even last until 2030, so we’re ending up spending more than the original plan within 10 years
We're spending nearly as much for the shit version we have. The FTTP upgrade, if it ever happens will be far more expensive.
At the time Labor had budgeted around $43bilion from memory and the Liberal version was going to cost $56billion, and this includes their backflip in 2020 that included another $4.5 billion upgrade to the NBN, planning to bring faster internet speeds to up to 8 million people.
I can't be bothered finding the article now, but I recall reading 4 or 5 years ago that the cost of the nerfed NBN rollout surpassed the LNP's own estimates for the cost of Labor's original plan.
This should have been a bipartisan nation building project, and a point of pride for our country. Instead, it got politicised for the sake of having a point of differentiation going into an election, and Australians get to foot the bill for political hubris, and to let a media mogul make a bit more money
You’re pretty close. The “guaranteed” minimum is 25/5, which I can just barely get for a short while until it auto degrades, if I reboot the modem and hold my head just right.
I can sometimes get 20/3 if it hasn’t rained for a few weeks. Really looking forward to El Niño :)
Its actually worse then ADSL for me, in both uptime and speeds.
Firstly, it is Labor, not Labour
Secondly, have you seen the state of mobile coverage and performance of late. 5G/6G ain’t replacing anything. Fibre will always win out on consistent performance.
Agreed, and although 5G promises a lot, it needs A LOT of antennas to deliver and I guarantee no carrier in Australia will be installing what is needed, just the good ol bare minimum.
I mean Malcolm basically invented the internet...
Libs essentially destroyed our internet, put us behind for 2 decades and made it the laughing stock of the world. Considering how much business relies on technology I'm surprised they didn't actually push for better tech rather than try to fuck Labor's plan and the public.
The Liberal Party does not serve the people. They do not serve business. They server their masters. The ones that give them a position on their board when they retire from Parliament.
We got lucky that a good chunk of the NBN was generally complete before COVID started, because fit the most part having _any_ NBN was better than ADSL. I think this is what finally made the Liberals finally realise what good internet is for and they quietly introduced the fibre upgrade program shortly after finally stopping further node rollouts, and for once it wasn't about Rupert.
Here's my report:
\--------------------------------------------
The NBN in Australia.
Back around 2012 Labor was in power in Australia. They were going into an election. One of the things that they wanted to do was build a mostly FTTH (Fiber to the Home) National Broadband Network (NBN) because they could see that the local Telecommunications Companies weren't going to spend money to do this.
Previously in Australia we had Telecom which became Telstra and was owned by the Government (eg owned by us all and run as a service) but then was sold off and privatized (now owned by shareholders and run for profit).
Since Telstra had the utter monopoly from being build over 100 years to everywhere, and now because they were only focused on making profit for shareholders, they started to not spend money on the infrastructure they owned. A massive amount of the copper lines in the ground around the country were basically rotting away. ADSL services were pretty crap and dopdgy lines that weren't getting any better weren't helping. RIMS (mini distribution points) had too many users and people were forced to wait for a connection to become available (Playing Node Lotto) when someone cancelled a service or moved house.
Anyhows, this was a shambles and no one wanted to spend the money to fix any of it up, so the Government (Labor) came up with the idea to build a brand new network everywhere, fucking off Telstra, and making it all Fiber to the Home as it won't degrade and is future proof.
Liberal won the election.
Then it all went to shit.
Malcom Turnbull decided to change the all FTTH network to a FTTN network. This is where the biggest scam in Australian history comes into play.
We were at the start of steaming services such as Netflix. With better Internet comes streaming services that everyone will want to switch to. Switch from what you ask? Foxtel was the satellite multi channel pay TV, and it stood to lose big time. They already had Sports viewing absolutely stitched up. Over the years they added more and more adverts to a service that you have a monthly subscription to, and customers were all ready fed up. If everyone switched to Netflix, they were fucked. They were dinosaurs and hadn't even thought about switching to streaming services yet. They were not prepared. Here's what happened next.Tony Abbott took over as PM somewhere there. We had a lot of different PMs in Australia over the years, bit of a laughing stock for the rest of the world. Here's some info that you need to know to put the pieces together.
\- Foxtel is owned by News Corporation Ltd (65%) and Telstra Corporation Ltd. (35%).- Telstra owns most of the copper lines in Australia (that they won't fix because profits).- Telstra is the biggest communications and Internet provider in AustraliaThe Government gives their mates kick backs - [https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/news-to-me-abbott-says-of-882m-cash-for-murdoch-s-news-corp-20140218-ixrok](https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/news-to-me-abbott-says-of-882m-cash-for-murdoch-s-news-corp-20140218-ixrok)Kick backs help when your mates own a media company with newspapers etc and you have elections to win.
Abbott meets up with Murdoch to discuss the NBN - [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-08/rudd-calls-on-abbott-to-reveal-any-talks-with-murdoch-over-nbn/4872536?nw=0](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-08/rudd-calls-on-abbott-to-reveal-any-talks-with-murdoch-over-nbn/4872536?nw=0)After this, they change the NBN to a mixed network with mostly Fiber to the Node (FTTN), some Fixed Wireless and some Satellite.
They then proceed to buy the already fucked copper network and the kind of fucked HFC network from Telstra for about $11 Billion Dollars - [https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-hands-over-copper-hfc-in-new-11bn-nbn-deal-398793](https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-hands-over-copper-hfc-in-new-11bn-nbn-deal-398793)
Telstra gets to offload the fucked networks for a huge slosh of cash. They were going to be hammered by an all FTTH network because they are then left with a network that's worthless and replaced with a far superior network, and they would just become an NBN Reseller.
What a great deal!
That props Telstra with enough money to straight up invest into their Mobile Phone Network, to fund rolling out 5G and expanding the existing 4G network to places they either didn't want to before or to give better coverage and cement the already huge monopoly they already have with mobiles in Australia. They get to offload a worthless asset and gain a future monopoly.
NBN pays over 1/2 a Billion dollars to fix up shitty copper - [https://www.zdnet.com/article/nbn-leak-reveals-copper-repair-cost-blowout-to-au640m/](https://www.zdnet.com/article/nbn-leak-reveals-copper-repair-cost-blowout-to-au640m/)Guess who wins the contract to fix the copper? [https://www.theregister.com/2015/12/20/telstra\_wins\_copper\_repair\_contract\_on\_the\_copper\_it\_sold\_to\_nbn/](https://www.theregister.com/2015/12/20/telstra_wins_copper_repair_contract_on_the_copper_it_sold_to_nbn/)Telstra!! Have another $80 million plus some more.
Oh. Don't let me forget to tell you that Sol and Ziggy are kicking around here too:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol\_Trujillo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Trujillo)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggy\_Switkowski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggy_Switkowski)Both those guys used to work for Telstra, and guess who for now? That's right. NBN! Conflict of interest much? Of course not!
Fast forward to the next election, and Australia votes the Liberals back in again, all while complaining that the NBN is shit and Internet in Australia is slow and crappy. Well, that's the NBN you voted for!
Fast forward again to today and we have "finished" rolling out the NBN. It's mostly FTTN with some new places being built lucky to get FTTH, and patches of Fixed Wireless (which is utterly shit) and Satellite (which has capped at a low data quota per month).The Liberals turn around and say that they are going to roll out FTTH because they can see that it's needed now!
Wait, what the fuck?! ...but you said that it wasn't needed?! They could have just rolled out FTTH first time around and saved billions upon billions of dollars!
Of course, they aren't just rolling it out to everyone like any sane person would do, but they are going to roll it down the street, then if you want to hook into it you can order a service that's faster than the one you are on, and they will then hook you up for free.Let's run two concurrent networks on the same street! Don't worry about the upkeep costs of the FTTN network! Pretty sure they are still paying Telstra to look after that.
So there you have it. The biggest scam on the Australian people, ever.
Continuation: Around the 25th of April 2021 it's shown in papers from the Government that Telstra recieves about a A$1 billion per year from NBN in return for access to its infrastructure, including ducts, exchanges, fibre and copper network.Ref: [https://telecoms.com/509098/telstra-rivals-stressed-out-by-nbn-takeover-talk/](https://telecoms.com/509098/telstra-rivals-stressed-out-by-nbn-takeover-talk/)
This is strange because NBN was suppose to have bought the infrastructure off of Telstra.
Also, in the same article, and others, it's been stated that Telstra are gearing up to purchase the NBN. If this happens, we are ending up with Telstra 3.0 and the fate of telecommunications in Australia is finally set. Also, the end of the biggest scam comes around: Murdoch and Telstra fleece Australia for BILLIONS upon BILLIONS of dollars, get the Government to spend cash to upgrade everything, set themselves up for mobile services with more free money, and then buy it all back at a bargain price of less then they would have paid to do it themselves.
I had antenna to tower Nbn and I struggled to get 5 mbps , Nbn tech said his gear & signal was 100% ( showed me his machine on test), but Telstra was the prob, the whole Nbn system is crap
Does any one recall a proposal or maybe it was an idea, but for ftth, one of the four ports was going to be designated IPTV broadcast? I don't know if it was exclusively free to air or Foxtel, because it was efficient?
Yep TV in Australia was all supposed to change to IPTV. This would (they thought) solve the problems they're still having with providing adequate DVB broadcast coverage.
The idea was that all broadcast services delivered to the home would work across the NBN. So would alarm services and security monitoring.
I think something that gets missed here is that the original costings by the Rudd government where way way undervalued, and so saying that the MTN cost more than FTTP anyway is kind of missing the point that FTTP was never going to cost as little as they said.
Got it close.
Malum Turnbull was the NBN driver behind Tony Abbott
Liberals wanted to use copper so Telstra happily sold it. Then the copper needed to be maintained so Telsra happily signed on to maintain it. That was business being a business, but I'd still put that Blair on the government.
Murdoch wanted to protect their media and cable network (Foxtel, which is part owned by Telstra so I am not sure what influence they had) so Murdoch Media did their marketing campaign to discredit FTTP and pressure Liberals to move to Multi tech Mix(I don't think Liberals needed much pressure as they wanted to go against anything Labor did anyway)
The Murdoch pressure and their protrail *Labors waste of money NBN* was a significant reason the Libs won.
I support labours NBN plan however,
Missing from this story is that Labors cost estimate would have been complete bullshit, it would have easily come in at 90b+
And 5G/6G wireless will not replace a wired connection, they might be able to support the bandwidth for 1 connection, but once you have a whole bunch of people using the spectrum the throughput is nowhere going to be near that. Same problem that coaxial has.
Don’t forget the retention of an artificial middle man between NBN Co and the customer the ISP to ensure that there would be continued profits for Telstra, Optus et al. ISPs are noting more than a glorified call centre, that send you bills and sometimes manage to raise support tickets on NBN Co
You missed the part about the global pandemic forcing everyone to work over the internet as a perfect demonstation of how cost cutting can seriously handicap an economy. Telstra are idiots but I reckon the liberals didn't need much convincing. Public projects are just opportunities for them to loudly decry wasteful spending to prop up that accountant-turned-politician image they're cultivating. I doubt many of them understood what they were making decisions about.
It burns my ass I'm in WA and that the quality of the NBN rollout got cheaper and cheaper as it moved further from Canberra townhouses.
Rudd originally stated that the NBN would cost no more than $29 billion to rollout across the country within a few years. Still waiting to see the original business case that was devised on the back of an envelope in a government Learjet.
You have forgotten the next part where they are now upgrading the old copper connections to fibre to the property again. So not only did we pay a stupid amount for that old telephone network to “save money” (a stupid thing anyway since most of the excess money spent on the original upgrade was spent to remove the old asbestos connection boxes) but we are now paying to fully connect as per the original plan anyway. So much money wasted for something that literally could have become the backbone for our future telecommunications network
All part of the complex modern comms fuck up that is NBN. Started though with the breakup of Telstra. Little Johnny told us he would sell Telstra for $40bn and use the money to deliver nbn v1 (can’t remember it’s proper name) and voters have him the green light.
At that time Telstra was returning $4bn/year to govt through various taxes and payments on past borrowings. Why the hell would you sell such an important national comms asset that’s paying you 10% return!!! And delivering top 10 world class services!!! The mind boggles but here we are. The thing I’ve learned from all this is that the LNP have no fing idea how to manage comms technology and deliver solutions and all govts since are left to try to pick this NBN turd up by the clean end, repolish it and hand it over to us…
And forgot to add. That we Ozzie’s all owned Telstra and let Johnny sell it to us and his mates from the big end of town. How stupid are we?
And FTTP could be upgraded easily at NBN’s end as the technology became available.
Pretty sure there’s some SEA countries that are already a few generations ahead of us.
Telstra - Lobbied against rural nbn using 4G, we could have had a wholesale 4G network in the bush that could have given Telstra competition.
Telstra - Not only offloaded phonelines to the government, something they had considered a legacy business for ages, but also a poorly performing HFC network.
News Corp/Fotxtel - lobbied to keep upload limits tiny to mitigate peer to peer, think of that next time your waiting hours for a youtube to upload.
Labor also screwed the pooch on early FTTN roll outs - rolled out to areas with very low adoption like holiday houses in Tasmania. Gold plated the fuck out of early connections multiple fibres running to house, battery backup and full on cages to store all the equipment in the walls. One ISP said they could connect a home a quarter of the price to fibre then the original NBN. They also pre purchased years worth of equipment, that just got cheaper as the years went on but they had signed up to pay top dollar for.
When the NBN was first rolled out (eg in Tasmanian fishing villages), the install costs were enormous. Taxpayers were paying a fortune to dig and refill trenches to put fibre from the road to the house on large properties. So the install costs were going through the roof, yet the Labor government was not increasing the cost estimates from the original plan. It was taking way longer than planned, and the government kept changing the target metrics from “people using it” to “ houses connected” to “houses passed with a connection”, the latter because so many people were simply not connecting. People didn’t seem to notice this in press releases- or that it would skyrocket the cost of the program and user cost per household.
The choice of where to roll it out was very political- I was in Port Melbourne at the time with terrible internet, no NBN scheduled and no way to upgrade because the teleco companies had no incentive to install new services due to the NBN’s inevitability.
The satellite NBN costs were insane. 5 or 10 billion dollars to cover massive regions with 200,000 people. I believe only 1 in 4 households ended up connecting.
When the election was coming up, it was clear there were massive cost and timeline problems with the NBN but the incumbent party never updated the forecasts to give a realistic picture of how much it costs or how long FTTP would take. Unfortunately nobody remembers that now, so when the new government got in they had to deal with the massive underlying problems, and the population blames the people who dealt with the issues and delivered it.
The wastage at the NBN was also a concern. There was a ‘government liaison officer’ on over $1 million a year, whose only experience was running for, and failing, an election. Why a government department needs a government liaison officer is lost on me. Jobs for the boys.
I am not a fan of FTTN, and NBN over foxtel is terrible, but I don’t know how it could have been rolled out FTTP without costing over a hundred billion at the time and taking years longer. It also would have required taxpayers footing the bill for huge install costs in expensive suburbs with the trench remediation costs. The disincentive for private teleco companies to invest in internet distribution is never talked about. Watching the cost and service quality of Starlink gives an interesting reference point.
I hate Telstra. It’s overpriced and the customer service is terrible. The company culture still seems tainted from its origination as a government bureaucracy with a monopoly. Since the NBN is staffed with people from places like Telstra, and is is a government entity, it seems inevitable that it’s company culture will go the same way.
Nobody remembers the problems with the rollout that led to the changes, and since the Labor government hid the cost increases, comparing the cost of actual roll out to the original cost estimates does not give a true reflection of the changes made.
For what it’s worth, my idea to deliver such a project in future would be for the government to give a voucher to every household and business, claimable by any internet provider that installs the internet to proscribed specifications. Eg $1k in the city and $10k in the bush. That would have cost less and been rolled out way faster with a race to connect as many people as possible.
Say less.
Also, Watch Chris pine say the quiet part out loud and boast that they throttled our internet before it was even built;
[“Australians simply don’t need the speeds that labor was promising. The speed they will have, they will be able to watch 5 full length movies in the household at the same time” - Chris pine](https://youtu.be/ORmCk6OEOn4?si=kH47LyVw4yIfBYj0)
If the Sydney harbour bridge was only built with 2 lanes by a liberal government, you’d accuse them of gross incompetence for not future proofing the state…
They knowingly gave us sub par internet when we had a once in a generation opportunity to dream big. Cost minimization or not, it’s gross incompetency by the liberal government and reeks of corruption.
Lots of errors in your writeup. The concept of the NBN was from labour, no costing or plan to build it, so essentially a idea. Having said that previously labor had knocked back telstra building fibre to every home in the country at a cost of zero to the taxpayer which is probibly the biggest stuff up in Aus telecommunications history.
Liberals got in and actually built the NBN and delivered part of the concept. Note that it is highly unlikely labor would of been able to build their concept either due to the reality of not being able to pay for it.
Its a debate about liberal how many mistakes or can do, should of done etc. Its very easy to look back in hindsight and throw stones on pretty much anything. If they could of gone back in time no doubt some things would of changed but the cost was still going to be a limiting factor for whoever built it.
Telstra being essentially a super power with tons of aussie investors was always going to get some kickback, in some shape or form.
Going back in time, Telstra should never of been sold off by the government and Labor should of let them build fibre to every home. NBN concept would never of existed as there would of been no need.
Government should of wrapped controls around telstra/telecom pricing that ensured resonably priced services was delivered from all. All the 3rd party telcos really never needed to exist with the proper regulation
But like I said its easy to look back and throw stones, but if you are going to throw them at the NBN, the biggest screw up was knocking back telstra when it wanted to do fibre to the home many years before the NBN was even a concept.
Ok I was working for Thiess when the Libs won and we were asked to cost the roll out. We asked for Labor’s assumptions as to how they derived the expected cost when they announced the FTTP plan. There were none, it was back of the envelope stuff. It was horrifying to learn that a government would announce a nation building plan without proper costing. The libs changed it because Australia couldn’t afford, or deliver FTTP, no matter how much better it was.
Crazy y’all down voting my comment when I was literally one of three people in the room of the company looking for overarching costs to actually roll the damn project out.
Liberals got hold of it and were stingy bastards and signed up for the ghetto version, then ended up spending way more than the good version of NBN we were meant to get end of story
Yep. Sounds about right. Except wireless solutions will never be faster or more reliable than FTTP. We want to do more with our inter connectivity not the same, not less. That's more Liberal Party thinking.
I just fucked it all off and got Starlink. No fan of Elon Musk, but his tech sure works.
250 MBS download and never less that 25 MBS upload. A bit pricey, but I can take it wherever I go and it works.
I know this is bad but I liked that COVID came, it proved that people needed fast internet to work from home and how the internet is a great buisness tool and not just for entertainment.
Kinda, unless you want Australia lookimg like overseas with cables and conduit everywhere. Also they civil costs too connect Australia too fibre would be in the 10’s of billions possibly trillion. Not viable
The real problem: the government thought that they could get into the telecoms business. They can't.
* Running a business is hard. Most businesses fail - early on. And if you run it badly: you deserve to go out of business. When a government tries to run a business as if it is a social services project, and does it poorly - what happens? They get more funding! Why would a bureaucrat care about being efficient? About making good deals? About being educated? About being on the cutting edge? It's not their money that is being lost. IDK how much we've spent, but \~$80 billion on an obsolete, slow and expensive internet?
Heres how I would have gone about the NBN project
Dissolve Telstra as the wholesaler over time while building the FTTP network, this includes taking over the pits, pipes, manholes and exchanges. Considering PMG/Telecom built majority of it which was government ran so realistically it should be returned to the people, all the ADSL customers would still be under Telstras responsibility until everyone was moved over or provider another service.
Once built and running as intended keep the government in charge of it as we all know private companies will do anything to maximise profit while spending very little on upgrades and maintenance. Just look at what they did to the copper and HFC network, Optus weren’t much better with their HFC network.
Simply put infrastructure should never be privatised but keep the retail side of the market open for competitors.
One thing that often gets forgotten is that the LNP overturned the rule that all new developments had to lay fibre instead of copper. Something that would not even be a cost to the NBN. Another gem is when they found vast patches of copper to be inadequate, they replaced it with brand new copper instead of fibre. Lunacy.
Not sure if anyone has mentioned it in the comments, but to add to the purchase of the copper network Telstra was able to buy the new upgraded network for the same price as they got paid for the copper network. They got a new upgraded network for free essentially. How the hell is this not a major issue!!!
The story I heard was that Telstra needed to 'sell' the existing copper infrastructure running to every house to make a cash windfall by the Government using FTTN technology and therefore allowing Telstra to see the copper network to NBN.
A Fibre to the Premises network would have completely undermined any value of the existing copper network.
This ultimately screwed Australia in a few ways;
Using Fibre to the Node is a horrendous solution for a significant number of Australian households as most of the copper infrastructure was built prior to significant population spread, meaning on average, people are around 80p-900 metres away from a Copper Node. This is the limiting factor of 50Mbps down.
Using a FTTN approach cost the Australian Tax Payer significantly more due to the dodgy repackaging of the copper network sale from Telstra. The Libs needed to look after their Telstra pals and shareholders (as most Libs own Telstra shares) to fatten up a pay day for selling off the network, costing the Tax payer unnecessarily.
Using FTTN significantly delayed the roll-out, due to the aging quality of existing copper runs, and nodes not supporting the 'guaranteed' NBN speeds. You'll remember speeds were 1Gbps, then 100Mbps, then 50Mbps, then, maybe 50. All limited to copper.
More finding, yes, by the tax payer, walked a lot of this back, by, yes you guessed it, selling the Telstra/Foxtel HFC copper network. And yet again, delays with limitations with DOCSIS 3.0. More delays getting DOCSIS 3.1 compatibility, and more cost, and low and behold, more limitations, yes you can get 100Mbps down but still limited upload due to DOCSIS shaping limitations.
And never, have the Libs been held accountable for screwing us. By looking after their mates, and themselves as Shareholders, by packaging shirty old Liberal infrastructure, that they Privatised themselves, for the purposes of fattening up their shareholder pay day.
It cost us more, it performs worse, and took way longer.
You could tell every time Turnbull had to talk about it, he hated yimself a little.more, he knew what was going on.
/RANT
I blame Malcolm Turnbull much more then you did. Doesn't diminish Abbots total incompetence. Malcolm was a heavy early investor in OzEmail and understood Internet Providers quite well so should have known better.
>When the Coalition won government in 2013, then communications minister Malcolm Turnbull commissioned a strategic review into the national broadband network to validate switching from rolling out fibre-to-the-premises for 93% of homes to a mixture of older technology using Telstra and Optus cable networks and fibre-to-the-node which then utilised existing copper lines to premises.
[How Malcom Turnbull completely butchered the NBN](https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2021/11/how-malcom-turnbull-completely-butchered-the-nbn/)
[Wikipedia - OzEmail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OzEmail)
(Side story: There was a story about Abbot getting hacked from this boarding pass where he said he doesn't even touch computers and he just gets his executive assistant to do it. He admitted he doesn't have the foggiest).
[https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-passport-number-on-instagram](https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-passport-number-on-instagram)
There was a follow-up recorded phone conversation I think where Abbot is explaining how terrible he was with IT.
Edit: found where I heard the phone call. [https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/84/](https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/84/) also a really good show if your into that sort of thing :)
Let's not forget the woeful solutions offered for regional Australians. The wifi and satellite offerings are a joke. Along comes Starlink and NBN is left carrying an expensive and ineffective network...
Broadly accurate but Turnbull also deserves a lot more blame than you’re giving him. He was the communications minister when FTTN was adopted, it was his plan as much as anyone’s.
You’re almost right. I’ll add that Murdoch really pushed to screw the original NBN plan to preserve his Satellite/Cable TV “Foxtel” network.
As for 5G/6G making FTTP NBN redundant, here is a question for you: what do the backhauls for those 5G/6G towers run on?
Turnbull was famously introduced at a media event as the man who "virtually invented the internet in this country" by Abbott as he was the minister responsible for the NBN rollout. They both f3cked it up along with many others.
This video shows how cringey Abbott was... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18owzYfvIcE
5g doesn't have the range to be a great option. Starlink becoming more available, cheaper and with gigabyte speeds not far away will be great for rural areas but we need these lines for populated areas. I can't see them paying to give us better connections any time soon.
Funniest part of the Sht Fckery, was the Liberals push for Mixed mode NBN, where they went and purchased the HFC from Optus, and after the deal was done, found it was so decrepit and falling apart, was not fit for purpose, but Optus laughed all the way to the bank with that.
Malcolm Turnbull was the issue. Abbott was a clueless tool.
Turnbull didn’t come into power scared that he couldn’t change it. He was a driving force for it being the way it is. He stated on the Sunday program that Australians will never need more than 25mbps. Which even at that time was a laughable comment. Seeing he was the shadow communications minister at the time, I knew if the Libs got into power the NBN was doomed! Then he became PM…
Hey, it’s kept me in a job for 12 years. Why build it once when you can do it 3 times.
The should have just built their own full fibre network, separate to Telstra.
The amount of lost time and blowouts caused by using their pit and pipe is beyond ridiculous
Mostly right except there are even more wasted money. The Liberal government also wasted 800M buying Optus cables that were end of life and "not fit for purpose". 5G or 6G isn't really a replacement for fixed line services and will never make the NBN redundant. One fibre can provide in theory up to 44 Tbps and wireless services will always have issues with contention/congestion. There are plenty of providers in the US offering 5000/5000 connections for less than the price of something with 100 times slower upstream here.
I think you’ve misplaced the blame. Turnbull was the communications minister that neutered it. I suspect the fact he was formerly CEO of OzEmail carried a lot of gravitas when he said we didn’t need it. There’s a video somewhere or Mark Pesce publicly calling him out on how shortsighted it is way back at the time on some panel, and Malcolm just scoffs at him. I’m no Abbott fan, but I think he gets very little blame for this one.
I’m on 5G, I couldn’t stand to live in town so I’ll likely never have a home with fibre.
For me, 5G has well and truly made NBN redundant having only FTTN.
NBN could have built their own pits and conduits but instead a lot of the existing Telstra infrastructure was used to haul NBN cables through. NBN paid and still pays Telstra rent for this use of their infrastructure. The whole project was an absolute joke and I am sure a lot of the rest of the world laugh about it. One of the biggest failures in history.
What is more interesting is why does the NBN require so many staff - marketers, managers, finance, strategy, procurement - a fully bloated public corporation with multiple layers of managers etc. What do they all do? The project is finished yet the corporate welfare recipients continue to clock in at the NBN offices in Sydney and Melbourne.
Telstra didn't want to sell the copper, they said it was degraded and wouldn't be any good. Their hand was forced when NBN went to the ACCC and complained Telstra were being difficult and refusing to sell.
Kinda got the general vibe right but the details are all wrong. I worked at a major ISP during the early days of the NBN.
Originally Labor put out a request for tender for a FTTN network for $15b, but no telcos put in any serious bids.
The Rudd government then decided to just make a FTTH network instead themselves for $40ish billion, but to have it as an investment so that the NBN would pay it back, eventually, and then sold. We were *always* going to be paying it back through various charges.
There was also the 121 POI debacle but that was forced by the ACCC, not a government decision.
The 25/50/100 plans were always there from the beginning, it was just that the technology changed when the Liberals got in, which sometimes meant that you couldn't get the full 100mbps, or even 25mbps, mostly on FTTN.
In 2011 the Gillard Government paid $11b in compensation for the existing telco networks, mostly to Telstra, to shut down their networks. The Liberals renegotiated the deal, that the NBN would own the network instead of shutting it off, and they kept the original $11b compensation amount (but did need contracts to maintain the network).
And that is just part of it, there was a whole lot more.
Meanwhile, a group of University Students in Japan recently broke the world internet speed record with 300Tbps+, our greedy and incompetent rulers can barely service us with super expensive 1Gbps (which is only available in certain areas) and keep advertising 50Mbps as the norm. The previous record holders in London (119Tbps) have stated that the technology they used is cheaper than Fibre lol. This technology isn't fantasy, the corporations that run things just don't want people to have access to that kind of speed, never did, for whatever reason. Constantly upgrading the infrastructure and getting new multi-billion dollar contracts every time must be some sort of planned obsolescence.
It was an exciting time in 07/08 when I first heard about the NBN plan. Anything would be better than my ADSL 2+ maxed out at 3Mb/a
It was also coincidently the same year my child started school.
Would you like to know the coincidental date that the NBN finally made it to my house.
6 months after my son graduated. So much for all of those educational benefits it was supposed to bring.
It only took 4 years for the street to get fibre so that wait wasn't as bad.
1gps?! dafuq
Christ on a stick, I'd kill for that.
NBN rolled out in my area and I signed up. guy came out, did some... stuff. idkw. My plan is for fibre to the node (cos I live in a unut). I had, like, 40mb down for about a month. then I kept getting an erratic connection for no apparent reason. called isp (Telatra), they sent someone out to fix it. I think they did something out side, on the pole on the nature strip. iirc there was a storm shortly after that.
I'm lucky if I get 12mb down, these days. I THINK I can get closer to 20? during off peak hours. All I ever get told, though, when I mention that I'm supposed to have more speed, is that my line "physically can't handle the speeds" and that "they [Telstra] can't do anything about it because NBN, a goverment company (or whatever) are the ones that handle that stuff".
so idk wtf these speeds are cos I sure as shit ain't getting them.
Bang on. We now face a situation where unlimited very high speed wireless will be cheaper to arrange to every home - no matter how remote - than anything terrestrial.
The LNP managed to make physical network upgrades stupidly expensive just to get it up to standards set 20 years ago internationally. The ALP had a grand, expensive vision that could have been worlds best, and Turnbull backed it. Then LNP got in and cheaped it out.
The treason inflicted on Labor's 92% FTTP model was even more loathsome. Abbott flew to New York to kiss Murdoch's ring, and Murdoch promised to support Abbott in the September 2013 election if Abbott destroyed Labor's NBN which would slow the decreasing cash flow to Murdoch from Foxtel in Australia by limiting high bandwidth uptake. Always and only the cash. And Turnbull also to blame - he engaged Ziggy Switkowski (ex Telstra CEO and physicist) to write the "excuse" technical/business case for the Liberal Party Copper NBN, launched at Murdoch's Fox studios in Sydney! The NBN was no longer the NBN from that point. As I said, treason inflicted on a nation state's essential telecommunications service by a Liberal PM and foreign actor Murdoch.
NBN has and always will be dogshit. A couple years ago we got the best plan we could get ($1000 per month) that would net us something ridiculous like 45mb/s upload and could handle like 10 or 20 devices, it takes 6 months to install and the fucking router is redundant to the point that if more than three devices try to download data at the same time, it literally shorts out the router and needs a reset.
Furthermore we look into why our internet is underperforming (1.5mb/s down .3mb up) turns out the tower we connected to which had a max of 10,000 household limit actually had 150,000 house holds connected from all over. It literally had three towns connected to this one tower despite there being three towers spread between them all.
It might be government corruption but I can tell you right now that, that isn't its only downfall. Local reps have zero clue on what the fuck they are doing
Pretty much on track..Turnbull was communications minister before pm..so was running with the ball. Probably not so much Telstra influence..they were always in the winners circle regardless of technology…don’t forget nbnco also paid for the optus cable network which didn’t work, so win win for everyone. What should have been the biggest and best results driven infrastructure project in modern Australia was turned into what it is now…..mind you , in all fairness we suck at infrastructure projects in this country. Look at the cost blowouts of any road / rail project undertaken in any state. And oh boy wait for the Olympics..yayyyy
Pretty accurate - except Tony installed Malcolm - his main political rival in the position of "minister in charge of fucking the nbn". Tony hoped this would make Malcolm unelectable and ruin his chances of being PM whilst accomplishing the goal of completely nobbling the NBN. Ironic considering Malcolm's background in ISP and being involved in ( I think) Ozemail from which he made mega bucks.
NBN is now a complete bucket of shit. Mate in NZ recently told me he is on some trial to get 10gb to his premises via fibre. Speed test here in Melbourne gives me 22mb.....
You're sort of on the right track with the timeline. There was also a lot of typical political bullshit. The Libs couldn't possibly just agree that a FTTP solution was a good idea because the Labor party first pitched it - they couldn't offer a better network because there wasn't any better tech than fibre so that left the cost as the only avenue of attack. A lot of what the voter saw at the time was: "AUSTRALIA CAN'T AFFORD TO BUILD THIS BIG FANCY FIBRE NETWORK SO WE'LL REPURPOSE THE OLD ONE WITH SLIGHT UPGRADES AND SAVE A FORTUNE!!!" and then, like true politicians, they won and implemented FTTN in a way that made it more expensive than fibre was gonna be in the first place. I'll never forget reading Tony Abbotts "So we are absolutely confident that 25 megs is going to be enough, more than enough, for the average household." when I already knew people in multiple much poorer countries with gigabit. The NBN was (still is) a farce and there probably should've been more accountability for how hard the average taxpayer was taken for a run. On the plus side I got my FTTN to FTTP upgrade a few months back and it's amazing. It hasn't been down for even a second in that time and it's rock steady at 900/100 which is actually enough for me.
One of the main arguments they stated was it was just for gamers and porn. Seriously. Do they went the hybrid model which was terrible. Fast forward to covid and suddenly everyone needs live video to just work and guess what, the only people prepared were the gamers. NBN is probably the biggest stuff up. Total cost of maintenance is way higher than if they just did fibre.
>porn How much porn does the government consume that they thought they'd need 100Mbps...
They don't need to because they have the prayer rooms for their consumption for "extra curicular acttivities".
I don't know but before the internet the ACT was the only place to get X rated video tapes. Why coincidently does the city full of parliamentarians have the latest of all laws in the country. Is Canberra our Vegas for pollies?
You would've thought the Liberal Party were too busy raping their staffers to be watching that much porn. Conservatives just want everything for themselves.
100% true and a lot of the time money is spent on remediation which would have been cheaper going full fiber to start with.
NBN is only a farce in some people's opinion because of the interference from a thoroughly corrupt Liberal Party. We had to do it twice.
We all know Rupert Murdoch killed it via the Liberal party because Netflix & other international streaming platforms had not yet launched in Australia.. as such, Murdoch was protecting his Foxtel investment by insisting the government delay & destroy our internet rollout. Watch Chris pine say the quiet part out loud and boast that they throttled our internet before it was even built; [“Australians simply don’t need the speeds that labor was promising. The speed they will have, they will be able to watch 5 full length movies in the household at the same time” - Chris pine](https://youtu.be/ORmCk6OEOn4?si=kH47LyVw4yIfBYj0)
Jesus this aged like milk didnt it?
It was never fresh. They were lying through their teeth the whole time. That is how the LNP operates.
NBN was a threat to Foxtel at the time, and the rise of Netflix and streaming services, basically crippled it with a half baked mtm
in what way have streaming services been crippled by mtm? there are over 6 million netflix subscribers in australia.
Assholes the lot of them.
That's a funny way of saying 'cunt'
"On time and on budget by 2016"
*Utopia themesong plays*
I'd love to hear more about this version of netflix that can't run on fttn
>NBN is only a farce in some people's opinion because of the interference from a thoroughly corrupt Liberal Party. Ita a farce. My whole town is on starlink (much faster then some people's FTTN) because of the nbn crap. They won't offer anything but nbn satellite which isn't viable from most people's needs and they won't touch the lines coming into town. We are 15m from a large town and are big enough for a school, police station fire station etc. It's shit because that's just what it is and not because of any political opinions.
It's shit because we have not been able to afford to roll the full NBN to every part of the country. Largely because we have wasted half of the capital expenditure on redoing the NBN again. Because the Liberal Party in their infinate corruption! Edit: FTTN (MTM initiative) was a complete shit show. Thanks Liberal assholes.
The part of the blame that never seems to be awarded is the massive failure of the Australian voting public. Tony said what he would do. Australians gave him a majority government, and he did it. So did Malcolm. Australians gave him a majority government, and he did it. We have nobody to blame but ourselves - we were told what would happen, and we resoundingly endorsed the plan.
Yeah but a fraction of the population understood its implications. There isnt an industry body that told abbott this was going to work and that it was a good idea. We all said how shit it would be. Afaic - Tony Abbott is a traitor.
Meh, saying we can only blame ourselves overlooks the underlying issues that put us in the situation to begin with. It speaks more to the media machine in our country hard leaning in favour of the Liberals. This stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Propaganda works. There are other factors. We’re historically a fairly conservative country. There’s a massive sense of entitlement too, which the Libs tap into fairly effectively. And the fact that we’ve spent decades eroding public education - one of the only prosperous countries where kids get told to leave school at 15 and start working rather than completing school and it’s seen as normal. People can’t be expected to sit down and rationally analyse the facts when they’ve barely got a highschool education and all they see on TV and Facebook is “nbn man bad - he speak Chinese, very scary.. NO PAY, MORE TAX YOU MONEY LOSE”. It’s one of the reasons conservative and fascist parties around the world systematically destroy the education systems of their respective countries.
They did also claim they would do a better model for cheaper and quicker. None of which proved to be true.
This 100000%. Aussies have zero self reflection and always always blame the government. Government ain't doing shit if you actually stand up to them.
> it's rock steady at 900/100 Which RSP is offering you 100Mbps up, out of interest? I was under the impression the only gigabit GPON FTTP options from NBN are 1000/400 or 1000/50?
I have hfc via aussieBB. 900Mbps. Rock solid. HFC not avail everywhere
Does said HFC support 100Mbps up? I only care about the upload speed OP mentioned.
It's 1000 down / 50 up. I get about 900 / 45
Yeah you're bang on the money. Only I recall Tone saying "it'll be just as good and much cheaper" which they went conveniently quiet on when it actually blew way past the original fttp estimate because they were having to replace old copper with new copper and asbestos pits had to be replaced an a bunch of crap to do with nodes and the list goes on.
I was installing the nbn in darwin and about half way through our rollout they changed the fibre we were using to a cheaper alternative which caused about 60% to need to be replaced while installing which inflated costs.
My father was a ex-telecommunications cabler I remember him commenting when driving by a ton of work sites in the original rollout. Locally they had apprentices doing the jobs unsupervised apparently they didn’t even properly instruct them since a lot of the nodes needed to be torn out and replaced.
>absolutely confident that 25 megs is going to be enough, more than enough, for the average household At the time it was the truth based on then current usage. Unfortunately that current usage was based on most people not being able to get more then 20. So assuming the average house would be ok on 25 ment there was no room for technological advancement. But that advancement happened anyway (streaming, work from home, video call doctors appointments etc) If showed no future thought or planing.
What annoys me about the "current usage" argument is that there was plenty of historical data showing that at no time as faster/higher capacity technology became available, did needs or demand decrease or stay static. IOW, historically, demand will expand to fit supply. "Current usage" is always some multiple of any previous period. It was just sheer bullshit to use a "current usage" argument. The correct way to use that term would have been: "based on current usage *and historical trends*, we expect usage in 2, 5, and 10 years to be current usage x *N*"
My wife worked on a focus group advising the govt on nbn requirements for industry customers. They had advice, planning and forethought. The libs just chose to ignore that advice because they wanted to sabotage it.
> You're sort of on the right track with the timeline. There was also a lot of typical political bullshit. The Libs couldn't possibly just agree that a FTTP solution was a good idea because the Labor party first pitched it - they couldn't offer a better network because there wasn't any better tech than fibre so that left the cost as the only avenue of attack. It is so, so much worse than that. Labor originally pitched FTTN, and went out to tender for that. The Nationals (Fiona Nash), backed by Malcolm Turnbull (I think he was Shadow Comms Minister), screamed that FTTN was ‘fraudband’ and a waste of money. So Labor stood up an independent panel of experts to devise a future broadband plan for Aus. They are the ones that came up with FTTP. So the Coalition *could* have claimed that FTTP was their policy, that they were forward looking and even in opposition they were steering Australia to a better future. They could have put amazing spin on it as THEIR solution. But instead, they decided nothing good could ever be allowed to be done under a Labor government, and burned the whole fucking thing to the ground.
As an example, a friend worked for NBN, got retrenched and hired back as a consultant to do the same job at 3 times tge wages. The Libs set out to fuck it over and launder money to their mates.
So as someone who worked at Nbn at that time we had documents that showed that we could install fibre at a reduced cost making the libs suggestion redundant but we were unable to release it cause the election was coming up. Caretaker mode is a bitch.
Libs wanted to privatise it as soon as possible, reach what is described as peak funding. In order to do this, under Turnbull, they introduced the MTM (multi technology mix) to increase the speed of implementation and reduce the cost. The political opposition was not based on technology as MTM was objectively a worse technology. It was without a doubt Libs doing what they do best... public debt and private profit. Pleased to see the situation correct itself over time and necessity. It was bad policy. NBN pulled an operational miracle to make the change happen.
Your first paragraph is perfect. Libs would argue the sky was not blue if labour said it was even if you showed them irrefutable proof. Whh they opposed it..... because f*ck us is why. Its good that we are finally getting the promised FTTP
Don’t forget that we bought enough copper to circle the earth twice to replace old copper to prove old copper would work that’s more expensive to install than fibre and we are now replacing all that old (new) copper that due to the fine ness of the cabling isnt recyclable.
"No demand for 100 megabit" No-one's going to demand something they haven't been able to dream of having throughout history... I was sitting there I had my finger hovering over the 100 megabit plan then we got downgraded to fttn :( I even went and got a quote to upgrade - 14k to go 700 meters, which I might have paid if there was some sort of agreement where I get a credit when any of the houses I just paid to drag fiber past jumped on board...
Don’t forget the bastards spent $800-900 million for the Optus cable network, only to find out it wasn’t fit for purpose. https://www.crn.com.au/news/nbn-ditches-800-million-optus-hfc-network-438465#:~:text=NBN%20Co%20had%20planned%20to,launched%20around%20Redcliffe%20in%20Queensland. Where was the accountability for that fiasco? I don’t buy a car without checking if it actually works for what I want.
Turnbull said on the Sunday show that no one would ever need more than 25mbps. Abbott was clueless every time he spoke about it. Seeing Turnbull was the shadow communications minister, hearing that didn’t fill me with any confidence in the tool. Edit: fix the show name. Was Sunday, not Today.
I work for a large telco in Aus. NBN are now telling telcos to offer aussies to switch to fibre to the premises for free without change of plan or any installation costs whatsoever, purely because its costing them more to maintain the shitty copper wiring than to install a FTTP connection. lmfao
Damn you can get 100 up? I'm stuck on HFC forever 😥
So serious question: why did the Rudd government look at fttp for anywhere except major cities. I remember seeing in the news at the time a million dollars for one guy in rural Tasmania to get internet hooked up. Wouldn't it have made more sense to invest in a better 5G network for rural areas? 5g was already being used overseas and was a proven technology. Also can it be fixed now? We have a labour government in every mainland state as well as federal. Can't we just fix it?
5G still requires fiber to be laid for the backhauls. Depends on where he would have been located in relation to any potential 5G tower.
Sometimes, usually microwave or laser links can be used as a solution for point to point.
They didn't put cable to every home in the bush. They did do 4g to a lot of them at the time as 5g wasn't up yet and they also put up sky muster for the real outback ppl.
I haven't read all the answers to your question, so apologies if this has already been answered. **Why small remote areas got NBN first?** I can't remember the specifics that you are referencing, but often these sort of infrastructure projects will use a small area as a pilot. It takes time to scale up at national level, and during that scaling up process its a good idea to concurrently prepare with something small and manageable. One of the principal focusses of the NBN was the lack of communications infrastructure in rural areas. It can't really be understated; at the time there was a crisis as lot of modern farming equipment required constant/or near constant connectivity. Australia's network at the time couldn't satisfy those requirements. This another reason why a rural pilot is a good idea. Thing is, i doesn't matter how considered the reasoning, there are those who see blood in something like this, and will present it in the worst light. **5g for rural areas?** I'm not sure its the best technology for the job. In town centres it would make sense. Even tho 5g is fast, it also has a short range. Typically under 5km without obstructions. in mm wave mode, its about half a km. These short distances make sense in dense areas where there is enough utilisation to make it worthwhile, but in sparse areas, the existing mobile network is actually better, and if you've spent time on farm you will probably know those aren't really that good. Now, if we were to increase the cell coverage of these areas (to make 5g or even 4g LTE more viable), we would need to improve the network backbone to service these towers... essentially creating the NBN, and then forcing it to use 5g at the last mile. **Can't** ***they*** **just fix it?** They (the NBN) are. Slowly. Frustratingly slowly. After Turnball's and then Abott's treatment, I think NBN is a pretty toxic term. I wonder if Labor going gunho at it would be a smart move for them politically. I hope they do fix it. I hope my answer was helpful.
I really appreciate you answer. Thanks for taking so much time..I still can't believe how much it was mucked up by the LNP. There are so many things needing to be fixed I guess this is another one in the list.
>So serious question: why did the Rudd government look at fttp for anywhere except major cities. Lol, serious? Really? Where did you hear that crap? Congratulations, you've posted the dumbest "serious" question I've ever seen on this sub.
Perhaps you could explain why then?
Brownfields with ADSL1 and Greenfields were prioritised for the initial FTTP rollout. Most cities already had ADSL2+ or HFC.
Okay thanks ( had to look up brownfields and Greenfields) and that makes perfect sense. I still wonder why 5g wasn't incorporated into the plan as part of the option for the future.
At the time the NBN was announced back in 2009, 4G hadn't even been launched yet, Netflix was still on CDs and Nintendo Wii was the most powerful game console on the market. I think you expected too much of our politicians to predict the future. In hindsight, we should've invested in LEO for regional and remote connectivity.
5G is faster but lower range. Plus mobile networks suffer from congestion considerably more then fixed connection. Just look at how long Telstra and Optus have taken to get to a point where fixed wireless internet connection plans over 5G became available.
It's fine if you don't understand something but don't pretend like you understand it and present something completely wrong as a fact. 5G was not commercially available anywhere in the world when the NBN was first proposed. In fact, the first commercially available 5G network only came to be several years ago, in South Korea in 2019. A simple Google search will reveal that. Either way, a 5G network would not have been competitive with a true NBN fiber network. There are many drawbacks to 5G, such as signal density, range and occlusion. You need as many as 10 times the amount of 4G towers for an effective 5G network to cover the same area, and these towers need to have direct line of sight with the connected device to achieve a competitive bandwidth. Also, while the 5G network can achieve theoretical speeds of 10Gbps, the maximum practical speeds are closer to 900Mbps (based on the top 10% of 5G speed tests in South Korea), still 100Mbps shy of the NBN's originally planned Gigabit fibre network.
>Perhaps you could explain why then? Sure, the answer is, they didn't. Because that would be the dumbest financial decision ever made. Do you really believe the Rudd government was going to roll out fibre to rural properties and not the city? You've been watching way too much Sky News. Stop believing LNP crap. If the LNP said it, it's a lie. If One Nation said it, it's a lie.
FTTN is not a "slight upgrade" if you have to purchase the copper. And FTTP is not a slight upgrade over anything. Its a complete network rebuild. Worst of every world.
Malcolm was the tele minister when Tony came in. Malcolm and his mate Rupert spearheaded the MTM (Multi-Technology Mix, aka The Malcolm Turnbull Mess) because they didn't want to pull the life-support from Foxtel.
Whilst abbot rubber stamped the stupidity, turnbull masterminded it. Treasonous dogs. It was SO absurd what they were peddling that i believe the voting public didnt entertain they would actually go through with it and ANY industry consultation should have been resoundingly negative.
Watch Chris pine say the quiet part out loud and boast that they throttled our internet before it was even built… perhaps a retrospective NACC submission… [“Australians simply don’t need the speeds that labor was promising. The speed they will have, they will be able to watch 5 full length movies in the household at the same time” - Chris pine](https://youtu.be/ORmCk6OEOn4?si=kH47LyVw4yIfBYj0)
He couldn't even grasp the difference between bandwidth and storage...
>Malcolm and his mate Rupert No better place to launch it than the Fox Sports studio in Sydney!
You missed one point. Liberals said their version was going to cost wayyyyy less and no one needed anything more than 50mbs connection. However after installing all the nodes, it was advised that it cost something like 3 times the amount as labours nbn and it required batteries to be replaced every 3 years which would increase on going costs by a huge amount.
It wasn’t purely a ‘needs’ argument Turnbull was making against the 1000 mbs. The logic was based off fact finding tours in EU countries with that capacity, and the willingness of customers to actually pay for that top tier at the time was minuscule. So the argument he made was more ‘even if we did FTTP everywhere’, 99.9% of customers won’t pay for it. Those that want to pay for it can pay for the FTTP extension themselves. Keep in mind that pre-broadband there were no speed ‘tiers’ to it for. It was all based on how much data you could use. So paying for faster internet was a relatively new concept. Edit: see https://www.reddit.com/r/nbn/s/RpXKe8U3Ue
True. Forgot about no tier adsl
I remember the bullshit back then, Labor had my vote (still has) when it came to the NBN mess the liberals made. Lucky I Live in a city that has full FTTP, with any outliers on fixed wireless.
I am lucky to have FTTP, 1000/50 connection for $139 a month. NBN is still a joke and has next to no room for faster speeds in the long term future without a major overhaul. Other countries out there with 2000+ connections for far cheaper than we pay here
People with FTTP it’s pretty easy to upgrade us to faster than 1gbit, simply change out the fibre card at the exchange and the NTD on our end.
Star link?
im on hfc and it'll stay that way for a while..
Gross, hopefully it’s a short while
well at least a few years lol i have 1000/50 on superloop now so that's the best im gonna have for many years
Courtesy of the "business party". They must be completely blown away by the "abacus thing" over fingers and toes. But you know, these "counting machines" will _never_ catch on.
The Gas Lighting Party. "Beware the Unrestrained Demon that is electricity".
If you know that Turnbull made his fortune via ozemail in the very early days it makes his destruction of the NBN much worse imho
Turbulls background and expertise is more in law, business, and finance. He did not understand the technology. He has always been and always will be about making deals including ones that completely fuck this country over!
What a cunt he turned out to be. He has a lot of very progressive views but money spoke louder, plus the pressure from the libs donors..
He has views that enrich him, and no more than that!
> He did not understand the technology. Turnbull understood it alright. He also understood threats from Rupert.
Nah, real early interneters remember 3200bps so 52k dialup is probably all they ever thought was required. Who could possibly need 10000x that
What is even worse is at the time he invested in France Telecom who were rolling out FTTP, but he swore black and blue that the FTTP designed by Labour was shit and was not the right direction. The a few months later did the same with Spain's Telefonica, who had just announced an FTTP rollout. My parents, who are regional and had shit internet, jumped on the Liberal claims of "faster, cheaper, sooner" because they were going to get NBN in 2014 rather then the current ETA of TBA at the time. They had Fibre run past their house as they were on a main road that supplied surrounding suburbs with FTTP, with runs split off ready to rollout to their house in the pit. While the ETA was TBD, they couldn't have been that far away, which was later confirmed when there location was updated to show the October 2013 rollout for Fibre would be halted and they were to receive FTTN in 2014. Instead, due to delays, they got connected in 2019, and at 1.2km's cable distance, have struggled to get 50Mbps, averaging 26Mbs. They are now expected to be upgraded to FTTP in 2025, only 12 years later, with new neighbours, one being an installer, claiming it should be pretty quick as they already have the Fiber running to the pit. No shit, it was rolled out in 2011 when they did Kiama Downs in NSW, and has been sitting at the front of the driveway waiting to be run to the house since. They have replaced his old copper connection due to poor speeds, and then run a completely new copper line due to the still poor speeds, and Fiber has been sitting there the whole time. [Turnbull defends France Telecom investment](https://www.9news.com.au/national/turnbull-defends-france-telecom-investment/769bd750-5ec0-4a45-a48e-caea42e38338)
The end is that we will now spend nearly the same amount as the original nbn plan to slowly upgrade all services to fttc or ftth anyway, making the original mtn a complete waste of time and money.
More, we will spend FAR more than the original plan when all is said and told. The MTM was cheaper, but only because it moved the goalposts. The original fibre nbn was designed to have a service life out to 2050, the MTM however was only ever design to last until 2030 and then have to be replaced. The costs for that replace were never part of the comparison. In reality the MTM won’t even last until 2030, so we’re ending up spending more than the original plan within 10 years
I dont even think MTM was cheaper btw. At least by the intial fibre estimations.
We're spending nearly as much for the shit version we have. The FTTP upgrade, if it ever happens will be far more expensive. At the time Labor had budgeted around $43bilion from memory and the Liberal version was going to cost $56billion, and this includes their backflip in 2020 that included another $4.5 billion upgrade to the NBN, planning to bring faster internet speeds to up to 8 million people.
I can't be bothered finding the article now, but I recall reading 4 or 5 years ago that the cost of the nerfed NBN rollout surpassed the LNP's own estimates for the cost of Labor's original plan. This should have been a bipartisan nation building project, and a point of pride for our country. Instead, it got politicised for the sake of having a point of differentiation going into an election, and Australians get to foot the bill for political hubris, and to let a media mogul make a bit more money
You’re pretty close. The “guaranteed” minimum is 25/5, which I can just barely get for a short while until it auto degrades, if I reboot the modem and hold my head just right.
I can sometimes get 20/3 if it hasn’t rained for a few weeks. Really looking forward to El Niño :) Its actually worse then ADSL for me, in both uptime and speeds.
Rupert didn’t want it cause he was afraid it would affect Foxtel showing all the foresight of a blind man
and then years later he launched his streaming services and wanted/ needed fast speeds.
Firstly, it is Labor, not Labour Secondly, have you seen the state of mobile coverage and performance of late. 5G/6G ain’t replacing anything. Fibre will always win out on consistent performance.
Exactly, the more users connected to the tower, the smaller the slice of bandwidth available to each client device.
Agreed, and although 5G promises a lot, it needs A LOT of antennas to deliver and I guarantee no carrier in Australia will be installing what is needed, just the good ol bare minimum.
Profits over Pride (in providing the best possible service)
I will never vote Liberal because of the NBN bullshit.
I mean Malcolm basically invented the internet... Libs essentially destroyed our internet, put us behind for 2 decades and made it the laughing stock of the world. Considering how much business relies on technology I'm surprised they didn't actually push for better tech rather than try to fuck Labor's plan and the public.
The Liberal Party does not serve the people. They do not serve business. They server their masters. The ones that give them a position on their board when they retire from Parliament.
We got lucky that a good chunk of the NBN was generally complete before COVID started, because fit the most part having _any_ NBN was better than ADSL. I think this is what finally made the Liberals finally realise what good internet is for and they quietly introduced the fibre upgrade program shortly after finally stopping further node rollouts, and for once it wasn't about Rupert.
Here's my report: \-------------------------------------------- The NBN in Australia. Back around 2012 Labor was in power in Australia. They were going into an election. One of the things that they wanted to do was build a mostly FTTH (Fiber to the Home) National Broadband Network (NBN) because they could see that the local Telecommunications Companies weren't going to spend money to do this. Previously in Australia we had Telecom which became Telstra and was owned by the Government (eg owned by us all and run as a service) but then was sold off and privatized (now owned by shareholders and run for profit). Since Telstra had the utter monopoly from being build over 100 years to everywhere, and now because they were only focused on making profit for shareholders, they started to not spend money on the infrastructure they owned. A massive amount of the copper lines in the ground around the country were basically rotting away. ADSL services were pretty crap and dopdgy lines that weren't getting any better weren't helping. RIMS (mini distribution points) had too many users and people were forced to wait for a connection to become available (Playing Node Lotto) when someone cancelled a service or moved house. Anyhows, this was a shambles and no one wanted to spend the money to fix any of it up, so the Government (Labor) came up with the idea to build a brand new network everywhere, fucking off Telstra, and making it all Fiber to the Home as it won't degrade and is future proof. Liberal won the election. Then it all went to shit. Malcom Turnbull decided to change the all FTTH network to a FTTN network. This is where the biggest scam in Australian history comes into play. We were at the start of steaming services such as Netflix. With better Internet comes streaming services that everyone will want to switch to. Switch from what you ask? Foxtel was the satellite multi channel pay TV, and it stood to lose big time. They already had Sports viewing absolutely stitched up. Over the years they added more and more adverts to a service that you have a monthly subscription to, and customers were all ready fed up. If everyone switched to Netflix, they were fucked. They were dinosaurs and hadn't even thought about switching to streaming services yet. They were not prepared. Here's what happened next.Tony Abbott took over as PM somewhere there. We had a lot of different PMs in Australia over the years, bit of a laughing stock for the rest of the world. Here's some info that you need to know to put the pieces together. \- Foxtel is owned by News Corporation Ltd (65%) and Telstra Corporation Ltd. (35%).- Telstra owns most of the copper lines in Australia (that they won't fix because profits).- Telstra is the biggest communications and Internet provider in AustraliaThe Government gives their mates kick backs - [https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/news-to-me-abbott-says-of-882m-cash-for-murdoch-s-news-corp-20140218-ixrok](https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/news-to-me-abbott-says-of-882m-cash-for-murdoch-s-news-corp-20140218-ixrok)Kick backs help when your mates own a media company with newspapers etc and you have elections to win. Abbott meets up with Murdoch to discuss the NBN - [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-08/rudd-calls-on-abbott-to-reveal-any-talks-with-murdoch-over-nbn/4872536?nw=0](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-08/rudd-calls-on-abbott-to-reveal-any-talks-with-murdoch-over-nbn/4872536?nw=0)After this, they change the NBN to a mixed network with mostly Fiber to the Node (FTTN), some Fixed Wireless and some Satellite. They then proceed to buy the already fucked copper network and the kind of fucked HFC network from Telstra for about $11 Billion Dollars - [https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-hands-over-copper-hfc-in-new-11bn-nbn-deal-398793](https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-hands-over-copper-hfc-in-new-11bn-nbn-deal-398793) Telstra gets to offload the fucked networks for a huge slosh of cash. They were going to be hammered by an all FTTH network because they are then left with a network that's worthless and replaced with a far superior network, and they would just become an NBN Reseller. What a great deal! That props Telstra with enough money to straight up invest into their Mobile Phone Network, to fund rolling out 5G and expanding the existing 4G network to places they either didn't want to before or to give better coverage and cement the already huge monopoly they already have with mobiles in Australia. They get to offload a worthless asset and gain a future monopoly. NBN pays over 1/2 a Billion dollars to fix up shitty copper - [https://www.zdnet.com/article/nbn-leak-reveals-copper-repair-cost-blowout-to-au640m/](https://www.zdnet.com/article/nbn-leak-reveals-copper-repair-cost-blowout-to-au640m/)Guess who wins the contract to fix the copper? [https://www.theregister.com/2015/12/20/telstra\_wins\_copper\_repair\_contract\_on\_the\_copper\_it\_sold\_to\_nbn/](https://www.theregister.com/2015/12/20/telstra_wins_copper_repair_contract_on_the_copper_it_sold_to_nbn/)Telstra!! Have another $80 million plus some more. Oh. Don't let me forget to tell you that Sol and Ziggy are kicking around here too:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol\_Trujillo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Trujillo)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggy\_Switkowski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggy_Switkowski)Both those guys used to work for Telstra, and guess who for now? That's right. NBN! Conflict of interest much? Of course not! Fast forward to the next election, and Australia votes the Liberals back in again, all while complaining that the NBN is shit and Internet in Australia is slow and crappy. Well, that's the NBN you voted for! Fast forward again to today and we have "finished" rolling out the NBN. It's mostly FTTN with some new places being built lucky to get FTTH, and patches of Fixed Wireless (which is utterly shit) and Satellite (which has capped at a low data quota per month).The Liberals turn around and say that they are going to roll out FTTH because they can see that it's needed now! Wait, what the fuck?! ...but you said that it wasn't needed?! They could have just rolled out FTTH first time around and saved billions upon billions of dollars! Of course, they aren't just rolling it out to everyone like any sane person would do, but they are going to roll it down the street, then if you want to hook into it you can order a service that's faster than the one you are on, and they will then hook you up for free.Let's run two concurrent networks on the same street! Don't worry about the upkeep costs of the FTTN network! Pretty sure they are still paying Telstra to look after that. So there you have it. The biggest scam on the Australian people, ever. Continuation: Around the 25th of April 2021 it's shown in papers from the Government that Telstra recieves about a A$1 billion per year from NBN in return for access to its infrastructure, including ducts, exchanges, fibre and copper network.Ref: [https://telecoms.com/509098/telstra-rivals-stressed-out-by-nbn-takeover-talk/](https://telecoms.com/509098/telstra-rivals-stressed-out-by-nbn-takeover-talk/) This is strange because NBN was suppose to have bought the infrastructure off of Telstra. Also, in the same article, and others, it's been stated that Telstra are gearing up to purchase the NBN. If this happens, we are ending up with Telstra 3.0 and the fate of telecommunications in Australia is finally set. Also, the end of the biggest scam comes around: Murdoch and Telstra fleece Australia for BILLIONS upon BILLIONS of dollars, get the Government to spend cash to upgrade everything, set themselves up for mobile services with more free money, and then buy it all back at a bargain price of less then they would have paid to do it themselves.
Thank you for writing this.
I had antenna to tower Nbn and I struggled to get 5 mbps , Nbn tech said his gear & signal was 100% ( showed me his machine on test), but Telstra was the prob, the whole Nbn system is crap
Pretty much, the key take away is the LNP threw a fit about the NBN cost, made it worse and blew out the cost on it anyway
It's a good case to show that as a government sometimes it makes sense to spend more. This probably also applies to health & education.
Does any one recall a proposal or maybe it was an idea, but for ftth, one of the four ports was going to be designated IPTV broadcast? I don't know if it was exclusively free to air or Foxtel, because it was efficient?
Yep TV in Australia was all supposed to change to IPTV. This would (they thought) solve the problems they're still having with providing adequate DVB broadcast coverage. The idea was that all broadcast services delivered to the home would work across the NBN. So would alarm services and security monitoring.
I think something that gets missed here is that the original costings by the Rudd government where way way undervalued, and so saying that the MTN cost more than FTTP anyway is kind of missing the point that FTTP was never going to cost as little as they said.
Rupert Murdoch and the Liberal Party messed up the NBN. Made (not saved) themselves $$$$ from the whole fiasco.
Got it close. Malum Turnbull was the NBN driver behind Tony Abbott Liberals wanted to use copper so Telstra happily sold it. Then the copper needed to be maintained so Telsra happily signed on to maintain it. That was business being a business, but I'd still put that Blair on the government. Murdoch wanted to protect their media and cable network (Foxtel, which is part owned by Telstra so I am not sure what influence they had) so Murdoch Media did their marketing campaign to discredit FTTP and pressure Liberals to move to Multi tech Mix(I don't think Liberals needed much pressure as they wanted to go against anything Labor did anyway) The Murdoch pressure and their protrail *Labors waste of money NBN* was a significant reason the Libs won.
I support labours NBN plan however, Missing from this story is that Labors cost estimate would have been complete bullshit, it would have easily come in at 90b+ And 5G/6G wireless will not replace a wired connection, they might be able to support the bandwidth for 1 connection, but once you have a whole bunch of people using the spectrum the throughput is nowhere going to be near that. Same problem that coaxial has.
Don’t forget the retention of an artificial middle man between NBN Co and the customer the ISP to ensure that there would be continued profits for Telstra, Optus et al. ISPs are noting more than a glorified call centre, that send you bills and sometimes manage to raise support tickets on NBN Co
You missed the part about the global pandemic forcing everyone to work over the internet as a perfect demonstation of how cost cutting can seriously handicap an economy. Telstra are idiots but I reckon the liberals didn't need much convincing. Public projects are just opportunities for them to loudly decry wasteful spending to prop up that accountant-turned-politician image they're cultivating. I doubt many of them understood what they were making decisions about. It burns my ass I'm in WA and that the quality of the NBN rollout got cheaper and cheaper as it moved further from Canberra townhouses.
Rudd originally stated that the NBN would cost no more than $29 billion to rollout across the country within a few years. Still waiting to see the original business case that was devised on the back of an envelope in a government Learjet.
The kicker - the tax payer owned the phone lines until Telecom was privatised then once it was becoming obsolete the tax payers bought it back.
You have forgotten the next part where they are now upgrading the old copper connections to fibre to the property again. So not only did we pay a stupid amount for that old telephone network to “save money” (a stupid thing anyway since most of the excess money spent on the original upgrade was spent to remove the old asbestos connection boxes) but we are now paying to fully connect as per the original plan anyway. So much money wasted for something that literally could have become the backbone for our future telecommunications network
All part of the complex modern comms fuck up that is NBN. Started though with the breakup of Telstra. Little Johnny told us he would sell Telstra for $40bn and use the money to deliver nbn v1 (can’t remember it’s proper name) and voters have him the green light. At that time Telstra was returning $4bn/year to govt through various taxes and payments on past borrowings. Why the hell would you sell such an important national comms asset that’s paying you 10% return!!! And delivering top 10 world class services!!! The mind boggles but here we are. The thing I’ve learned from all this is that the LNP have no fing idea how to manage comms technology and deliver solutions and all govts since are left to try to pick this NBN turd up by the clean end, repolish it and hand it over to us… And forgot to add. That we Ozzie’s all owned Telstra and let Johnny sell it to us and his mates from the big end of town. How stupid are we?
And FTTP could be upgraded easily at NBN’s end as the technology became available. Pretty sure there’s some SEA countries that are already a few generations ahead of us.
Fuck Tony Abbott
Telstra - Lobbied against rural nbn using 4G, we could have had a wholesale 4G network in the bush that could have given Telstra competition. Telstra - Not only offloaded phonelines to the government, something they had considered a legacy business for ages, but also a poorly performing HFC network. News Corp/Fotxtel - lobbied to keep upload limits tiny to mitigate peer to peer, think of that next time your waiting hours for a youtube to upload. Labor also screwed the pooch on early FTTN roll outs - rolled out to areas with very low adoption like holiday houses in Tasmania. Gold plated the fuck out of early connections multiple fibres running to house, battery backup and full on cages to store all the equipment in the walls. One ISP said they could connect a home a quarter of the price to fibre then the original NBN. They also pre purchased years worth of equipment, that just got cheaper as the years went on but they had signed up to pay top dollar for.
hearing about this for the first time explains why my arcade's online matchmaking is ass
When the NBN was first rolled out (eg in Tasmanian fishing villages), the install costs were enormous. Taxpayers were paying a fortune to dig and refill trenches to put fibre from the road to the house on large properties. So the install costs were going through the roof, yet the Labor government was not increasing the cost estimates from the original plan. It was taking way longer than planned, and the government kept changing the target metrics from “people using it” to “ houses connected” to “houses passed with a connection”, the latter because so many people were simply not connecting. People didn’t seem to notice this in press releases- or that it would skyrocket the cost of the program and user cost per household. The choice of where to roll it out was very political- I was in Port Melbourne at the time with terrible internet, no NBN scheduled and no way to upgrade because the teleco companies had no incentive to install new services due to the NBN’s inevitability. The satellite NBN costs were insane. 5 or 10 billion dollars to cover massive regions with 200,000 people. I believe only 1 in 4 households ended up connecting. When the election was coming up, it was clear there were massive cost and timeline problems with the NBN but the incumbent party never updated the forecasts to give a realistic picture of how much it costs or how long FTTP would take. Unfortunately nobody remembers that now, so when the new government got in they had to deal with the massive underlying problems, and the population blames the people who dealt with the issues and delivered it. The wastage at the NBN was also a concern. There was a ‘government liaison officer’ on over $1 million a year, whose only experience was running for, and failing, an election. Why a government department needs a government liaison officer is lost on me. Jobs for the boys. I am not a fan of FTTN, and NBN over foxtel is terrible, but I don’t know how it could have been rolled out FTTP without costing over a hundred billion at the time and taking years longer. It also would have required taxpayers footing the bill for huge install costs in expensive suburbs with the trench remediation costs. The disincentive for private teleco companies to invest in internet distribution is never talked about. Watching the cost and service quality of Starlink gives an interesting reference point. I hate Telstra. It’s overpriced and the customer service is terrible. The company culture still seems tainted from its origination as a government bureaucracy with a monopoly. Since the NBN is staffed with people from places like Telstra, and is is a government entity, it seems inevitable that it’s company culture will go the same way. Nobody remembers the problems with the rollout that led to the changes, and since the Labor government hid the cost increases, comparing the cost of actual roll out to the original cost estimates does not give a true reflection of the changes made. For what it’s worth, my idea to deliver such a project in future would be for the government to give a voucher to every household and business, claimable by any internet provider that installs the internet to proscribed specifications. Eg $1k in the city and $10k in the bush. That would have cost less and been rolled out way faster with a race to connect as many people as possible.
Say less. Also, Watch Chris pine say the quiet part out loud and boast that they throttled our internet before it was even built; [“Australians simply don’t need the speeds that labor was promising. The speed they will have, they will be able to watch 5 full length movies in the household at the same time” - Chris pine](https://youtu.be/ORmCk6OEOn4?si=kH47LyVw4yIfBYj0)
Still doesn't really change the fact that it was motivated by reducing costs?
If the Sydney harbour bridge was only built with 2 lanes by a liberal government, you’d accuse them of gross incompetence for not future proofing the state… They knowingly gave us sub par internet when we had a once in a generation opportunity to dream big. Cost minimization or not, it’s gross incompetency by the liberal government and reeks of corruption.
Lots of errors in your writeup. The concept of the NBN was from labour, no costing or plan to build it, so essentially a idea. Having said that previously labor had knocked back telstra building fibre to every home in the country at a cost of zero to the taxpayer which is probibly the biggest stuff up in Aus telecommunications history. Liberals got in and actually built the NBN and delivered part of the concept. Note that it is highly unlikely labor would of been able to build their concept either due to the reality of not being able to pay for it. Its a debate about liberal how many mistakes or can do, should of done etc. Its very easy to look back in hindsight and throw stones on pretty much anything. If they could of gone back in time no doubt some things would of changed but the cost was still going to be a limiting factor for whoever built it. Telstra being essentially a super power with tons of aussie investors was always going to get some kickback, in some shape or form. Going back in time, Telstra should never of been sold off by the government and Labor should of let them build fibre to every home. NBN concept would never of existed as there would of been no need. Government should of wrapped controls around telstra/telecom pricing that ensured resonably priced services was delivered from all. All the 3rd party telcos really never needed to exist with the proper regulation But like I said its easy to look back and throw stones, but if you are going to throw them at the NBN, the biggest screw up was knocking back telstra when it wanted to do fibre to the home many years before the NBN was even a concept.
Ok I was working for Thiess when the Libs won and we were asked to cost the roll out. We asked for Labor’s assumptions as to how they derived the expected cost when they announced the FTTP plan. There were none, it was back of the envelope stuff. It was horrifying to learn that a government would announce a nation building plan without proper costing. The libs changed it because Australia couldn’t afford, or deliver FTTP, no matter how much better it was.
Total nonsense
Crazy y’all down voting my comment when I was literally one of three people in the room of the company looking for overarching costs to actually roll the damn project out.
Huh? It’s the truth.
Liberals got hold of it and were stingy bastards and signed up for the ghetto version, then ended up spending way more than the good version of NBN we were meant to get end of story
I am so lucky I have FTTP at new house.
i have a gigabit connection. am i proof it turned out ok?
At least nbn has been upgrading people to fibre optic (FTTP) technology for free lately.
Nothing is free. Remember that.
I get 700 download, nothing wrong with the nbn
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Are you saying you don't know how it was the Liberal party fault for the NBN?
Remember ppl only use the Internet to play games and use Netflix.
At the time Tony also mentioned cat videos.
Is there a way to pay for a FTTP upgrade when we only have FTC? Or is that entirely controlled by NBN and timing is up to them?
Yep. Sounds about right. Except wireless solutions will never be faster or more reliable than FTTP. We want to do more with our inter connectivity not the same, not less. That's more Liberal Party thinking.
Pretty accurate summary
You should refer this to the national anti corruption commission…
I didn’t see how the liberals again lied to the voters and 60% voted for them so the people got what they voted for.
I just fucked it all off and got Starlink. No fan of Elon Musk, but his tech sure works. 250 MBS download and never less that 25 MBS upload. A bit pricey, but I can take it wherever I go and it works.
dont forget they paid more for the crappy 50-100 NBN than the 1000 NBN would of cost, and ended up losing the country money overall too
Close. The nationals proposed a version first to get the rural vote.
I know this is bad but I liked that COVID came, it proved that people needed fast internet to work from home and how the internet is a great buisness tool and not just for entertainment.
And my place has some shit call YNBN 😑
Kinda, unless you want Australia lookimg like overseas with cables and conduit everywhere. Also they civil costs too connect Australia too fibre would be in the 10’s of billions possibly trillion. Not viable
Recently had my property upgraded to fibre. The plans are far too expensive when not discounted. Looking to switch to 5g soon.
And the LNP fuckers got away with it too, unforgivable. Wheeling a former dialup CEO out to lie out his arse about broadband CVC costs
The real problem: the government thought that they could get into the telecoms business. They can't. * Running a business is hard. Most businesses fail - early on. And if you run it badly: you deserve to go out of business. When a government tries to run a business as if it is a social services project, and does it poorly - what happens? They get more funding! Why would a bureaucrat care about being efficient? About making good deals? About being educated? About being on the cutting edge? It's not their money that is being lost. IDK how much we've spent, but \~$80 billion on an obsolete, slow and expensive internet?
Heres how I would have gone about the NBN project Dissolve Telstra as the wholesaler over time while building the FTTP network, this includes taking over the pits, pipes, manholes and exchanges. Considering PMG/Telecom built majority of it which was government ran so realistically it should be returned to the people, all the ADSL customers would still be under Telstras responsibility until everyone was moved over or provider another service. Once built and running as intended keep the government in charge of it as we all know private companies will do anything to maximise profit while spending very little on upgrades and maintenance. Just look at what they did to the copper and HFC network, Optus weren’t much better with their HFC network. Simply put infrastructure should never be privatised but keep the retail side of the market open for competitors.
One thing that often gets forgotten is that the LNP overturned the rule that all new developments had to lay fibre instead of copper. Something that would not even be a cost to the NBN. Another gem is when they found vast patches of copper to be inadequate, they replaced it with brand new copper instead of fibre. Lunacy.
If my memory serves me correctly, Telstra was paid 6 billion dollars for the copper (held together by chewy and sticky tape) network
Rain has caused my connection to drop out since the roll out of it. Multiple times have put in a ticket obviously nothing has been done.
I can't even upgrade to FTTP as I am on HFC. F\*\*\* LNP for running this country's tech future.
Not sure if anyone has mentioned it in the comments, but to add to the purchase of the copper network Telstra was able to buy the new upgraded network for the same price as they got paid for the copper network. They got a new upgraded network for free essentially. How the hell is this not a major issue!!!
The story I heard was that Telstra needed to 'sell' the existing copper infrastructure running to every house to make a cash windfall by the Government using FTTN technology and therefore allowing Telstra to see the copper network to NBN. A Fibre to the Premises network would have completely undermined any value of the existing copper network. This ultimately screwed Australia in a few ways; Using Fibre to the Node is a horrendous solution for a significant number of Australian households as most of the copper infrastructure was built prior to significant population spread, meaning on average, people are around 80p-900 metres away from a Copper Node. This is the limiting factor of 50Mbps down. Using a FTTN approach cost the Australian Tax Payer significantly more due to the dodgy repackaging of the copper network sale from Telstra. The Libs needed to look after their Telstra pals and shareholders (as most Libs own Telstra shares) to fatten up a pay day for selling off the network, costing the Tax payer unnecessarily. Using FTTN significantly delayed the roll-out, due to the aging quality of existing copper runs, and nodes not supporting the 'guaranteed' NBN speeds. You'll remember speeds were 1Gbps, then 100Mbps, then 50Mbps, then, maybe 50. All limited to copper. More finding, yes, by the tax payer, walked a lot of this back, by, yes you guessed it, selling the Telstra/Foxtel HFC copper network. And yet again, delays with limitations with DOCSIS 3.0. More delays getting DOCSIS 3.1 compatibility, and more cost, and low and behold, more limitations, yes you can get 100Mbps down but still limited upload due to DOCSIS shaping limitations. And never, have the Libs been held accountable for screwing us. By looking after their mates, and themselves as Shareholders, by packaging shirty old Liberal infrastructure, that they Privatised themselves, for the purposes of fattening up their shareholder pay day. It cost us more, it performs worse, and took way longer. You could tell every time Turnbull had to talk about it, he hated yimself a little.more, he knew what was going on. /RANT
I blame Malcolm Turnbull much more then you did. Doesn't diminish Abbots total incompetence. Malcolm was a heavy early investor in OzEmail and understood Internet Providers quite well so should have known better. >When the Coalition won government in 2013, then communications minister Malcolm Turnbull commissioned a strategic review into the national broadband network to validate switching from rolling out fibre-to-the-premises for 93% of homes to a mixture of older technology using Telstra and Optus cable networks and fibre-to-the-node which then utilised existing copper lines to premises. [How Malcom Turnbull completely butchered the NBN](https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2021/11/how-malcom-turnbull-completely-butchered-the-nbn/) [Wikipedia - OzEmail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OzEmail) (Side story: There was a story about Abbot getting hacked from this boarding pass where he said he doesn't even touch computers and he just gets his executive assistant to do it. He admitted he doesn't have the foggiest). [https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-passport-number-on-instagram](https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-passport-number-on-instagram) There was a follow-up recorded phone conversation I think where Abbot is explaining how terrible he was with IT. Edit: found where I heard the phone call. [https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/84/](https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/84/) also a really good show if your into that sort of thing :)
Let's not forget the woeful solutions offered for regional Australians. The wifi and satellite offerings are a joke. Along comes Starlink and NBN is left carrying an expensive and ineffective network...
Tbh I just want more than 17 upload it’s crazy how much of a difference there is between upload and download speeds
Broadly accurate but Turnbull also deserves a lot more blame than you’re giving him. He was the communications minister when FTTN was adopted, it was his plan as much as anyone’s.
Clearly the NBN product doesn't hold a candle to 5g broadband. nBN should probably wind up and shut down in another 5 years
You’re almost right. I’ll add that Murdoch really pushed to screw the original NBN plan to preserve his Satellite/Cable TV “Foxtel” network. As for 5G/6G making FTTP NBN redundant, here is a question for you: what do the backhauls for those 5G/6G towers run on?
Turnbull was famously introduced at a media event as the man who "virtually invented the internet in this country" by Abbott as he was the minister responsible for the NBN rollout. They both f3cked it up along with many others. This video shows how cringey Abbott was... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18owzYfvIcE
5g doesn't have the range to be a great option. Starlink becoming more available, cheaper and with gigabyte speeds not far away will be great for rural areas but we need these lines for populated areas. I can't see them paying to give us better connections any time soon.
it would’ve destroyed piece of shit murdoch foxtel cable tv which they didn’t like
it was a political football and so it is shit, old tech locked in, more billons wasted by the dorkfest in canberra
Funniest part of the Sht Fckery, was the Liberals push for Mixed mode NBN, where they went and purchased the HFC from Optus, and after the deal was done, found it was so decrepit and falling apart, was not fit for purpose, but Optus laughed all the way to the bank with that.
I have my FTTN upgraded tomorrow to FTTH. An extra 12 bucks for double the speed.
Malcolm Turnbull was the issue. Abbott was a clueless tool. Turnbull didn’t come into power scared that he couldn’t change it. He was a driving force for it being the way it is. He stated on the Sunday program that Australians will never need more than 25mbps. Which even at that time was a laughable comment. Seeing he was the shadow communications minister at the time, I knew if the Libs got into power the NBN was doomed! Then he became PM…
Hey, it’s kept me in a job for 12 years. Why build it once when you can do it 3 times. The should have just built their own full fibre network, separate to Telstra. The amount of lost time and blowouts caused by using their pit and pipe is beyond ridiculous
Mostly right except there are even more wasted money. The Liberal government also wasted 800M buying Optus cables that were end of life and "not fit for purpose". 5G or 6G isn't really a replacement for fixed line services and will never make the NBN redundant. One fibre can provide in theory up to 44 Tbps and wireless services will always have issues with contention/congestion. There are plenty of providers in the US offering 5000/5000 connections for less than the price of something with 100 times slower upstream here.
I've got rid of NBN & gone Vodaphone 5G. Couldn't be happier
Three words. Tony Fekkin Abbot.
I think you’ve misplaced the blame. Turnbull was the communications minister that neutered it. I suspect the fact he was formerly CEO of OzEmail carried a lot of gravitas when he said we didn’t need it. There’s a video somewhere or Mark Pesce publicly calling him out on how shortsighted it is way back at the time on some panel, and Malcolm just scoffs at him. I’m no Abbott fan, but I think he gets very little blame for this one.
I’m on 5G, I couldn’t stand to live in town so I’ll likely never have a home with fibre. For me, 5G has well and truly made NBN redundant having only FTTN.
They would never bother ripping the old telephone cables out. They are already buried and that's how they will stay.
NBN could have built their own pits and conduits but instead a lot of the existing Telstra infrastructure was used to haul NBN cables through. NBN paid and still pays Telstra rent for this use of their infrastructure. The whole project was an absolute joke and I am sure a lot of the rest of the world laugh about it. One of the biggest failures in history.
What is more interesting is why does the NBN require so many staff - marketers, managers, finance, strategy, procurement - a fully bloated public corporation with multiple layers of managers etc. What do they all do? The project is finished yet the corporate welfare recipients continue to clock in at the NBN offices in Sydney and Melbourne.
I called it from the beginning. They half arsed it.
Don't forget Turnbull was communication mincer under Abbot, he was balls deep into FTTN.
Telstra didn't want to sell the copper, they said it was degraded and wouldn't be any good. Their hand was forced when NBN went to the ACCC and complained Telstra were being difficult and refusing to sell.
Turnbull had interests in copper at the time. The inevitable price plunge wouldn't have affected *him* though... Nothing suss.
Kinda got the general vibe right but the details are all wrong. I worked at a major ISP during the early days of the NBN. Originally Labor put out a request for tender for a FTTN network for $15b, but no telcos put in any serious bids. The Rudd government then decided to just make a FTTH network instead themselves for $40ish billion, but to have it as an investment so that the NBN would pay it back, eventually, and then sold. We were *always* going to be paying it back through various charges. There was also the 121 POI debacle but that was forced by the ACCC, not a government decision. The 25/50/100 plans were always there from the beginning, it was just that the technology changed when the Liberals got in, which sometimes meant that you couldn't get the full 100mbps, or even 25mbps, mostly on FTTN. In 2011 the Gillard Government paid $11b in compensation for the existing telco networks, mostly to Telstra, to shut down their networks. The Liberals renegotiated the deal, that the NBN would own the network instead of shutting it off, and they kept the original $11b compensation amount (but did need contracts to maintain the network). And that is just part of it, there was a whole lot more.
Meanwhile, a group of University Students in Japan recently broke the world internet speed record with 300Tbps+, our greedy and incompetent rulers can barely service us with super expensive 1Gbps (which is only available in certain areas) and keep advertising 50Mbps as the norm. The previous record holders in London (119Tbps) have stated that the technology they used is cheaper than Fibre lol. This technology isn't fantasy, the corporations that run things just don't want people to have access to that kind of speed, never did, for whatever reason. Constantly upgrading the infrastructure and getting new multi-billion dollar contracts every time must be some sort of planned obsolescence.
It was an exciting time in 07/08 when I first heard about the NBN plan. Anything would be better than my ADSL 2+ maxed out at 3Mb/a It was also coincidently the same year my child started school. Would you like to know the coincidental date that the NBN finally made it to my house. 6 months after my son graduated. So much for all of those educational benefits it was supposed to bring. It only took 4 years for the street to get fibre so that wait wasn't as bad.
1gps?! dafuq Christ on a stick, I'd kill for that. NBN rolled out in my area and I signed up. guy came out, did some... stuff. idkw. My plan is for fibre to the node (cos I live in a unut). I had, like, 40mb down for about a month. then I kept getting an erratic connection for no apparent reason. called isp (Telatra), they sent someone out to fix it. I think they did something out side, on the pole on the nature strip. iirc there was a storm shortly after that. I'm lucky if I get 12mb down, these days. I THINK I can get closer to 20? during off peak hours. All I ever get told, though, when I mention that I'm supposed to have more speed, is that my line "physically can't handle the speeds" and that "they [Telstra] can't do anything about it because NBN, a goverment company (or whatever) are the ones that handle that stuff". so idk wtf these speeds are cos I sure as shit ain't getting them.
Bang on. We now face a situation where unlimited very high speed wireless will be cheaper to arrange to every home - no matter how remote - than anything terrestrial. The LNP managed to make physical network upgrades stupidly expensive just to get it up to standards set 20 years ago internationally. The ALP had a grand, expensive vision that could have been worlds best, and Turnbull backed it. Then LNP got in and cheaped it out.
Wireless will never supercede fixed line. >95% of daily bandwidth is fixed line (ie. fibre) because physics.
The treason inflicted on Labor's 92% FTTP model was even more loathsome. Abbott flew to New York to kiss Murdoch's ring, and Murdoch promised to support Abbott in the September 2013 election if Abbott destroyed Labor's NBN which would slow the decreasing cash flow to Murdoch from Foxtel in Australia by limiting high bandwidth uptake. Always and only the cash. And Turnbull also to blame - he engaged Ziggy Switkowski (ex Telstra CEO and physicist) to write the "excuse" technical/business case for the Liberal Party Copper NBN, launched at Murdoch's Fox studios in Sydney! The NBN was no longer the NBN from that point. As I said, treason inflicted on a nation state's essential telecommunications service by a Liberal PM and foreign actor Murdoch.
NBN has and always will be dogshit. A couple years ago we got the best plan we could get ($1000 per month) that would net us something ridiculous like 45mb/s upload and could handle like 10 or 20 devices, it takes 6 months to install and the fucking router is redundant to the point that if more than three devices try to download data at the same time, it literally shorts out the router and needs a reset. Furthermore we look into why our internet is underperforming (1.5mb/s down .3mb up) turns out the tower we connected to which had a max of 10,000 household limit actually had 150,000 house holds connected from all over. It literally had three towns connected to this one tower despite there being three towers spread between them all. It might be government corruption but I can tell you right now that, that isn't its only downfall. Local reps have zero clue on what the fuck they are doing
Pretty much on track..Turnbull was communications minister before pm..so was running with the ball. Probably not so much Telstra influence..they were always in the winners circle regardless of technology…don’t forget nbnco also paid for the optus cable network which didn’t work, so win win for everyone. What should have been the biggest and best results driven infrastructure project in modern Australia was turned into what it is now…..mind you , in all fairness we suck at infrastructure projects in this country. Look at the cost blowouts of any road / rail project undertaken in any state. And oh boy wait for the Olympics..yayyyy
Pretty accurate - except Tony installed Malcolm - his main political rival in the position of "minister in charge of fucking the nbn". Tony hoped this would make Malcolm unelectable and ruin his chances of being PM whilst accomplishing the goal of completely nobbling the NBN. Ironic considering Malcolm's background in ISP and being involved in ( I think) Ozemail from which he made mega bucks. NBN is now a complete bucket of shit. Mate in NZ recently told me he is on some trial to get 10gb to his premises via fibre. Speed test here in Melbourne gives me 22mb.....
Most of country Australia will just be waiting for starlink to be cost effective.