Goold old Aussie ingenuity.
<http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2016/s4588209.htm>
LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: If you're one of the millions of Australians
expecting the National Broadband Network (NBN) at your place soon you
may want to watch this next story.
The Government's accepted a recommendation that the NBN be fully
privatised, something that will please the major telcos.
But in places where the highly politicised network has already rolled
out, like the Central Coast of New South Wales, it's not so much the
speed that's the problem, it's having the NBN working at all.
Andy Park reports.
DAVID SNEDDON: So when the NBN goes down, we don't get a lot of great
mobile phone coverage.
The NBN went down last week for six days. So we get a dongle and pop
it in a plastic bag, we clip it on to a rope that has been slung over
a tree, a little fancy clip.
ANDY PARK: This is quite high-tech, this is jungle internet, MacGyver
internet.
DAVID SNEDDON: MacGyver internet. So we clip that on and then we just
pull it up the tree.
And so we can get away with minimal internet use when the NBN is not
working.
ANDY PARK: This is David Sneddon's experience of Australia's $49
billion National Broadband Network.
You're still relying on a plastic bag and a bit of rope?
DAVID SNEDDON: In 2016.
ANDY PARK: The tree-changing high school teacher and his family moved
to the Central Coast of New South Wales on the promise of better
work-life balance.
Problem is, David Sneddon can't do his job marking online classwork or
even use the landline because his Telstra NBN fibre to the node
internet connection is unreliable.
It's not just the outages because his internet relies on ageing copper
wire, he's not getting the speed he thought he'd get.
So your house is back there.
DAVID SNEDDON: My house is back there.
ANDY PARK: And how much, what is your internet speed then?
DAVID SNEDDON: So when we tested today, we got 34.6 megabits download
per second download, 16 up. And then if we go, what is it, one, two,
three, four houses up, we get 58.3 megabits download and 25 up.
ANDY PARK: So between, well, three to four houses, there's basically a
double the difference in internet speed?
DAVID SNEDDON: Pretty much so.
ANDY PARK: He's paying Telstra for a premium plan, promising up to 100
megabits per second.
DAVID SNEDDON: If you go to the supermarket to buy a kilo of apples,
you get a kilo of apples, end of story.
But if we turn the apples into the NBN and we say it's megabits or
something like that, I order a kilo of apples from Telstra, Telstra
say I can't give you that kilo of apples, I'll have the NBN deliver them.
And the NBN lose some on the way and give some to my neighbour down
the road and I get delivered 350 grams of apples but I have paid for
up to a kilo of apples.
How is that fair for anybody?
ANDY PARK: The NBN Co says any issues with his internet speed are
Telstra's domain.
We asked the NBN Co about his outages on Monday.
JOHN SIMON, CO CHIEF CUSTOMER OFFICER, NBN: The NBN network does not
go down for six days. We do monitor and we do know where there are
faults and we respond to them.
ANDY PARK: But today, they admitted it took them six days to restore
David's service after it went down adding.
STATEMENT FROM NBN CO SPOKESPERSON: He now gets an internet service
which is far superior to most people in Australia.
DAVID SNEDDON: It's been a fraught experience in terms of both dealing
with the service provider being Telstra, not being able to talk to the
NBN who are the wholesaler, connection issues, timing, missed
appointments, the list goes on and on.
ANDY PARK: It's not just dropouts or slowdowns, for some it's the wait
to get the NBN in the first place.
This is not some remote corner of Australia. In fact, the centre of
Sydney is less than 40km in that direction.
And for the people here who successfully lobbied for the area to be
one of the guinea pigs for the NBN's rollout, the service so far is
proving to be less than world-class.
DAVID ABRAHAMS, FORMER CHAIRMAN, REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AUSTRALIA: I
don't regret it, the upgrade.
I'm, you know, reflective about the lessons that could be learnt in
the rollout.
ANDY PARK: Local digital entrepreneur, David Abrahams, pushed for the
Central Coast to be one of the first NBN rollout areas.
But now, he's become critical of the NBN over what he says are huge
inconsistencies in service delivery.
DAVID ABRAHAMS: I think it's fair to say that the NBN Co, even today,
raise expectations up perhaps too high and, therefore, the ombudsman
is flooded with various complaints.
ANDY PARK: In the last financial year alone, the telco ombudsman
received 664 complaints about the NBN in this area.
JUDI JONES, TELECOMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY OMBUDSMAN: They're lodging
complaints initially about delays in connection. So getting connected
to the NBN. And then it's about faults.
So that's slow data speeds, dropouts, unusable service.
JOHN SIMON: By then the end of June there was 48,000 premises
connected. So that in itself, if you do the maths, 600 versus 48,000,
it's actually quite a very small number, but I'm the first to agree
that one issue is one too many.
ANDY PARK: There's no complaints about the NBN here at the Central
Coast Leagues Club which has some of the fastest internet in the area.
WORKER: David.
DAVID ABRAHAMS: Yeah mate.
WORKER: Do you mind if I use the internet here at the bar.
DAVID ABRAHAMS: Sure, go right ahead.
ANDY PARK: That's why David Abrahams, who unsuccessfully attempted to
run for Labor pre-selection last year, has his office here.
He shares his bandwidth with local internet business owners who are
still waiting for the NBN.
DAVID ABRAHAMS: I call them my internet refugees because of the very,
the variable experiences that we have up here.
ANDY PARK: This seems like a likely excuse using the bar as, for a
workplace, why do you come in here, what sort of work do you do?
MARC CHARETTE, DIGITAL ENTREPRENEUR: I'm actually a Google street
virtual tour photographer. I don't have NBN, I've actually got less
than that and waiting for it, hasn't even shown up yet. It's one of
those things, it's just like, where do you go where you can actually
get a decent connection.
JOHN SIMON: When you scale-up a network and you get large demands,
processes always improve, you refine the workmanship of the
installation crews, et cetera.
So there's always an improvement process that occurs and we've seen that.
ANDY PARK: David Sneddon says he would be happy to go back to ADSL.
DAVID SNEDDON: It's a feeling of resigned frustration, we don't feel
that anyone is going to be able to change it and it's certainly not
going to be fixed any time soon.
DAVID ABRAHAMS: I hate this to be foisted on our experience on the
rest of the nation, regions similar to us.
You just have to rely on whatever you can get. Now that's not
acceptable really in a developed nation like ours.
--
David Boxall | "Cheer up" they said.
| "Things could be worse."
http://david.boxall.id.au | So I cheered up and,
| Sure enough, things got worse.
| --Murphy's musing
_______________________________________________
Link mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
