The NBN’s huge fixed costs require that nearly every Australian household subscribe to the network in order for it to be financially viable. However, as more homes abandon the NBN in favour of wireless options, including 5G mobile and Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system, the NBN’s fixed expenses are shared across a diminishing subscriber
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
It’s macrobusiness, no shit. 90% of their articles are attempts to manipulate the stock market
5G does have a congestion problem at peak hours as well, meaning that Telstra and Optus won’t sell you 5G home broadband if there’s already too many subscribers in your area.