There’s cost-cutting on the way for NBN Co. New CEO Bill Morrow has pledged to stop excessive wastage for the fledgling national broadband network, and one area where there could be savings to be found is in the NBN end-user equipment actually delivered to customers’ homes — in short, you might have to pay for the modem that hooks you up to the Internet.
Image via Shutterstock
At the moment, when the NBN is hooked up to your house, it’s installed with a network termination device, and a battery backup is included. All you have to do is connect a wireless router to get high-speed ‘net throughout your house.
But, according to documents witnessed by the Australian Financial Review and circulated around the telco industry, a proposal from NBN Co to release itself from the end-user installation process would mean that if you want to get the NBN up and running, you’ll have to pay for the privilege.
If this proposal goes ahead at the national broadband installer, it will pass fees further down the line; NBN Co may offer an installation service at a cost to wholesalers and end users in the future, but for the time being, telcos like Telstra will need to supply their own modems which will need to be installed either by professionals or by the homeowner.
Telstra already charges an activation fee for its NBN service, but this change would bring the NBN into line with existing ADSL2+ connections — so you could be up for a couple of hundred dollars or more.
Backup batteries are also gone from NBN Co’s installation plans. The batteries, which provide power to NTDs in the case of a blackout — important, since phone calls and medical monitoring services are necessarily delivered over the NBN — were made mandatory with all installs under a Labor government directive. Since NBN Co won’t be supplying batteries, that directive will fall to ISPs.
At the end of the day, since NBN Co isn’t going to be shouldering the cost of these installations to homes and businesses, ISPs will pass on the cost to consumers. As a homeowner, you’ll have to pay to get your house hooked up with the NBN, as well as paying an ongoing cost for your high-speed Internet access. [AFR]
Comments
61 responses to “Soon, You Might Have To Pay For Your NBN Install”
paying for the inhouse stuff yourself makes logical sense unlike 99% of the liberal NBN “stratagy”
*quick unrelated question is there a way to change font size in these comments? i just feel that the quotation marks around the word strategy would better illustrate my point better if they were 4000 pixels tall
Only FTTH people need the battery backup and new equipment. FTTN (the new official plan) people don’t need to change anything.
Next step will be requiring you to gather together your neighbours and crowdfund a new fibre capable exchange in your suburb and then organise the whole city to crowdfund paying for the fibre to be laid between your city and the one place in your state capital that they’re bothering to connect.
And then they’ll charge you 3 times the cost of ADSL2 for 10GB a month, slowed to 64k when you go over, naturally…
I doubt it. I just wont get it at all. Adsl1 for the win!
yeah and they will just slowly shut down the old ADSL networks and force you onto the NBN and then make you pay even m ore because you refused to move over at the start….
You don’t get it. NBN is dead. The official plan is FTTN, which means zero change for end-users.
This is turning is a joke. They’re paying for it with tax from the public and then further taxing the public to pay for it again. It makes me angry(and I apologise for being somewhat ageist) that there are these friggen old crows in such technological positions who know diddly squat about people and current market trends and who also do not care at all for the younger generation they’re suppose to be building for. Worst of all, they think they’re doing GOOD work. I hand on heart what them to have their hands on their hearts as they all have simultaneous heart-attacks(Too far? I don’t care.).
EDITED: 9 tries before comment submitted. Kotaku, you need to raise this with IT. Commenting is not a complex task to script.
I know right? It’s like the comments section crashed a moped in Bali during the Easter down time and has never been the same since.
You need to calm down and do your research. The NBN isn’t funded by taxpayer money.
It’s not a budget item, and it is designed to pay for itself over time, but the initial money has to come from somewhere before revenue starts rolling in.
Then where do you suppose the money comes from? It is from taxpayers money. I am well aware that it will turn a profit though that was assuming it was going to be a great product. It is a shadow of its former self and MT has ruined it beyond recognition.
I really wish they would reimplement labors original plan. I guess while we’re at it I may go ride my unicorn.
It wasnt tax payers money… Under Labor, the government was taking out a loan to pay for the NBN and that loan was going to be repaid via the revenue from the NBN… totally 100% off budget and paid for by the actual users.
actually, it was government bonds…
I would be happy to pay the connection fee if It meant I actually got FTTP instead of some FTTN rubbish.
Indeed.
I’m actually ok with raising costs to the NBN user if it means we can actually start moving things forward in Australia, rather than doing everything as cheap as possible and continuing to wallow in the internet dark ages.
I’m not. I will flat our refuse to pay.
2/3rds of my town was done but my suburb alone was not because tony got in. Now I’m unlikey to get FTTP or even FTTN and will instead get some bastard copper again which will not perform at 15MB let alone 25 for more than a year before it gets degraded enough to give such a speed.
On top of this, instead of costing me the same as my normal internet +$10-20 for 50/100 MBPS speed instead of just 25 MBPS Its now going to cost me 2-3 times that with even less data because the profitable dense suburban areas have been given back to the corporate monopoly so NBN Co can’t afford subsidies in place to give Aussies a universal price.
Now on top of this they want me to pay extra to give me a shitty back up phone line (so I can call 000 in an emergency, which is basically a law that I now must pay the privilege for no matter how unlikely It is I will use or even need such a service). But now they want me to pay for practically the whole installation too boot? GET FUCKED.
I was the biggest supporter of the original NBN. I Argued against FTTN, I sent letters emails did petitions voiced my opinions every where I could but this right here, right now itsn’t and NBN anymore. It is a gross mismanagement of money and its sickening, I will fight these fuckers tooth and nail now.
You have my vote… And my axe.
My thoughts exactly.
x2, I’m not paying money for FTTN. might as well stick with ADSL2. Using the same shitty copper, just less of it.
Yep, I agree. We all really need to get off this high horse of “I deserve this for free because….”. I would be more then happy to pay to have NBN to my home as a FTTP. If the planned FTTN is rolled out, I won’t support it.
YES! Exactly! My suburb isn’t even on the map for the NBN rollout, so I have no idea when I was meant to get it, at least 5 years away since that’s how long the roll out map projected. If paying for it myself meant that I could get the NBN much much faster, then I’m all for it!
I believe a good solution to this whole NBN thing is something I heard previously, the government should roll out the FTTN as currently planned by the Government, then the end user can pay for FTTP at their own discretion.
This would improve the roll out speed greatly, and also remove much of the cost involved, while still providing an upgraded speed over both FTTN and FTTP.
I’d just like to point out the pure economic fact that upgrading individually from FTTN to FTTP would cost more than doing it in one service.
Then what about all the other houses between you and the node, after you’ve paid the lay 500m of fibre do they just cheaply pile on after the fact? Or do you now own the fibre for your entire street to rent out at your discretion?
All of those impracticalities before we even try to have a look at costs. But that should be easy, let’s just compare it to what Telstra charge if you want to replace the degraded copper from the exchange to your place….
Except that’s not a service they currently offer, I’m not sure if it’s just not economically viable or if they can’t be bothered but it’s not exactly promising.
Personally I’d guess that what would constitute a large public works project is just too expensive for most consumers.
And I didn’t even get to the argument about how putting the cost on that end consumer creates class divides between home owners and renters.
Agreed. If the libs had a user pays fibre to the home option in their policy, they may find they might actually get some support from the public….
…but they don’t, they went real quiet on this as soon as they got elected.
This is becoming a fucking joke. I hope every single liberal loses their fucking jobs over this because we are reaching critical mass already.
We are already getting a fucking butchered pos version that 100% is NOT adequate, will have to be ENTIRELY REDONE apon completion and 100% ignores uploads. Now areas remain uncompleted half finished on indefinite hold, we are having more and more cut backs which are all getting pushed onto the consumer and now we are going to have to pay for our own fucking installation when we already have working internet to boot
WHAT the fuck is the point then, this is supposed to be a god damn government initiative this shit they’ve pulled already has a large socioeconomic impact and they are just going to push this even further. The fucking cowards should have scrapped the whole shitty mess instead of giving us this half aborted franken baby NBN that is the most grievous waste of money I have ever seen in my life on this planet.
The current version is so horrible that it will not be self sufficient monetary wise and nor dioes it deserve to be, it will have massive spiraling debt and go under forcing the government to actually pay for it all all but crippling our economy in the process.
This entire government should be on criminal charges for the shit they are pulling and it makes me sick, words can not describe how out right unbelievable there actions have been, its the straw that breaks the camel. I will not support this idea anymore, we are so far removed from the entire purpose of the fucking NBN that we are better off entirely cutting our loses until a government with some fucking balls and an IQ above 90 to go with it.
I mean jesus christ the whole purpose of the NBN was to give UNIVERSAL access to high speed high quality internet both UPLOADS and down. both Rural and Metro. Where class race or wealth has no bearing. That the richy rich have the same connection as joe bob who earns minimum wage and to be of sufficient quality to bring Australia up as an IT destination for Start ups and other companies alike. So that new business opportunity’s can arise because the whole country has equal access to the NBN. On top fo this it was supposed to be universally priced for everyone instead of people get shafted because they happen to live in X area. Now we have a bastard mixture of 3/4 different services, 2/3 of which give ZERO improvement for uploads and are so pathetic for downloads they won’t even meet their own pathetic 25Mbps minimum will cost 2x as much as current broadband and even more for those not in the profitable areas because for some reason those rights have been sold off (giving more evidence to a financial inability to turn a profit when they can’t make money from the profitable areas to subsidies the rural).
I am truly, truly ashamed of our government.
Why doesn’t anyone have any understanding of how expensive the NBN is to implement? Australia needs to understand the fact that money doesn’t grow on tree’s and we pay 5 billion per year interest on Australian debt. It would be great if we had the NBN but unforgettably our country is too big and our population too small to make it practical (from a business point of view) If you understand that then maybe now you’ll understand why the liberals can’t implement this along with many other things… It would be great if we all got great services for cheap but the world doesn’t work that way, you cant just go borrowing huge amounts of money and live beyond your means or you’ll end up like Greece for christ sakes
@deadsilence Thats really not your business is it? Why should he not have access to it? Greater bandwidth allows access to so much more at a faster rate. Streaming lossless audio, actual hi def video etc. But if we adopt the idiots idea of “why cant you just have what we have always had…” why the hell do you need a car when a horse does the job just as well? Sure its a bit slower but it still gets you there right?
Ffs kotaku FIX YOUR DAMN COMMENTS
It is my business thank you I pay taxes and in the future i will be contributing to paying of this country’s debt and i don’t like the idea of doing that just so people can stream HD movies and play games with no lag. You want 22 billion spent so people can play games when some people in this country can’t get a hospital bed? Get your priorities right
Personally I’d rather no money was wasted on FTTN, as it will cost almost as much and give nowhere near the same benefit, not to mention the fortune that would need to be spent upgrading that system (before it’s finished) and the landfill from all those pointless nodes. At this point they should scrap the whole thing.
Just so you’re aware there wouldn’t be much benefit to gaming as we would still need local servers for games/ping.
The biggest loss by far is to the IT industry that could have started up here and the revenue that industry could have made. Now there is no chance of that happening. We missed the boat!
I love that you brought up the hospital bed idea.
Extremely fast reliable internet can allow specialists and doctors to consult on patients hundreds or thousands of kilometres away, there’s even research in robotic aids to allow surgeons to actually perform surgery from a remote location.
Particularly useful if you don’t like in a major city and the costs of commuting for treatments become prohibitive or an unfair burden.
Beyond that, if we need to upgrade from FTTN to FTTP in 5 years like the current NBN board member Zitowski suggests do you think it will be cheaper or more expensive than doing it once and saving on all the labour.
It’s vital infrastucture, invest in it and provide access to all.
Why is it, that a most people seems to think like you, that its just for home use (gaming and movies). Imagine if everyone had high speed fiber, call centers could shift work from the office to the home, just mail them an ip phone and software and let them log in from home to work and take calls. People could claim tax deductions and help our roads and environment by not having to travel to work and back. There would be countless other non direct benefits from having the NBN FTTP. You just need to get off this wagon of thinking that its just for games and movies.
Jobs could go national. Sydney firm having workers in WA, because location would no longer matter.
Almost every non-technical person I speak to about this doesn’t see the bigger picture you’re describing.
A lot of people still seem to think the internet is a luxury item for use as entertainment. In reality it’s as essential a service as electricity and is absolutely vital for business, education and health services as well as entertainment.
Basically every single person in the country is connected via the internet. How can they not work out that improving the infrastructure for that communication of information would not improve the performance of practically every sector of the economy?
You don’t need 100mpbs to do any of that, the only use for it is Multimedia
Only because most people assume that only 1 service or program is utilising the internet and thats how they calculate. When you account for your whole family and the fact that everything utilises more and more bandwidth as time goes on, it only makes sense to future proof. I can’t recall anything that needed upgrading later costing less than doing it properly in the first place.
You should stop posting because you clearly have no idea how I.T. works.
Your comment shows you understand even a single basic principle involved with the entire project so I wont go into much detail.
The entire thing needs to be done right, its going to cost us another $100 billion by 2025 when it needs to be redone and IT WILL NEED TO BE REDONE the fucking liberals even admitted it themselves.
The other aspect is that the government isn’t paying for the NBN, NBN co is. Its not going to cost us ANYTHING UNLESS IT FAILS TO BE SELF SUFFICIENT. They say uptake is already bad, what do you think happens when they start rolling out the super shitty hybrid and copper that is not even any different than a not insignificant amount of people can get anyway? That’s right it will tank even further. There is also the fact that now that NBN co can’t make a good chunk of money in the most profitable areas because Tony gave it away to telstra and its ilk to not piss them off, what do you think happens then? oh that is right every other tom dick and harry has to pay %30 more minimum, to recoup. Guess who is going to pay more for this craptastic service ? NO ONE.
So the end result is we have abysmally shite uptake numbers, people unwilling to pay the increased cost for a NBN without the NB and we are left with NBN co, who actually has the loan, unable to make its payments and whoops the government must step in and only then will the government ACTUALLY HAVE TO PAY. (and guess what happens then, our budget/economy hits the fucking fan)
So don’t go around patronizing someone who has a vastly superior understanding of the fucking topic and everything it encompasses. This course of action will gives us a shitty sub quality network that is not good enough for today’s use let alone 15 years from now. I mean it 10 years when it is done our network still wont even be on par with what a lot of Asian countries have right now, that’s messed up
The point is they need to abandon the whole project or do it once and do it right. This half assed bullshit is going to fragment the entire nations internet and fuck up everything for the next two decades.
Australia doesn’t have a spending problem, Labor barely spent more than the howard govt. We have a revenue problem, because the howard govt sold revenue producing assets for a one time windfall which made their books look great, and froze several duties from raising with inflation. Combine that with other revenue projection not meeting expectations, and “the labor govt had a spending problem, we need to fix it, rarara”.
We live in a AAA rated first world economy and don’t make shit. We need to invest in being an information based economy. The LNP are doing the exact opposite.
As I replied to another…. the NBN was meant to be “self funding”…. Labor’s government was using a LOAN to pay for the NBN and the loan was going to be re-paid by the revenue from the NBN…. not a single cent of taxpayers money was to be used and it was 100% off budget. Just go’s to show how Liberal lies fooled everyone.
What are you on about? NBN isn’t even funded by tax payers and in no way is that related to our government debt. Even if that is expensive, and I am not sure that it is, none of your money is going into it (unless you invest in government bond then thats another story).
FYI the Australian Government debt is one of the lowest in the developed world and economists generally agree that there is nothing to be worried about, stop listening to Liberal bs and do your own reading on this.
Out of curiosity what do you NEED 100mbps for?
Pirating stuff, that’s all people want it for – pirating movies and tv shows in full hd. It’s got almost zero to do with a proper business or socially beneficial motive – it’s to be more reckless pirates. I guarantee that everyone who has ardently supported the NBN has a pirating agenda or has pirated stuff in the past. They are full of s**t when they say they NEED it or that it will do blah blah blah and that it’s fair and equitable. Most people don’t need to stream their pirated porn in HD, you f**king a**holes.
When internet speed isn’t congested and we are able to supply decent speeds without charging stupid amounts of money for it, we might actually get Data Centers that can support servers for Games, Companies, Small Business startups etc..
Imagine if a small startup company is able to purchase a cloud Server from a Data Center that handles all their business needs. The new business would save Thousands of Dollars in start up fees that it may not of even had. Then you have these data centers start popping up that are now able to supply the bandwidth a company needs without charging a arm and a leg. All of this new money would then be taxed and the government would make its share.
Who knows Australia might even tap into this Multi BILLION dollar industry we call IT. So “what do you NEED 100mbps for?” a rather simple question really.
Need to download the Game of Thrones finale before spoilars appear from the US.
Maybe I don’t like having my computer running 18 hours a day because my downloads take forever. Maybe I would like to stream some HD content and I mean HD not the BS shrunk compressed mono sound nonsense you get everywhere, while my family member is watching youtube and someone is playing online.
Maybe I don’t want it to take 2 hours to upload a 1 minute HD clip to youtube. Maybe I want to be able to have an actually skype session in HD. Maybe I want to have my xbox games like dead rising be playable whenever I want instead of waiting 2 days to download a 20Gb patch. Maybe I want to download a game digitally at launch without it takeing 72 continuous hours to download the 50GB.
Just fucking maybe I want my connection to be actually usable by more than 1 person at a god damn time.
Get a clue for christ sake, 20 years ago dial up was “enough”, now you can’t evne open a webpage with REAL dial up because a single picture or banner has so much data it just times out.
You think 25MPBs is going to cut it in 15 years when the NBN gets finished? Shit I want 100 MB right now, WTf am I going to do stuck on 25 by 2030?
You need to seriously get a clue.
Don’t forget pirate Game of Thrones. Its un-Australian if you don’t.
oh no! you have to wait to download stuff?!?!? hahahahhaha go and spend some time outside or get a girl friend
Or maybe somebody runs a business (for example multimedia) that requires uploading and downloading huge amounts of data. I know several folk who work with international clients who need this kind of connection, one of which was promised NBN where their office lies but since the Liberals came into office, have been wiped off the rollout. Their business has suffered for it. This is why a LOT of people were excited for the NBN. This is partially why it was being built in the first place (as @kingpotato previously stated.)
You’re posting on a gaming website you dumb arse. YOU should go spend some time researching how infrastructure affects economic/social development. Then you can bend over for you local LNP member you voted for.
Legal streaming while my housemate/s are doing the same or equivalent stuff. Our adsl2 with 4.5 down and 0.8 up doesn’t cut it now, let alone in 5-10 years.
The whole IT industry puts it’s hand up when you said “what do you NEED 100mbps for?”
Downloading and uploading media from servers and cloud solutions, often I need to resort to mailing HDDs at the moment or other physical delivery options for my film related work.
The download would be useful, but what is vital is a greatly improved upload rate which is impossible on pretty much any ADSL system.
As is it can take hours to upload a few basic overly compressed proofs, lots of workflows just aren’t available because of the delays they cause. As I mentioned the physical postal service will actually beat it out.
I also do a lot of legal paid for streaming, gaming etc which is a hobby I pay for and can be bandwidth intensive. At the moment I live alone so my limited ADSL2+ bandwidth is enough for those needs.
But what happens when I start living with a partner and we both have our discrete consecutive needs? And we have a couple of kids who want to use it as well?
@deadsilence I don’t need the 100mbps downstream….
I need the 40mbps upstream
Our business is transitioning to more cloud-based services to allow our employees, who are dotted around the country, access to files and emails from anywhere in the country. My 100/40 connection will allow us to move vast amounts of data to the cloud scores faster than an ADSL connection can.
While ADSL is fine for uploading/downloading a handful of pdf documents, the initial move of data, plus any large amounts of offline backups mean that we need the connection to be fast.
At the moment, we have employees in ACT that need to send an initial 40GB of data up to me in QLD (to set up their cloud storage) because it takes me hours instead of days to upload because of my FTTP connection.
My maths may be a bit wrong but….
40GB @ 0.65 Mbps (Their upload speed) – 140 hours
40GB @ 39.12 Mbps (My upload speed) – 2 and a half hours
While the general (read Liberal) arguement is that the NBN will only be used for Pirating, Porn and other illegal activities, it actually provides benefits in cloud services, reliable data-based communication and yes gaming in the way of e-commerce. The economic benefits to FTTP far outweigh the frankly pathetic excuses against it.
If the NBN was left unchanged (or some productivity and efficiency changes to speed it up enacted), it would very quickly provide a substantial benefit to the country, not just from ROI when its paid off its loans, but also the substantial strengthening of our digital economy through increased capabilities and less costs through an internet backbone not controlled by a private monopoly (if I can get a 100/40 NBN connection for less than my old ADSL connection then I think that speaks for itself)
Typical Labor supporter. Blaiming the Liberal party for the NBN’s issues. The NBN was f**ked long before Liberal came to power. The original plan was great, but none of you Labor fans seems to understand AT ALL that the Labor party COMPLETELY botch the implementation of that plan. The roll out was running more than 5 years behind schedule!!!! The first schedule had the entire NBN rolled out by 2020, then the first revision to the plan pushed that back to 2025, then a third revision pushed it out further.
Bad rollout of a good product or bad rollout of a substandard product?
I know which I’d prefer.
Hell if the liberals just came in and improved on the bloody rollout most people here would be singing their praises, if they can do it better, faster and cheaper that’s fine. If they can do it better and cheaper but slower… I’d also accept that but would personally prefer just better and faster.
Of course we’re getting it worst and more expensive, I have my doubts it will be any faster either.
Shock horror – a business is requiring its users to pay the cost of the service they are providing! Who knows where this ‘paying for stuff you want instead of forcing others to pay it for you’ shenanigans might end up?!?!
I have no problem paying for a router, or hell, even paying for the technician to feed the fibre into my home (when they connected my home it was just digging a small trench in the garden and piping the cable over to the house). The benefit of fibre to the home (FTTP) far outweighs the couple of hundred dollars to get connected.
My issue would be paying for a technician to just put in some more useless copper, to then have them come by in 5-10-20 years time to finally have fibre connected.
If its ‘user pay’ then I want it to be cost effective (ie do it right the first time)
How outrageous! Next they will want us to pay for the internet we use, as well!
Wait… Don’t we currently pay for both already?
If you voted for Abbott you can attribute some of the blame for our ever shittier NBN to yourself.
Doesn’t a form of this already exist with developmental costs for building asphalt roads on residential dirt roads? most people fork out the money for it since it increases the market likability of their properties, maybe in the digital future the houses with NBN fibre will have a marketable edge.
I’m not supporting the idea, infrastructure costs should definitely be left up to the Government, i’m just saying it might not be a money sink.
Those batteries are pretty potent too. We had an electrical issue at my house and were missing power to a portion of the house for 24 hours. I was browsing online for several hours (I think about 6 hours although the power had been out for anywhere up too 8 before that) when I heard a weird shrill alarm went to check and discovered my modem was almost out of batteries 😛 didn’t even know it was running on batteries the whole time ^_^. I figured when they told me about the battery it would be a 20 minute thing or something not half a day.
4k porn.
you suck kotaku get your comment section fixed.
I just want a decent internet connection. I don’t even care. I’ll fucking pay. I’ll call the erratic chaos lord we call a communications minister and personally pledge to kiss him on the rosebud while dressed as his high school PE teacher if he likes. Just let me have some decent goddamn service.
That’s extremely mang. Just move
Countries.
I did. I spent seven years paying $40 a month for uncapped, unlimited fibre to the home and now I’m dying.
Coming home weirds me out sometimes, but not in ways you’d expect. This is one of them. Why can’t I just use the internet?! Why is it so expensive? Why are there so many weird limits on it? Why is geoblocking so terribly restrictive?
I need to fix this fast.
The most important thing about the NBN is quite simply this:
The mining boom is over, the dollar is too high and manufacturing is dead.
Where then are we supposed to make money?
Service industries? How do we compete with India and most of Asia, which is rapidly developing cheap call centers hooked to VOIP technologies?
We could try to innovate in Tech….. except most of Asia already has fibre networks connecting their metro areas. We could make our entire country into a giant fibre network linking every home, and allowing anyone to start the next billion dollar online service from home… Except the government has basically cancelled that idea. But don’t worry, You can still work in food production if you’re one of the approximately 200,000 people that industry can support, and if you can work around the current drought conditions.
Frankly I’m surprised the rest of the world hasn’t figured this out and made the dollar/housing bubbles crash yet.
When your 3D graphic’s business (that your running from home) needs to download a clients 5Gb file to work on and you dont want to wait 4 hours for it. Which you can then upload back to them without it taking 14 hours. It’s not all about the download….
Paying for copper wire? thanks Abbot.
Take my $500-$1K and connect my house to my exchange that already has fibre setup for other suburbs it services. It’s been years and this exchange already services a number of suburbs now, just not mine, The council even dug up the sidewalks in my street last year for power and didn’t tell NBN so we are no where in the next 1-3 years plan still.
Pathetic, I could care less about a few hundred dollars but just get it done quickly and right even if have to pay something myself. I’d save that money within months of it being installed.
My girlfriends brother is working for one of the rollout companies. And they’ve been stagnant for over a year. There is no money, they aren’t doing any work because all their rates were based on outdated documentation (and these changes were during ALP days) so have been trying to find a way out of the head contract.
Add to that there is nowhere near the required labour to install this thing. Scrounging for any man with a bobcat and an excavator bit attached.
Like the BER it’s a complete farce.
Delete.
Delete
It amazes me how limited and black and white some people are in their thoughts of how much FTTP and 100/40 speed options will benefit Australian industry, corporations, small business and individuals. FTTN is a joke. Yes its costs money to make a great thing happen and it needs to happen so find a way to do it right despite the scary costs.
The internet continues to evolve rapidly… it used to be just for browsing and downloading but it is rapidly changing along with our usage where upload speed is just as if not more important for users than download speed, comparing what we have now on adsl2+. We are now in an age and moving more so every day where personal and business users are interacting with content over the Internet not just downloading content like in the past.
To say its just for pirating and HD media downloads is simply short sighted. Of course some personal users will benefit from such speeds for this sole purpose…. so lets not build it for this reason and minority at the sacrifice of the rest of Australia’s technological advancement opportunities.
How many users from vast sectors dream of being able to upload the latest high resolution photo and in particular video content to users and clients… be it research reports, service reports, proofs, among many, many more possibilities. Its just not feasible today on average adsl2+ speeds to spend hours waiting for 1 file to upload (and if it fails anytime during that time to start over again). Downloading the same content on the other end is also important. Solution – put any 1 hour long video into the old snail mail system on a DVD disk instead and wait a few days for the client to receive it. Progress? I think not!
This is just one example of the major advancement of how 100/40 speeds will change the way many of us work. How much faster response and turnaround times can be compared to how we do it now. How many more can you think of for the work you do?
Or another way of looking at the big picture…
Dial Up and then ADSL allowed the world to communicate via email. EVERYONE in business today uses email as a main form of communication with its employee’s and customers.
ADSL then allowed us to attach small things efficiently to our business emails increasing productivity with supporting documents.
Fibre is the next generation of communication eliminating current obstacles and creating a world of new opportunities to be more productive and achieve tasks we want to do today but can’t along with so many more new concepts and ways to do things going into the future.
If they do it right with FTTP then in 10 years business and individuals will wonder how we ever got by on ADSL.