NBN rollout locations 2012 revealed! Are you getting it ?
Posted Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 7:04 pm by Jason Cartwright
Today was a big day for the progress of the National Broadband Network in Australia. The government announced the cities, towns and suburbs that will at least have construction started in the next 12 months. This rollout plan includes 28 new locations that will bring the NBN to almost half a million homes and businesses across the country.
“Today’s announcement represents the start of a major nationwide construction effort that should eventually see us offer National Broadband Network coverage to every one of Australia’s 13 million premises.” said NBN Co CEO Mike Quigley.
This announcement is actually only the beginning of a far more transparent build process for the NBN. Early next year the NBN Co will release a 3-year indicative view of the rollout, this will be updated annually until anticipated completion of the rollout in 2021.
Unfortunately Albury Wodonga didn’t make the list this year, but dozens did. Did your city make the cut ? The full list of locations the NBN will reach in 2012 is available on pages 3 – 4 of this PDF from NBN Co. The list of diverse new locations revealed today is shown below.
NSW – Blacktown, Dapto, Gosford, Lidcombe, Long Jetty, Penrith, Richmond, Sawtell, Strathfield (Homebush), Wollongong.
NT – Darwin
QLD – Nudgee
SA – Aldinga Beach, Port Augusta, Port Elliot, Stirling, Strathalbyn, Yankalila
TAS – Launceston, Somerset
VIC – Ballarat Central, Melbourne City, Melton, Tullamarine
WA – Applecross, Meadow Springs, Pinjarra, South Perth
It’s important to remember the areas listed indicate where construction will start within the next 12 months, there’s no guarantee of a competition date. The detailed maps also show just how harsh the rollout will be. Despite living in a listed rollout location, you may live on the wrong side of the street and miss the initial rollout.
More info @ http://nbnco.com.au
iiNet NBN plans answer NBN dream. 100Mbps + 1TB = $99pm.
Posted Monday, September 19, 2011 at 8:23 am by Jason Cartwright
The NBN dream of delivering faster speed and better prices is finally being realised. This morning iiNet have announced their retail NBN plans. Earlier this year Internode took a lot of heat for their NBN offerings being too expensive ($189.95 for 100/40, 1TB plan). Internode pointed to NBN interconnect costs as the reason why, but since then Dodo, Exetel, but more importantly, iiNet have announced significantly cheaper plans.
At the time of the Internode pricing announcement, the Government’s Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy suggested competition would bring prices down and after today’s announcement, it seems he was right. Early reaction online this morning seems overwhelmingly positive for these prices. Not entirely surprising given moving to an iiNet NBN plan would dramatically increase speed and downloads – Win/Win.
While there may be 12 options, the top plan is most inviting. 1TB of downloads, at 100Mbps down and 40Mbps up for just $99.95 per month. All the iiNet NBN plans require a 24 month plan, but if that’s the barrier to entry, sign me up now.
iiNet’s plans don’t cater for the entry level pricing, look to Dodo or Exetel for that, but at the medium to top end of the market, iiNet are currently the cheapest. Your move BigPond and Optus.
The only problem with the iiNet NBN plans is that most of us can’t get them yet. Now the pricing is in line with what we expected to see, the only question left is how fast it can be rolled out.
Update
VOIP phone service can be added for $9.95pm. The NBN prices are also available to business but the top plan costs $30pm extra.
More @ http://www.iinet.net.au/nbn/
First NBN Wireless locations announced by NBNCo
Posted Wednesday, August 3, 2011 at 6:25 pm by Jason Cartwright
93% of us will receive superfast fibre connections, sadly that means 7% will miss out. 4% of the remaining 7 will be serviced by fixed wireless and the other 3 by satellite. Speeds, latency and load degradation will all be worse on both of these wireless technologies, but with some corners of Australia being so remote, its just not financially viable or sensible to run fibre.
Metro residents may look at the heavily disclaimed ‘Up to 12Mbps’ speeds above and be shocked, sitting pretty with their 100Mb cable connections today. In reality the further you go into regional and rural Australia speeds drop off – dramatically. If your wondering where the remaining customer base for dial-up is, you found it.
12Mbps may be slow, even by today’s standard ADSL2+ connection of 20Mbps, but its all relative. Just think of remote users being 5 years behind. The biggest issue will be from residents who live on the borderline of the fibre rollout. There literally could be one side of the street on 100Mbps and the other on 12Mbps. Talk about a digital divide.
Don’t kid yourselves people, real estate sites will absolutely add internet connectivity options to buying and renting property details in the next 5 years. To be honest its surprising its not available now. If I knew a similar rental property was available 1km closer to the exchange would net me 8-10Mbps better speeds on ADSL2+ I’d happily pay $5-$10 more a week for it.
So lets get to what your really here for.. will you get Fibre or not ? NBNCo have released maps of the first communities to receive fixed wireless. The surround Geraldton (WA), Toowoomba (Qld), Tamworth (NSW), Ballarat (Vic) and Darwin (NT).
For detailed maps, check out the Fixed-wireless coverage map [PDF]. For more information, head to NBNCo’s website.
NBNCo: “We were not hacked, compromised or affected.”
Posted Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 6:01 pm by Jason Cartwright
Well well well, it seems our good old traditional media are running a story with some pretty badly reported facts. With visuals of police forces raiding a house with guns blazing its all very dramatic. If you take two big headline topics NBN and Hacking, and combine them in one story, your bound to get great ratings right.. never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
This afternoon police to arrest a 25 year old man from Cowra in Central NSW on 49 hacking charges, but the reports that NBN was compromised seem to be incorrect. In a tweet from NBNCo on twitter, they say:
We were not hacked, compromised or affected. The company said to have been involved has not yet connected services over the NBN
Update:
NBNCo have released a full post responding to the miss-reporting regarding the NBN Hack.
http://nbnco.com.au/news-and-events/news/hacks-and-hacking.html
Finally a geek gets the NBN, turns out its awesome
Posted Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 10:35 pm by Jason Cartwright
While that National Broadband Network has begun its rollout in small pockets of Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales, it has now reached South Australia and we finally get a detailed write-up from a user. This week Internode switched on their first customer in Willunga, 1 hour south of Adelaide.
Mr Raaj Menon is not just any customer. After early release sites were announced at the start of this year, Mr Menon convinced his family to up and move to Willunga just to be one of the first connected to the NBN. Spouses have to put up with a lot when it comes to their partner’s geeky habits, but this has to be up there with the best.
Mr Menon is the CEO of PCRange and has published his experience with the NBN in a blog post, providing a first-hand breakdown. Unsurprisingly Menon whipped out Speedtest.net got a workout to show off the new 100Mbps FTTP connection. The results speak for themselves.. impressive.
“The connection for the trial I have is 100Mbit downstream and 40Mbit Upstream. I was also given 200Gb data for the month which should be ample at least for now.” says Menon.
A ping to the closest server was returned in just 3 milliseconds. Hard core gamers would kill for a ping that low. By comparison a speedtest on my ADSL2+ connection landed a 35ms ping, decent, but every bit counts when it comes to twitchy FPS. The download speed was 95.12Mbps – only a 5% degradation from the theoretical maximum. The upload speeds were equally impressive, 35.99Mbps. While not symmetrical, this is around 35x ADSL2 upload speeds.
Image credit: The Digital Dreamer
Stats are fun, like specs on a cpu, but its real life applications that will impact our lives. Menon goes on to say “I can download a 1.3 Gigabyte file in under 2 minutes at 9 megabytes per second”…”I can upload a file just over 400MB in under 2 minutes.”
To put this in perspective, each episode of the techAU podcast is around 800Mb, the uploading process currently takes hours, using the NBN this would be done in 4 minutes.
Menon says he will continue to update us as the months roll by, so be sure to subscribe to his blog, Twitter or Facebook.
Telstra (and Optus) deal done, NBN continues march to your place
Posted Thursday, June 23, 2011 at 11:00 pm by Jason Cartwright
Image credit: rpongsaj
Today was a very important day for the NBN Co and the National Broadband Network. This morning Senator Stephen Conroy along with Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced an 11 Billion dollar deal with Telstra had been reached. The details of the agreement are extensive, but the only checkbox to tick is the approval of Telstra Shareholders and the ACCC. Both of these are more of a technicality than a serious hurdle, hence today’s announcement being made now.
For a minimum of 35 years, NBN Co will have access to and use the Telstra infrastructure including fibre to create the NBN. This avoids what would likely have been a much more expensive option of NBN Co building it out themselves. Originally when the plan was tabled, the government spoke about a ‘long term lease’ which was believed to be around 99 years. In reality, 35 years is a long time, particularly when you think internet services started in Australia just 20 years ago.
The deal includes a transition plan for all BigPond customers to be progressively moved over to the NBN, meaning user adoption of the NBN is now a foregone conclusion. While Telstra will decommission its copper network, and even pull equipment out of exchanges, it will continue to offer Pay-TV over the HFC network in cities.
Total payments over time are estimated to deliver approximately $9 billion, with the additional $2 billion going to changeover costs incurred like retraining staff.
Not to be left out, a deal between Optus and NBN Co was also struck. Optus are now on-board and will transition their customer-base on HFC to the NBN progressively. The agreement with SingTel Optus Pty Ltd will net them a $800 Million. With Optus and Telstra both confirmed to transition customer to the NBN, that will secure around 60% of the users online. Other ISP’s who use Telstra infrastructure will have little choice but to move and why wouldn’t they if they can avoid the Telstra wholesale premium.
There is an out clause for Telstra, if less than 20% of customers are signed up, then they can opt out. Once past this point, if the government were to change and wanted to redact on the contract, tax payers would incur a $500 Million penalty.
So the only question now is when will you get the NBN ? Unfortunately NBN Co only release immediate rollout sites. Most likely regional areas will be in the next 3-5 years and city areas in 5-8 years.
A big day indeed.
More on the Telstra deal @ NBNCo and more on the Optus deal @ NBN Co.
