I'm still salty, to put it very mildly, at the Coalition for nixing the FTTP plan. My parents got FTTP, which they barely use at a trickle. I'm still on my wireless internet plan because it's no worse than whatever excuse for an upgrade is available at my place thanks to downgraded NBN plan of the copper and coal party.
Well if people would stop voting for the Rupert Murdoch private interest party things in Australia might improve. Seriously it's amazing the amount of damage that person has done to politics and the social fabric.
Malcolm Turnbull advertised that FTTN could handle speeds up to 100Mb down. I thought that sounded alright -- cheaper, faster rollout, and same speeds as FTTP anyway (with faster FTTP speeds than 100Mb allegedly being absurdly expensive anyway).
Of course, that requires keeping distances from nodes to a minimum, and in the end that wasn't done. I can't get higher than about 50Mb down due to distances from the exchange. I recall them saying that their 50Mb plan is most popular -- but I'm only on it because my connection is unstable at faster speeds. So yeah, it sucks.
And now, only a few years on, the FTTN is already slowly getting replaced at great expense making the FTTN a colossal waste of money. Turnbull knew better as other places on earth already tried FTTN and removed it. The cost of putting power to all the nodes was excessive and ongoing power bills eventually expensive too. FTTP was passive at the nodes. The only argument was that it was planned to be a quicker rollout which didn’t eventuate either. Total shit show.
How many kilometres of replacement copper did they buy? Fucks sake. Unfortunately perfectly demonstrative of both Australian politics and the Australian public.
I used to have access to a separate fibre network (not NBN, was FTTB with VDSL through the building) because I lived in Fortitude Valley in Brisbane -- not only was it cheaper, it was properly fast and had near symmetrical upload, not quite, but not 5% of the download.
Now I'm stuck on NBN HFC. I get random 15 second dropouts, constant packet loss (but only incoming, not outgoing) when playing online shooters, its just crap all around. And the support for it hasn't helped. Sigh our internet is a mess. And its entirely down to the LNP as to why.