The Great Big NBN Sticky Thread

More as a response to [Swen], we get advised of works from our RSP, although we also run business services over NBN, so we technically pay our RSP for the privilege of them telling us about planned and emergency works, instead of having to go to some random pleb website every day to find out new planned events.

 

anyone know from how long they have workers outside the house for a few weeks and laying cable to when it is available? my check on website says april, but that's 2 months away. surely it won't be that long now?

 

yeah cause laying cable is all they have to do right.

it'll be ready when it's ready and no sooner.

 

My NBN got pushed out by 18months. Still says I’m getting FTTP though, so lose some win some I guess…

 

mines been pushed back so many times, lost count, keeps getting worse too. started FTTP, then FTTN, then FTTC, back to FTTN now, will probably end up with FTTTCWS (fibre to the tin can and wet string) by 2030.

 

I been pushed back for 5 years now.
over it so I went with vivid 4g 12/1 and have since swapped to optus and get 69/39.
was last told my date is December 19 but im not bothered anymore.

 

thanks so much for your valuable insight. it was really informative.

 

I'm more referring to the USB transfer speed.
Just purchased a tp link ac1200, what a pile of garbage, wont even connect to 5ghz and loses 60% signal strength from the modem 10 metres away.
connects to the nbn at 1/3.5.

 

It's worth starting a separate thread, it sounds like there are a few things going in our setup that are more general home network problems than NBN-specific

 

I paid for FTTP via TCP. It took 2 days for the fibre to be run, connected and the NTD to be installed. 3 weeks later, a NBN Tech visited to do a quality inspection. 2 weeks after that, I was able to connect.

Whole process took 5 months and I was the ONLY customer..................

Good luck.

 

I wish there was a way to find more information about our connections... I pay for the 100/40 speed upgrade to get 15/5 on a good day. If we use the 25/5 plan (which would logically make sense with the above right?) I get 6/1 or worse. Optus' takes away a portion of my bill because of it but it shouldn't be an issue in the first place.

Is my area over subscribed?
How long is my cable run?
Why did I get 98/39 at my previous address which is not that far away? (and further out of town)
Would swapping telco give me better speed or is it just stuck like this forever?
Is there anything I can do?

renren

 

Are you on NBN? Give Aussie BB a call. I routinely get ~97/36 on my 100/40 plan every time I do a speedtest.

 

have you considered asking your Internet Service Provider these questions?

 

Yes multiple times. The answers are not satisfactory, primarily because the service representatives don't have answers for these sorts of questions in their scripts (or, in some unfortunate cases, the language skills to comprehend what I'm asking).

 

take your business/money elsewhere, there's other ISPs that offer no contract deals, so it can be relatively risk free.

 

^^ this. if your service provider is not offering you the service they should, stop rewarding them with your business.

script readers means the business can't be bothered training their staff to the minimal degree required to understand their job well enough to support you, the customer, who is paying for it.

there is never an excuse for poor language skills, end of story. crap language skills invariably means outsourcing to some equally crap offshore provider where doing it on the cheap has meant compromising on selecting staff who can actually communicate in the language the customers speak. the customer base is in an English speaking country. I expect them to be able to communicate competently in that language.

 

just to add to the above... something I was ruminating over this morning, while fixing something and dealing with the usual hassles of the previous bloke's highly dubious DIY skills -

I put up with some communications challenges with my favourite local curry restaurant because they make a damn good curry, their English is limited, and we get there in the end. I am patient with dealing with the owner and staff at my local fish aquarium, because they are Chinese and English is very much their second language, but they are lovely people, keep a really nice shop and are very knowledgeable about fish keeping, and it's worth it.

when it comes to your ISP, it's a relatively homogeneous product. about the only ways an operator can differentiate themselves from their competitors is price, and providing a better level of service. it's easy enough to fuck it all up, but once it works - it works.

I expect my internet connection to work all the time, without fail. obviously if someone up the road puts a backhoe through my local link then there's nothing the ISP can do other than raise a network fault for me, but I sure as hell expect the network under their control to work all the time, without fail, and that includes no congestion within their ability to address. if something breaks, I expect to be able to communicate that to them effectively, in a reasonable time, to someone whom I can speak to clearly, who has sufficient knowledge to understand the issue, help perform initial diagnosis and triage, and escalate as required. I don't want to be read a script, I don't want to have to struggle with someone who clearly can't understand nor speak my language, and I don't want to be told to turn my modem on and off for the fifth time because some clown hasn't bothered to read the case notes the last 4 idiots I spoke to probably didn't bother to make anyway.

if that can't be achieved, I'll fire them and go elsewhere. I don't use my local pizza shop any more because they screw our order up all the time, and I'm sick of not getting what we ordered. I don't use the most convenient garage to me any more, because they invariably dick me about at the end of the day because they didn't put a spanner on the thing until after lunch despite me dropping it off before 8am precisely so they could get going with it and not cause me hassles later. just yesterday I walked out of a large electronics retailer for jacking me around; I went to their competitor and spent a little more and got exactly what I was after, with no hassles, from someone who knew what they were talking about and sold me what I wanted, as opposed to trying to sell me what they had. this morning I told the manager of a photography store that his sales associate just lost him a $1700 sale for annoying the hell out of my wife repeatedly while she was trying to think about a purchase, I'm going to travel into town to reward someone else with the sale. and in a couple of months I'll be telling my current health insurer to stick their business up their arse because I'm sick of having to chase them all the time (which I honestly can't attribute to deliberate or natural incompetence) - but not before my wife goes in for about $10k of surgery, which they can damn well pay for instead of my new insurer.

so why do people put up with crap ISPs? the difference between a decent ISP and rubbish one is literally a couple of dollars a month. decent meaning it works, it doesn't congest because they take the time and money to ensure so, they communicate network outages quickly, clearly and effectively, and they have competent support staff available to talk to when required.

don't tell me it's the cost, if it was we'd all be driving the cheapest nastiest Chinese made import available, Harvey Norman would be broke because we'd all be watching Soniq TVs while sitting on milk crates, and every fast food restaurant would be broke because we'd all be eating pot noodles. obviously this isn't the case, so why do do we reward cheap, nasty, budget ISPs with our money and continued custom, despite all of the choices and alternatives that competition has brought?

 

unfortunately sometimes it's because people get stuck on a contract after being promised the sun and the stars only to be given a a foul odorous pile of shit.

In 3 months time I will be switching from my ISP to another as although my issue has now been fixed and you helped a fair bit with that. the lack of communication and assistance from there behalf was crap.

 

I can understand that fully. lock-in is a pain in the arse the industry came up with precisely to stop people changing when someone else did it better. I can also understand bundling with other services like mobiles, Foxtel etc.

sometimes all the options aren't available all the time. but if we as a customer base stop rewarding providers for crap service, the industry will respond. at the moment it's responding to people buying with their wallets.

 

Is there some sort of quality assurance speed for each line that NBN also aims for or something? I spoke to ABB about my drop in upload from ~10Mbps to ~5Mbps (not expecting them to be able to do anything) however the NBN portal has been "failing" the upload speed as it is under 8Mbps. Since then I've had two techs come out to try and remediate the line and there is now a work order in to replace my lead-in cable