back to article nbn™ pauses hybrid fibre-coax build and will fix current connections

nbn™, the company building and operating Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN), has announced that it will remediate parts of its hybrid fibre-coax and pause new rollouts The company's not said what needs remediation, offering only “wholesale connector replacements, signal amplification calibration, and lead-in work as …

  1. Paul J Turner

    Fancy that

    Just as the UK starts getting serious about customers getting what they pay for -

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/23/advertising_watchdog_cracks_down_on_broadband_speeds/

    - nbn sees which way the wind will soon be blowing down-under and panics about their craptacular performance and the prospect of customer lawsuits.

  2. Sampler

    I for one..

    Welcome a return to all fibre, if that's what they're saying here (rather than simply replacing the copper with "better copper").

    In saying that, my flatmate upgraded our connection to NBN and a speedtest showed 93.21mbps/38.15mbps at peaktime whilst my other three flatmates used it, so happy with the service they provide in Surry Hills at least.

  3. aberglas

    They had to buy the copper

    Even under the original FTTP plan.

    The trouble is that many if not most people were actually satisfied with their existing broadband. And would not have switched to the NBN if the copper was still available. In those early Hobart trials it was only something like 15% that took up the NBN when it was free to convert.

    Meanwhile, other people without broadband are screaming for something, and still waiting.

    That is the fundamental disconnect. It was never about megabits. It was about availability to those that had none or very poor broadband.

    1. Phil Kingston

      Re: They had to buy the copper

      "It was about availability to those that had none or very poor broadband."

      For better or worse, nbn(tm) decided that availability to those that were easy to connect was a better way to spend the pile of money they found themselves with.

    2. Pu02

      Re: They had to buy the copper

      No, it was about a lot more than availability- it was about scrapping the copper networks, it was about putting in place a scalable broadband network for the nation that didn't require 240v and racks of vulnerable equipment exposed to the elements on street corners... not just connecting people with little or no connectivity.

      They only had to buy the copper networks to get access to the pits to replace the old copper, whether it be FttP or MTM/FttN+HFC. They sure as hell didn't want to use the old copper, as Tony and Malcolm required. You could argue that if Telstra was doing its job over the last decade it would already have replaced a lot of the copper with the best option going at the time, in which case a MTM might have been viable.

      Anyhow, regardless of what the bought and why, they sure didn't need to buy thousands of new km of new copper wire and set about repairing/replacing any existing wiring. Any numbnut could tell them it should all have been fibre, whether the decision be made on day one, mid way, or now.

  4. Winkypop Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Terminal

    Can it get any worse?

    You bet it can.

    Maybe my 3 Mbps ADSL2 isn't that bad afterall.

  5. TReko
    Big Brother

    Not just Doublespeak - Orwellian actions too

    It can get worse - remember when the NBN got the police to raid Stephen Conroy's office in parliament last year.

    They were trying to suppress leaks of how bad it is.

    The leaker had his home raided too, and lost his job. NBN exec's got their bonuses.

    (great reporting from el Reg South, as usual, thanks)

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    New Clean Coal and other technological marvels of the age

    Improved, Whiter, Steam

    Drip-less candles

    Bread with perforations (ready for slicing)

    Faster Message Pigeons

    Hybrid Fibre-Coax

    1. Khaptain Silver badge

      Re: New Clean Coal and other technological marvels of the age

      Privacy and freedom of speech on the internet.

      Flying cars.

      Clean energy.

      Domestic robots.

      Safer streets.

      More employment.

      Cheaper housing.

      etc, etc, etc

  7. desmo

    Really, this is a direct result of the political attacks on the FTTH NBN that Labor were going to rollout but that Abbott saw political gain in opposing. Add in our now PM's blundering when minister for communications and we have this FUBAR situation when we could have had fabulous fibre.

    I've had Optus HFC for 10+ years and have the 100Mbps/2Mbps sec service and regularly get those speeds (although Fri/Sat nights can see speeds drop to 30-40Mbps) . Will be interesting to say the least to see what happens when they force me onto NBN HFC instead.

    1. N000dles

      From what you describe the problem with your connection isn't whether you are running HFC or FTTP but the ISP you have chosen. If you're losing speed during peak times then it's the backhaul line used by the ISP. You would have the same problem if you had fibre all the way to your house.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        not just the ISP, it's the amount of subscribers sharing your segment too

        HFC suffers from more than contention in upstream pipes; service also suffers contention across the 'last mile' or local segment. So choice of ISP is not the only factor/concern.

        Many places I've seen are suffering more from local segment contention now (Telstra has not done much to develop its HFC offering over the last few years, and is unlikely to do anything now that nbn will be taking over). Service is getting worse and worse, as is reliability. Troubles like lightning taking down entire areas for days are common (and nowadays it invariably takes a day or even several to fix problems that knock off thousands of accounts.

        Lightning strikes will affect nbn just as often, and nbn has done little to show it will will be ready, able or willing to fix such problems either.

  8. The Central Scrutinizer

    I'll be sticking to my 6 meg (or thereabouts) ADSL thanks very much. Not that I can even get the Not a Broadband Network anyway. What a monumental cock up.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's technology, Jim

    But not as we know it

  10. marky_boi
    FAIL

    not surprised really

    I saw the untrained NBN monkeys come in and install a service in my Aunts place. They literally ran in, slapped in the modem on an existing pay TV service using a splitter.. confirmed carrier and just about ran out all in about 5 mins. If it wasn't for me at the door stopping them and asking questions, there is no way my Aunt would have known what to do next. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys. Extrapolate this to anew install, can you see the monkeys taking time to do a workman like install??? I know first hand the care that went into the HFC network originally, to the point of torquing the f connectors to the right settings. Almost everything is contractors who don't give a flying ^%$@*@. take this one step further, if a build out has occurred under NBN watch I doubt it's up to snuff.............

    1. LaeMing

      Re: not surprised really

      I had a very positive experience with my NBN install contractors. I got in on the last of the fibre, though I doubt that was the critical difference.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    When I read that Telstra had to be paid billions for their network I always think that it meant that the minister that decided to privatise Telecom in the past was essentially responsible for wasting billions of dollars of tax payer money - Then again, who knows what the phone system would be like had it remained under government control

    1. Randall Crook

      If my memory serves me well, Telecom Australia, as a government instrument, was on numerous occasions actually classed as the best in the world. It was only after privatisation that their reputation started to decline.

  12. TheHangingJudge

    My fibrous experience

    My house was in the area picked for the trial rollout of FTTH in metro Melbourne early 2011. Even though I had pretty good speed already through Telstra cable, I went for it because it was free to connect and maybe wouldn't be later.

    I went for Optus on cost and it has been crap. Hard to say whether it would have been any better with Telstra because a lot of the problems have been outside the house, which is NBN responsibility. There is a drop out or major go-slow every other evening (insufficient CVCs?) for 30 mins or so but recently there have been several days-long outages and I have had to call in a fault, which takes 20-40 mins on hold on the mobile (you have no hard line because that is via the NBN).

    One of the many engineers I have met says that this is because the street distribution boxes put in as part of the first tranche of rollouts are now very fragile and when engineers go inside to correct a problem for one property, they cause a problem for another. Is this rollout going to be like painting the Forth Bridge?

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