back to article NBN Co adds apartments to FTTP rollout

NBN Co – via Telstra Wholesale – has revealed which apartment blocks will be the first to get FTTP under commercial trials of a rollout plan designed to thwart cherry-picking by competitors. The Telstra Wholesale rollout publication (PDF or Excel, here) obliquely identifies suburbs in Sydney (Millers Point and Haymarket), …

  1. Dafyd Colquhoun

    "...in the Fortitude Valley..." clearly written by a non-Brisvegan. It's either "... in the Valley..." (colloquial) or "...in Fortitude Valley..." (formal). Fortitude Valley was named after a ship, not a geographic feature. Just one of those things to confuse tourists :-)

    1. Richard Chirgwin (Written by Reg staff)

      Thanks - I have removed the extraneous "the". You're right, I'm from Sydney!

    2. Chet Mannly

      Teneriffe is also not even in the valley - its a separate suburb!

  2. Fluffy Bunny
    Holmes

    Failure of vision

    This just shows what a gigantic failure the KRudd policy was. If we had wanted a slow and unresponsive monopoly, we would have kept Telecom Australia in government hands. They are the ones who cabled Gungahlin with pair-gain rubbish. They should be made to pay to remediate it.

    As far as the rest of Australia goes, if actually people wanted superfast broadband, they would be willing to pay for it. Not create a gigantic hand in the taxpayer's pockets. The right way to do this would be for the government to provide subsidies and tax inducements to encourage telcos to cable out to hard to reach properties. The inner-urban and suburban people would be quite cheap (relatively) to cable.

    Listenning to all the whingers out there, I am struck by the saying that "there is nothing so vital to the public good, as something other people have to pay for". And if people don't want to pay for their own connection, then it wasn't actually very important to them, was it.

    1. Rastus

      Re: Failure of vision

      This NBN thing is the second biggest waste of taxpayers money (the first is the politicians)! I have ADSL2, and it is certainly fast enough - I don't need a webpage to open in one millisecond, or an episode of GoT to download in five seconds!

      Oh yeah, and if it is allowed to continue to completion, the NBN will cost at least $90 billion, not the rubbery, minimised-for-public-consumption figure of $43 billion they quoted at the beginning.

      1. th3ro

        Re: Failure of vision

        How nice for you that you don't need the NBN, sitting pretty with your "fast enough" ADSL2. Not everyone is so fortunate.

        I on the other hand live 400m too far from the exchange for ADSL of any kind. I have to get by on grossly expensive mobile broadband which makes most of what I want and/or need to do online unacceptably expensive. Taking into account data allotments, my current plan is 6 times more expensive than before I moved here and is the cheapest available.

        Nice way to see everything only through your own perspective.

    2. Jason Ozolins

      Re: Failure of vision

      "The right way to do this would be for the government to provide subsidies and tax inducements to encourage telcos to cable out to hard to reach properties."

      They did that. It was called the Higher Bandwidth Incentive Scheme, and then there was the later Broadband Connect scheme. Apparently the telcos were not sufficiently encouraged - I have no access to any wired broadband, and am using the only non-3G, non-satellite wireless provider that barely manages to scrape a living on the awkward rump of properties left after Telstra cherry-picked all the easy ADSL subscribers in my area.

      That wireless service is unreliable (as in, regularly drops out multiple times per evening, or is unavailable for up to multiple days at a time) and often slow when I want to use it (because they can't afford a decent amount of upstream bandwidth due to their small size). It does make it easy for me to brush off Telstra sales people when they call up trying to get me to bundle my services, as I just tell them that Telstra failed for years to give me the ADSL that I repeatedly asked for and would have been prepared to bundle, and could they kindly tell their employer that they long ago destroyed any trust or goodwill I felt towards that company. As far as I can see, privatising Telstra had the grand result of transforming them from a "slow and unresponsive monopoly" to a brazen and cynical monopoly. Woohoo.

      The actual right way to do this would have been to structurally separate the monopoly local loop from the rest of Telstra. But thanks to Howard/Costello's vision for telecommunications extending only so far as making their government look good by paying some debt off really quickly, we've got a monopoly carrier that for years treated crappy landline service as a pressure for its customers towards higher-margin mobile products, a copper network showing the effects of a decade of desultory maintenance, and now a government that has committed to that same copper as our broadband future. A commitment they made without any credible evidence about how much is still fully functional, or about how much Telstra will want in return for access to that network now its value to the government has suddenly increased.

      'Stralia: rhymes with failure.

  3. aberglas

    What about the blackspots

    While the NBN rushes to provide fiber to suburbs that already have reasonably fast broadband via both ADSL and two cable providers, people with little or no broadband will get nothing.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What about the blackspots

      That's Rupert's master plan.....so, are you ready to subscribe to Foxtel now?

      [evil laugh]

    2. th3ro

      Re: What about the blackspots

      This was my first thought also when I read it. People like me stuck on mobile broadband too far from the exchange will still be sitting here without decent broadband in 5 years time, while those who already have access to ADSL2+ and cable will be upgrading to FTTP or FTTN.

  4. Winkypop Silver badge
    Unhappy

    So many plans and counter plans, from both sides of Parliament

    So little action from anyone.

    NBN, not going to happen.

    1. LaeMing
      Flame

      That's why it is called the NBN

      No Broadband Network

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not everyone has an alternative

    I live in a capital city (15 Kms out).

    There are no cable operators nearby. (There's only minor player at that)

    The old NBN was going to be close, but not close enough.

    Thanks to the LNP there's no chance of the NBN now.

    Our estate is only 10 years old, we had pair-gain phone lines.

    I whined and bitched and got our line upgraded.

    I got ADSL 1

    I waited and whined and bitched and finally got a spare ADSL 2 connection.

    There is no alternative.

    RIP NBN

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