[trengrj]

If you look at Australia on a map, the premise of a NBN for everyone was definitely going to be difficult but I'd argue that the project hasn't failed. I have NBN at home and it works well. I think we will look back in 10 years with a much softer view on the project.

[toomanybeersies]

I live 20 minutes walk from Melbourne CBD and don't have NBN. I'm scheduled to get it sometime between July and December 2019.

It's not just the speed of rollout that's a failure, but the actual connection speed.

New Zealand has managed to get 100 MB/s to most urban centres, and 1 GB/s to the larger ones, it's consistently fast too. Meanwhile I walked past a billboard advertising 40 MB/s the other day like it was something to be impressed about. It's certainly not future proof.

I know people who've worked with the NBN and organisationally it's a complete shambles.

[throwaway9d0291]

> If you look at Australia on a map, the premise of a NBN for everyone was definitely going to be difficult

If you look at Australia's population density [0] and the guarantees the NBN actually made (FTTP for 90% of premises) [1], I don't think it's unrealistic at all. The NBN just needs to cover the major cities and some of the larger regional towns.

> I think we will look back in 10 years with a much softer view on the project.

As someone who moved from Australia (ADSL) to the US (Cable) to Europe (Fiber), absolutely no way. Coax is over a decade old already and the absolute cutting edge state of the art offered by a major ISP is 2Gbit/s. Meanwhile on fiber, there are multiple ISPs offering 10Gbit/s already (Salt in Switzerland, Bahnhof in Sweden, Fibrant in Salisbury, NC, VTel in Vermont).

Fiber is also showing signs of getting faster. Copper is not.

Specific to the NBN, back in 2012, just before we voted the Liberals in, NBNCo was getting ready to switch on gigabit network-wide [2]. Now, they're saying they're not even going to bother with HFC [3].

There is no way this project will be seen as anything but an example of truly stunning incompetence 10 years from now.

[0]: http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/1270....

[1]: https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn#nbn_about

[2]: https://www.nbnco.com.au/corporate-information/media-centre/...

[3]: https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/tech/2018/08/08/nbn-hfc-tech...

[BigJono]

"Truly stunning incompetence" is generous. Everything that has happened to the NBN from 2013 onwards has been pure malice. There's no "incompetence" about it.