News & Discussion: National Broadband Network

[SBD]

We upgraded from FTTN to FTTP last year, and had a new all-in-one modem/hub provided as part of the changeover. It includes mobile data fail-over if the NBN goes down. We didn't upgrade plans, but Speedtest showed a roughly 25% increase in speed to close to the nameplate speed of the plan we'd been paying for anyway.

This week, we were caught by the (Internode--only?) NBN outage in the Elizabeth area caused by a fibre fault in/under the rail corridor in Salisbury. Fail-over happened seamlessly, we didn't even immediately notice we'd been affected. The external fixed IP number wasn't responding. Speedtest showed it was slower, but through the day we didn't really notice much difference.

Evening peak showed noticeable performance degradation. The fixed NBN clearly has more capacity to handle peak load than the mobile broadband infrastructure can handle.