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[Starlink] was released in Australia in 2021 and offers unlimited data for $139 per month plus a hardware cost of roughly $599, with speeds comparable to the NBN’s 100-megabit plans.
Why the fuck would people be swapping to this when it is an extra $40-$50 a month for “comparable” speeds?! This article obviously has an agenda.
Not everyone who is on NBN can get a 100Mbit plan. Many people who are not on fibre struggle with unreliable service. And if you’re like me where the only ‘NBN’ available to you is SkyMuster, and 4G speeds and reliability have been deteriorating over the past few years, and there’s no 5G in sight…
(Full disclosure: I’ve been on Starlink for almost two years now. Where I live, it is the only way to get usable internet service. If there ever is an adequate alternative option for me, I’ll swap in a heartbeat.)
There’s a lot of places that are still on copper and you can’t get 100 megabits (unless you want to spend $10,000+ to have fibre installed). Not out at Woop Woop either, suburbs of regional cities.
Star link offered faster speeds than NBN for me in my apartment 15km from the city centre. Fucking embarrassment. It was pretty new too, but it had all copper in the building.
Yup, have some relatives who live in the outer burbs of Perth and they get worse speeds on turdbulls fibre to the node mess than they did on ADSL . They are considering 5g and musk net at present. Thanks Malcolm!
Meanwhile I’m pretty happy with gigabit fibre to the home for $100 a month. The low upload speed of 50MB/s still has me scratching my head.
I know a few folks in that situation - likely people who the originally designed fibre roll-out would have hit, but instead got a substandard connection.
I’m not so sure it’s a full death spiral though, one would hope that the fibre retrofit can catch a lot of these up.
Yeah, I should have said, I’m definitely not convinced of the narrative the article is selling. Like you say, as fibre is rolled out, people will come back to the NBN when they can get connections that are as fast (if not faster) and more reliable for cheaper. And the NBN is a government project, so they don’t have to worry about cash flow in the meantime.
Yeah the only people I know who have gone to Starlink have done it because they are rural and can’t get close to 100Mbit speeds if they have NBN access at all
We currently run HFC NBN and Starlink at our work. It runs a failover setup so when HFC dies it swaps to Starlink then swaps back when HFC comes back.
I literally have to pay for two services to maintain reliable internet because HFC constantly goes down for the whole area.
If I move to EE, I pay a fortune for the install and miss out on access to NBN FTTP plans.
HFC has been so bad the past week that we’ve mostly been on Starlink. I got the shits and unplugged HFC to stop it swapping over so we’ve spent the past few work days purely on Starlink.
It’s worked perfectly for VOIP and all the other typical office tasks (email, remote hosted files and documents). It’s a third the price of EE, cost all of 400 bucks for the hardware, was delivered in like 48 hours from the order, and took maybe an hour to setup on the roof. I can’t even get a budget estimate for EE install costs in 48 days, let alone actually get the thing running. At which point it will cost me a massive premium for our internet forever.
I’m going to cancel HFC. What an embarrassment the Liberals left us with. Thanks Malcolm and Tony, sweet legacy you disgusting worms.
You’ve got to start saying it’s shit, then you underfund it to make it a bit shit. Then you sell it off so a publicly traded corporation run by your mates and donors can ‘run it more efficiently’.
Except, we’ve seen this play out over and over. It never ends well for us, the suckers, oops I mean the consumers.
They also overdid it, nobody wants to buy an NBN that’s mostly copper. The way business would run it more efficiently is by just turning off and abandoning areas that need repairs.
That’s exactly why Telstra sold their copper network to the NBN in the first place. And Murdoch and Foxtel selling their HFC. Fibre to the home was making them both worth $0. Telstra had done minimal maintenance on copper for years, because they knew what was coming.
Never forgive LNP and in particular Turnbull for creating a scheme to pay out for old, obsolete networks. “Cheaper and sooner”. Neither, and technologically and strategically inferior.
The NBN was given a pile of shit to start with. But as soon as it gets close to cleaned up, the vultures will be circling.
@No1 I don’t believe any such ‘death spiral’ exists. Starlink is a last resort due to cost and latency. It’s better than a broken cabled feed. 5G suffers from limited area availability and time slice contention when more users are added, as is the case with all wireless systems.
NBN FTTH is an unbeatable value and a total performance beast. @zurohki
NBN FTTH is an unbeatable value and a total performance beast
Sure, as long as you don’t need upload speed. That’s apparently a premium business-class feature.
@zurohki You can get 1000/400 if you really need it. Speed costs money, typically $9.00/day (Launtel). The use case for more than 50Mbps upload is limited.
I saw guys running trace into all the conduit in my neighbourhood, and they said it would be a couple months til we could all get fibre to the house.
2 years later… sweet fuck all.
It was about 18 months for me from seeing the fiber in the street to being able to get connected.
It will happen, just keep bugging your ISP for updates.
What’s the ISP going to do about it?
Jack shit, they have no power over that, but you can be made aware of an available upgrade as soon as they are possible.
I’m with ABB, and when FTTH upgrades were available in my street I had my appointment booked the day after they were given the green light by NBNCo. I was up and running on gigabit fiber (upgraded from FTTN VDSL) within 2 weeks total.
NBN switched half of my town to fixed wireless at a higher cost than FTTN just to get ‘bums on seats’ to make coalition pollies look good/less bad.
Let me put that another way.
I got a worse service, at a higher cost to the government, AND a higher cost to me, just so it could happen 6 months earlier.
I would have been happy to wait, and now FTTP is off the table for me.
Fuck 'em.
