Now a lot of us are working from home, how would you evaluate the NBN?

Mine has been great, except for wireless coverage, which is blamed on the double brick house. Other than that, its been very good. I have only paid for a 20Mbps service, but it streams everything perfectly.

i have wireless into a steel frame timber clad house, find it excellent.
Work at a place that is large, and besser block there is no reception inside. Supposedly set up a $1200 booster system, not going to happen its not that important.

FttN is a disgrace for a "developed" country in a suburb 6km from the CBD, my max sync speed is 23mbps.
FU Malcom you globalist parasite.

And to add insult to injury, FttP is literally all around me w/ just my block getting FttN, I have to pay NBNco $350 for them to give me a quote.
I need about 25mbps more to comfortably work and let others stream.

I recently had NBN (fttc) installed in place of Optus cable broadband (being shut down). So far so good with my NBN.

If I am not mistaken the wireless coverage (or lack of) at your home is not related to the NBN but more to the wireless/router you have been provided by your service provider.

My NBN connection box has a ethernet port that connects to the router/wireless modem which provides the data/internet via ethernet and wifi as well as doing and providing the VoIP phone service (if required).

The router/wireless modem I was provided for my NBN by my service provider is the fairly standard product and had OK performance. Being a single unit it was never going to provide great wifi coverage.


I have been using a google mesh Wifi router at home for 2 years and it provides great wifi coverage. I simply plugged this into my NBN ethernet port. The google wifi mesh Wifi uses 3 or more nodes/points to expand the wifi coverage upstairs/downstairs and across the house. There are many other providers of wifi expansion/mesh systems. I went with the google branded version as I was hoping for a simple and easy setup. (which it was). The google wifi mesh is now called google wifi (Nest) it also seems to have gone up in price from what I paid. (I got mine when there was a sale on at my local retailer). Be aware that the setup and use of the google wifi requires you to use their google wifi app on a phone for setup and configuration. (this is a great idea but is a bit different to others that use a web browser configuration page)

WIth 5 people in our house constantly teleconferencing for work, uni, and school over the last month, it has performed pretty well. On a couple of occasions I've had to dial in by phone due to audio breaking up, but considering how many others are working and schooling from home, I'm pleasantly surprised how well the system has coped. (Although a two week outage after it rained in January was fairly inexcusable....having to hot spot the whole house off my phone the entire time.)

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FlySurfer said..
FttN is a disgrace for a "developed" country in a suburb 6km from the CBD, my max sync speed is 23mbps.
FU Malcom you globalist parasite.

And to add insult to injury, FttP is literally all around me w/ just my block getting FttN, I have to pay NBNco $350 for them to give me a quote.
I need about 25mbps more to comfortably work and let others stream.

Yeah, its a joke isn't it! I think I have FTTN here, but I can't remember what FTTN is versus FTTC.

Either way, it uses VDSL to connect to the box over the road. I think my sync speed is 33Mbps and upstream 11Mbps. I found that VDSL seems sensitive to other cables tee-ing off the feed-in cable. I moved my modem to the first connection point and disconnected the remainder and got an extra 3Mbps.

One thing no one told me is that VDSL can take 10 minutes, and sometimes more, to sync up, which is crazy! ADSL was better and faster than that. I contacted my provider only to have them tell me its normal.

Now I have a UPS for the router and another UPS for another access point on the other side of the house. I just can't afford the service to be down and take so long to restore if I am on a work video conference. FTTP would have avoided all of this.

If I were close to FTTP I would probably get a quote too. Someone that worked at NBNCo was telling me that if you did it before deployment sometimes it works out cheaper than you would expect.

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funnywinds said..

I have been using a google mesh Wifi router at home for 2 years and it provides great wifi coverage. I simply plugged this into my NBN ethernet port. The google wifi mesh Wifi uses 3 or more nodes/points to expand the wifi coverage upstairs/downstairs and across the house. There are many other providers of wifi expansion/mesh systems. I went with the google branded version as I was hoping for a simple and easy setup. (which it was). The google wifi mesh is now called google wifi (Nest) it also seems to have gone up in price from what I paid. (I got mine when there was a sale on at my local retailer). Be aware that the setup and use of the google wifi requires you to use their google wifi app on a phone for setup and configuration. (this is a great idea but is a bit different to others that use a web browser configuration page)

I bought a samsung smartthings hub that now has Plume mesh WIFI. I had never heard of it before.

I only have the one access point though, so the 'mesh' is hardly a mesh. It supposedly also has extra smarts to work out what channels are less busy and to use those. I haven't had much luck with it and instead have setup two normal access points with the same network so that it can get good coverage across the house.

One of the reasons I brought this topic up was that ThePhil was not happy with his NBN connection ages ago and it turned out to not be a problem with the NBN, but with the WIFI from his router to where he was working. It can be very challenging sometimes. In my old fibro house it was not a problem, but now I am in a double brick house and I can see the neighbours networks almost as easily as my own, and I need at least two APs to get decent access in the house.

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Harrow said..
WIth 5 people in our house constantly teleconferencing for work, uni, and school over the last month, it has performed pretty well. On a couple of occasions I've had to dial in by phone due to audio breaking up, but considering how many others are working and schooling from home, I'm pleasantly surprised how well the system has coped. (Although a two week outage after it rained in January was fairly inexcusable....having to hot spot the whole house off my phone the entire time.)

I had 4 power outages in the first month of being here, and one of them went for 1 day. I got used to using 4G for a while. I then bought UPSes for the router and AP and haven't had a power failure since... go figure!

It is pretty good though. I think people don't realise how hard it would be to get a reliable, consistent network across just 4G or 5G if everyone in your street and the neighbouring streets are using.

Considering now there are a lot of houses like yours with almost constant streaming, its doing pretty well. So well it makes me wonder what the streaming services including SBS and ABC use on the back-end. There must be some serious hardware and links there.

It's been excellent. All bottlenecks I face are from the other end. I'm going to go for a cheaper plan as I don't need the bandwidth I have. I've not seen it drop more than a mbps and don't bother checking the speed anymore. I'm running workstations remotely and video conferences all day. I'm just fttn so maybe I'm lucky or I'm not downloading enough movies and games to be able to whinge about it.

My Telstra NBN / WiFi sucked untill I complained & Telstra sent me a new smart modem. I then also updated my old Apple airport WiFi extender to a Netgear Orbi mesh system.
Absolutely no issue's now.

I have FTTC, situated a long way from the curb, with a ****ty wiring setup in our block and its still excellent. I wonder if the early setups are the worse ones? We only recently got it, but I believe the experience base in the industry was rubbish and it was rolled very poorly early on. Ours was seemless.

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FormulaNova said..
Yeah, its a joke isn't it! I think I have FTTN here, but I can't remember what FTTN is versus FTTC.

FttN = NBNco will run fiber to an already established telephone junction box, in my case it's supposed to be 600m away. You'll be lucky to get 75/20 Mbps.
FttC = NBNco will run fiber to a new fiber junction box on your street, or 3 blocks away max, easily 100/20 Mbps.
FttP = NBNco will run fiber all the way in to your house, and will allow you to get 1000/50.

When I first moved in I was getting 14mbps max sync, which was slower than my previous ADSL, so naturally being an information worker, I blew my $h!t. NBNco said the outside line was to spec, (>18mbps) so I then replaced all my internal wiring with CAT 5e and managed to get the amazing:
Up 5.12 Mbps
Down 22.06 Mbps

I'm still paying for 50/20 though. I paid my taxes. Never claimed $0.01 in benefits. And yet I like others on FttN are treated like 3rd class citizens and I have to bypass my internal network or make excuses for why my video is bad in meetings.
My network topology looks like: VDSL (modem) > pfSense appliance (DHCP, Firewall, DNS, VPN, VLANs) > 3 x Wifi 6 (AX) + NAS > Clients

I have to connect to the VDSL modem directly in order to ensure I can use Teams/Zoom, it has a QoS rule to prioritize my laptops.
Sure I could put a rule in the pfSense appliance, but in practice it didn't work as effectively.

And the $350 is just to have NBNco give you a quote, and it's always be between $3 - 25k, w/ the average being smack in the middle according to whirlpool.
I have a cell tower 200m away, holding out for 5G.

FU Malcolm Bligh Turnbull.

I have fttc then a cluster f*ck of copper inside the property and works fine. streaming with three people connected watching different shows and cloud based data storage for work

best thing the government have done

the current spending on job keeper, job seeker and cash boost makes the nbn look cheap.
not sure why all the SB flat earth users wanted to keep their adsl ?

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FlySurfer said..

FormulaNova said..
Yeah, its a joke isn't it! I think I have FTTN here, but I can't remember what FTTN is versus FTTC.

FttN = NBNco will run fiber to an already established telephone junction box, in my case it's supposed to be 600m away. You'll be lucky to get 75/20 Mbps.
FttC = NBNco will run fiber to a new fiber junction box on your street, or 3 blocks away max, easily 100/20 Mbps.
FttP = NBNco will run fiber all the way in to your house, and will allow you to get 1000/50.

When I first moved in I was getting 14mbps max sync, which was slower than my previous ADSL, so naturally being an information worker, I blew my $h!t. NBNco said the outside line was to spec, (>18mbps) so I then replaced all my internal wiring with CAT 5e and managed to get the amazing:
Up 5.12 Mbps
Down 22.06 Mbps

I'm still paying for 50/20 though. I paid my taxes. Never claimed $0.01 in benefits. And yet I like others on FttN are treated like 3rd class citizens and I have to bypass my internal network or make excuses for why my video is bad in meetings.
My network topology looks like: VDSL (modem) > pfSense appliance (DHCP, Firewall, DNS, VPN, VLANs) > 3 x Wifi 6 (AX) + NAS > Clients

I have to connect to the VDSL modem directly in order to ensure I can use Teams/Zoom, it has a QoS rule to prioritize my laptops.
Sure I could put a rule in the pfSense appliance, but in practice it didn't work as effectively.

And the $350 is just to have NBNco give you a quote, and it's always be between $3 - 25k, w/ the average being smack in the middle according to whirlpool.
I have a cell tower 200m away, holding out for 5G.

FU Malcolm Bligh Turnbull.

What is your provider? I put my money where my mouth was in this move and picked up a Aussie Broadband connection. So far, so good. The network seems fine, and I figured 20/5 or whatever it was is fine for me.

My parents have fibre to the premises, and they wouldn't even know it. It just works.

I have strung cat 5 between the modem and the TV, just to avoid more congestion on the wifi, but it was working fine before on WIFI. Its when its outside the living room that coverage is not so great, but with 2 APs, its still okay. I am considering running another cat5 out to the patio to run yet another AP.

I think we have all forgotten what life was like before WIFI. I ran cat5 outlets in one house to every single room with at least 2 sockets in each, and something like 10 in the living room. It bugs me that the people living there now just use WIFI...

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FlySurfer said..

When I first moved in I was getting 14mbps max sync, which was slower than my previous ADSL, so naturally being an information worker, I blew my $h!t. NBNco said the outside line was to spec, (>18mbps) so I then replaced all my internal wiring with CAT 5e and managed to get the amazing:
Up 5.12 Mbps
Down 22.06 Mbps

I'm still paying for 50/20 though. I paid my taxes. Never claimed $0.01 in benefits. And yet I like others on FttN are treated like 3rd class citizens and I have to bypass my internal network or make excuses for why my video is bad in meetings.
My network topology looks like: VDSL (modem) > pfSense appliance (DHCP, Firewall, DNS, VPN, VLANs) > 3 x Wifi 6 (AX) + NAS > Clients

Just keep in mind that its worth putting your modem at the first point the Telstra cable comes into the house and disconnecting the rest of the cable from that point. It will give you the best signal quality. After that, just run ethernet to where your AP is.

My call quality seems pretty good, but I haven't had many video conferences, and mainly just audio.

I haven't found out exactly, but is there a way in VDSL to actually drop your connection rate to improve quality, i.e. drop the connection to something more reliable?

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FlySurfer said..
FttN is a disgrace for a "developed" country in a suburb 6km from the CBD, my max sync speed is 23mbps.
FU Malcom you globalist parasite.

And to add insult to injury, FttP is literally all around me w/ just my block getting FttN, I have to pay NBNco $350 for them to give me a quote.
I need about 25mbps more to comfortably work and let others stream.

Absolutely. It's a shame the majority of us ended up with worse fixed internet services than a developing country.

Well to be fair, the effwit who convinced enough voters in 2013 that FTTN was a good idea was Tony Abbott - the now dethroned Prince Of Negativity.

We can complain about Malcolm but in the end enough Aussies voted for the dumbed down NBN system to put the Turds in office and they're still there...

The idea of the NBN was great. The LNP took a great idea (with some flaws) and totally screwed it by investing in outdated technology. FTTN was a big F U to Australia. The other compromises, FTTC, HFC should be "good enough" for most purposes at the moment. I'm still waiting on FTTC to arrive at my place. Fibres have been run to all the Telstra pits, just waiting for them to come back with the modems. I'm still on Optus cable. Good enough for general use, but the crap upstream totally sucks for a remote worker, let alone when everyone else is stuck in the house now.

I feel sorry for people stuck with FTTN. When I move house next, FTTN will strike your house off my search. If enough people think that way, it will have a noticeable effect.

In the time like that it is perfectly clear how absurdly was investment in NBN.How absurdly is and was hope that people could suddenly work from home. Maybe 1% can, but the rest will utilize whole bandwidth to watch video and other porn. 100 bln dollars could be used to make someusefull things, but becomes ultimately wasted as the rest of strategic investments into: submarines, F35 fighter planes, frigates, spy planes etc which have absolutely no use in real fight against real enemy ( pandemic) not imagined Russian or Chinese invasions. In the case of such invasion, those toys becomes useless anyway, but those billions could be invested profitably into high tech technologies and industries.
To illustrate let imagine that dream comes on and anti corona vaccine is invented . Australia doesn't have a single plant to manufacture it and we have to wait till other countries saturate their needs and could sell leftover to us. Obviously we have top research facilities , producing top quality science but , none of resources to utilize them and make products and money. But now we have at least NBN stream pornhub to every isolated person at the cost of 100 bln dollars.Hiring chinese hookers for whole nation could be more effective, cheaper and more fullfilling.
As to fast internet Elon Musk is already starting to deliver the fastest possible internet , that will span quickly whole world at very reasonable costs. Lets imagine that our government invested 100 bln into Elon's Starlink satellites and could soon draw profits when project is completed. Internet delivered straight from the sky without need for any cables, fibres or copper, digging and strangling.This is a future of internet here on Earth.

Its interesting. In a time when everyone takes good reliable internet for granted, it shows that we really do assume its always on and reliable.

I suspect that right now there are hundreds of thousands of people sitting at home watching streaming TV, chatting with friends, and making the best of a bad situation.

We have conferences with teams in India some days and they obviously only have 'market driven' internet services, and it seems to show. Some are terrible. Some are good.

Here, pretty much all of them should be good.

if 1% are able to work from home because everyone assumes that everyone has the internet, this is a good thing. There are huge numbers of jobs that need to happen in each city and they don't need to be done in person. Working from home is not neccessarily fun, but it can be done for a lot of people.

Then you have to consider the entertainment factor right now. Its a difficult thing being locked in, and we have it better than lots of countries. The fact that we can stream movies and watch rubbish, goes a long way to helping people get through this.

If you are against spending on infrastructure, you had better hold onto your hat. There will be big spending at the end of this, and we can't all just import tractor parts from China. Some of us need to create things too, and to get that kickstarted, money needs to be spent.

I'm on a telstra bundle (net and phone) paying about $80 per month at the northern gold coast with FTTN. average is 38Mbp/s down and 18Mbp/s up 7ms ping according to telstra speed test. i'm in zoom meetings with audio/video every day since easter and it's been flawless so far

southern goldcoast is a different story as it's full of old infrastructure, and colleagues living down there are often complaining about NBN performance

I'm using the the earlier generation modem sagecom 5355. There's no mobile switchover. we were one of the first to get NBN a couple of years back