[arcboii92]

As a kiwi it blows my mind how bad your broadband is over there. My cousin recently moved to some rural Aussie town and will be getting 25 megabit, tops. Here in NZ we're rolling out 4 gigabit connections nationwide over the next 6 months.

EDIT: props for getting rid of limits and disconnects though. NZ providers are just saying we'll be able to cope with everyone working from home because we have a fancy network.

[justanotherc]

25mbs is bad?! Lol I would KILL for that -- here in small-town Canada I'm still on DSL that tops out at 12mbs. My dad who's on a farm gets six through a point to point connection that he pays an arm and a leg for -- although he's shortly getting an LTE connection at 25.

Last week they started laying cable down my street, so it seems pretty soon I'll be able to join the modern world.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

It's very regional. A while back someone here on HN was trying to tell everyone how easy and affordable it was to get 10Gb fiber these days and didn't seem to be aware of how ridiculous that statement was. Sure enough, when challenged they produced a link to a company that assured me they could not service my company's area, which not only isn't rural but is also a stone's throw away from a rather large IT company who's name you'd definitely recognize.

Hell, my company has several branch locations which are relegated to point-to-point wireless links in the sub-Mb range.

[auxym]

My parents live 75 km away from Montreal. It's a small, somewhat isolated town, but still: it's not remote in any sense of the word.

Their only broadband option is LTE (and data prices in Canada are through the roof) or satellite (also expensive).

From what they're telling me, people from the area formed a co-op and got government funding to lay fiber. Except now that it's happening, incumbent telecomms also want a piece of the pie, doing everything in their power to lobby, slow things down through the CRTC and give them time to put their own systems in place before the co-op.

[candu]

Also in Canada here, albeit the big-city part - our telecommunications sector is uniquely bad in terms of bandwidth / service for value and consumer choice.

We have organizations like Internet Society Canada (https://internetsociety.ca/) that are aiming to help change that, but it's an uphill battle.

[nreece]

Yeah it sucks, and what's worse is that there's no near-future course correction by the policy makers. This is going to come back and bite us in some very uncomfortable places.

Kudos for the multi-gigabit fibre, when we can only imagine of a gigabit lottery.

[golergka]

I'm confused, what do policy makers have to do with it?

[nreece]

"Here in Australia Labor’s plan was for a nationwide network with 93 per cent FTTP coverage. Under the Coalition’s model, only around 20 per cent of NBN Co customers will enjoy FTTP. Around a third of fixed-line premises will be lumbered with FTTN."

https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/n...

[duckMuppet]

Let no tragedy go to waste...

[em-bee]

how much international bandwidth are you getting now though? when i lived in auckland more than a decade ago, the local bandwidth was rather irrelevant to me, as most of the websites that i needed to access were overseas and i paid about a dollar per GB for that.

a fast local internet is useful mostly for local streaming services. (does youtube count as local in NZ now?)

[mandelbrotwurst]

At least some of that could be due to the fact that Australia is way larger geographically though, right? It's a lot more cable to run.

[stephen_g]

Not at all. NZ is even less urbanised than Australia. The long-distance transit cables between cities in Australia all mostly already existed before the NBN even started.

You could cover more than 80% of our population just cabling up (literally) about half a dozen reasonably dense cities.

The actual reason is political. One side of politics privatised the state owned monopoly telco, creating a single huge, anti-competitive behemoth. That made progress with the internet stagnate for a decade. Then the other side got in, tried to work with the telco but they wouldn’t budge, and then surprised everybody by deciding to just build a provider-neutral network that was FTTP to 90-93% of the population. This was going fine - a few months behind schedule but on budget (projected at AU$44.1bn) after a few years.

But the opposition managed to convince a bunch of people in the media that it was hugely over-budget (despite the fact it wasn’t, and that all their financials were on the public record) and that a sensible solution was to stop that, and instead buy the old copper networks off the incumbent provider and spend a few billion to do a bit of an upgrade. They were “absolutely confident 25 megs is enough for anyone” and said this would cost max $29bn. They won Government, turned the network on its head and it’s just been one problem after another with huge widespread service quality issues, massive cost overruns, delays etc.

So now the cost of their “more sensible, cheaper, and quicker to build” network is nearing $60bn and finishing two years later than the original FTTP schedule (before they won Government, the party that wrecked the project promised to have it done by the end of 2016!)

So it’s just a big mess. Nobody really knows why they chose to do what they did when pretty much all the experts said to just continue with FTTP (they paid some consultants with links to their party to say their idea was great to get around that). Some say it was business links between party members and the incumbent telco, or the cable TV network they own half of. Others say it was because they had a deal with Murdoch (the leader of the opposition actually happened to have lunch with him the day before they announced their policy) because he owns the other half of the cable TV network. Perhaps it was just because they couldn’t accept that it was a good idea the way it was...

[paranoidrobot]

The "Australia is way larger" thing ignores that the situation in the cities is just as bad, or sometimes worse.

[gumby]

Australia is pretty densely settled though. I mean I have cousins on the Eyre Peninsula so I know what "thinly settled" means, but most people live in (comparatively) densely settled suburbs.

[monocasa]

Then you'd expect the situation to get better in denser areas of Australia far more than it does.