Is this typical?

Not sure if a cable dragger is the best person to design a multi billlion $ network. Or how he did his costings.
I do recall articles on how the lowest layer of subbies could not cover their costs on the rates they paid. I suspect their are too many layers of sub contractors all adding a % markup. But i say that with no empirical evidence.

Bought a smart TV today and hooked it up to the NBN router. Now to see what it can do. Might get Netflix.

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Originally Posted by DiscoMick

A friend who actually installs the NBN reckons the contractors are charging the NBN up to 10 times what it actually costs to install. He also thinks nodes and copper are junk and fibre was the only way to go.
On that basis, it might have been cheaper for taxpayers to have had the NBN hire a bunch of fulltime staff and send them around the country doing the installs area by area. Once finished they could then have moved on to maintenance. However, the outsourcing model adopted seems to have increased the cost, rather than being the best value for money. Interesting argument.

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Copper is good for 1000Mbps and is cheaper to install. There is an upgrade path so, if you want faster, you can pay the extra to upgrade to fibre.
Given you only purchased the 10Mbps plan and given 100Mbps is the current fastest available NBN plan, paying the extra for fibre is money better spent elsewhere. That is an even better argument.

Given that the NBN was designed in concept by the good folk who bought us pink batts and school halls whether you want them or not, we are stuck with this turkey.
However much could be done with the pricing, to reduce congestion,
Reduce the internal rate of return
Ban unlimited plans, either pay per mb over a generous base allowance or drop the speed

In my experience in ISP billing, there is always a small % that hog the majority bandwidth, charging $$$ is the only way to moderate behaviour

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Originally Posted by AndyG

Given that the NBN was designed in concept by the good folk who bought us pink batts and school halls whether you want them or not, we are stuck with this turkey.
However much could be done with the pricing, to reduce congestion,
Reduce the internal rate of return
Ban unlimited plans, either pay per mb over a generous base allowance or drop the speed

In my experience in ISP billing, there is always a small % that hog the majority bandwidth, charging $$$ is the only way to moderate behaviour

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The minimum internal rate of return for government enterprises is apparently legally fixed. If the projected rate of return is less than this, the budget accounting rules require the project to appear in the budget. This would, according to at least one source I have seen, more than double the budget deficit.

How likely do you think it is that any government of whatever flavour would allow that? The only way it could happen is for there to be bipartisan agreement, and in the current political atmosphere, can you see that happening?

A technical fix that could possibly fix congestion would be to charge at the retail level by speed rather than data quantity, with a steeply rising speed cost, but this would require most users to be no more than about 12Mbps - a bit hard to sell with NBN selling 25 for everyone as a basis and serious doubts how long this will be adequate. Or perhaps time of use charging - peak and off peak, used for satellite and wireless but very unpopular.

While I agree there is a small percentage that use most of the data, the problem is not mostly the amount of data used but the fact that most people want to use data at the same time, in the evening peak. With the rising popularity of netflix etc and the coming increases in resolution of everyday video, this is only going to get worse. In fact, there are serious concerns with bandwidth for this sort of development not only with NBN but with networks worldwide.

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Originally Posted by JDNSW

The minimum internal rate of return for government enterprises is apparently legally fixed. If the projected rate of return is less than this, the budget accounting rules require the project to appear in the budget. This would, according to at least one source I have seen, more than double the budget deficit.

How likely do you think it is that any government of whatever flavour would allow that? The only way it could happen is for there to be bipartisan agreement, and in the current political atmosphere, can you see that happening?

A technical fix that could possibly fix congestion would be to charge at the retail level by speed rather than data quantity, with a steeply rising speed cost, but this would require most users to be no more than about 12Mbps - a bit hard to sell with NBN selling 25 for everyone as a basis and serious doubts how long this will be adequate. Or perhaps time of use charging - peak and off peak, used for satellite and wireless but very unpopular.

While I agree there is a small percentage that use most of the data, the problem is not mostly the amount of data used but the fact that most people want to use data at the same time, in the evening peak. With the rising popularity of netflix etc and the coming increases in resolution of everyday video, this is only going to get worse. In fact, there are serious concerns with bandwidth for this sort of development not only with NBN but with networks worldwide.

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They already do and always have - my 100mbps connection isn't the same price as a 12 or 25 - it's $30 per month just for the speed boost above 25, the data plan is on top of that.

Yes, I've got a great connection that I can use 1000 gig a month on if needed, but I pay a lot for it - nearly $130 a month.

Twice what we're paying for 12 Mbps.

We've got an unlimited plan for around $130 per month at 100MB/s the cost reduction to drop back to 50MB speed is only $10 per month so really isn't worth it. I've never got above 40/40 on the FTTN connection that we have and the speed test the other night was around 12MB/s but it is reliable and with the family consuming around 400GB a month I'm not unhappy with the performance and its still faster than the ADSL that I had previously that topped out at about 4MB/s
The bottleneck is not with the technology, its with the amount of bandwidth that the ISPs have provided and as more people come online it gets worse. Hopefully the focus on bandwidth charged for vs delivered will continue and the ISPs will increase their backbone capacities to cope.

Regards,
Tote

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Originally Posted by DiscoMick

Twice what we're paying for 12 Mbps.

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So not bad value then compared with lower speed connections.

As shown earlier we get between 80 and 90 most of the time - FTTN.

I think we got very lucky as the node we are connected to will only ever service half our street - about 20 homes, whereas the nodes are capable of nearly 100 I think.

Time will tell if it stays at this speed as the rest of the estate is swapped over in the coming 18 months.

I walked around our immediate area and couldn't even find our node, so it must be a fair distance away or else hidden.

At the moment 12 Mpbs is enough for the two of us, but we'll see what happens. The wife is having a bit of a gorge on downloading old episodes of Sea Patrol at the moment while she's in bed with the Influenza Brisbane, so we'll see how that goes.