My broadband has been crap for ages and honestly I figured that’s just how we live now. But I snapped the other night when I couldn’t watch Tulsa King and snarked a tweet at Optus with a screen shot of my sad, medieval internet speeds.
So, er, turns out it wasn’t their fault. Mostly.
My NBN modem carked it and the Optus box attached to it has been working like a champion to make up the difference with an emergency 4G signal.
That’s cool. I guess.
But I can’t help thinking if they hadnt done that I’d have realised a long time ago that my NBN box was dead.
Thinking I should probably just get my service from the Russian hackers.
I hotspot at work, which works fine for what I do, and charge my phone at work (because I'm a tightarse and don't want to buy another charger for home). One morning my phone was beeping at me, in a tone that wasn't a text, ring or alarm. Turns out I'd been hotspotting all night (watching Netflix and other after hours tooling around) and didn't even notice the difference between that and my NBN connection...
When we all get Elon’s Neuralink inside our scone, the signal will come direct from the radio mast atop the Central Services building. The day will be coming soon, when we will own nothing and be happy.
Internode and 46mpbs downloads , ping at 13. Internode also have a top notch help desk in Adelaide, who I don't call much because it just works. Infact it was so fast I downgraded it and used the difference to get the TV box thingy.
do you get Aussie Broadband there? We got absolutely jack of optus and switched. Easy and haven't looked back. (Being rural we are on wireless broadband). We have a hiccough every now and again but aussie broadband actually contact us to let us know there are problems and they are working on it - optus we didn't hear from once. Takes work but these companies need us to move more often to keep them on their toes. They love a sleeping beauty customer (i think that is what i heard them called - a customer that doesn't ask for any contract improvements and just pays their bill on time paying shiteloads more than people moving around for deals)
We had a plan for a national service like that, but then that government lost, and the new one was all: leave it up to private industry, and just cobble something together with the ancient copper pairs that are already in place, because that'll be faster and cheaper. Turns out that with sufficient mismanagement and active malevolence you can make the crappy option more expensive and later... (BTW I believe that there are significant chunks of the USA that also have pretty crappy internet, don't they? But the dense bits have the good stuff, sure.)
As well as being free market neoliberal tight arses the new government were staffed by Luddites who thought fast internet was only for gaming and pirating nerds and who wants to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure to support THOSE weirdos?
Turns out that in the decade it's taken to build the network, technology and what we can do with it has advanced pretty rapidly and then a global pandemic hit and everyone had to work from home if they could and turns out fast internet would have been SUPER handy in 2020. Who knew? (Only every tech savvy person in the country who were shouting from every rooftop that they could find that the Plan B version of the NBN would be a white elephant and were tragically proven right).
I live in one of those internet deserts in the US. Fortunately, a friend pointed me to a way to get decent internet for way less than I was paying my old provider. Still not 100% awesome, but better than what we had.
Thanks for the explanation. The US has some areas without good options, but the telecoms, railroads and utilities (basically anyone with rights of way) strung significant amounts of fiber optic cables all over the country and it took a while for the demand to catch up with the infrastructure.
Australia has extensive high bandwidth backbone fiber infrastructure too. It's the last-km that is slow (in some places). As Dave W pointed out, if you happen to be in the footprint of the previous government's early roll-out, like north-west Tasmania, then you've got fiber to your house and are (presumably) grinning.
There are a lot of Australians who don't do much with their internet, I suspect, and aren't very demanding. Also Rupert put a _lot_ of effort into delaying uptake of online services, so that video-on-demand didn't eat into his cable-TV footprint.
Turns out that the internet isn't so slow in Australia...if you have the presence of mind to live in a marginal electorate.
For others, who live somewhere that politicians can just take for granted, well, why would you have the audacity to think that you'll get a quality service?
Even in a marginal electorate, with a strong independent candidate, I've had to do a deal with the muskman to get reliable fast internet out of the sky. Costs a bomb too ($140pcm) - but at least it bloody works. Got so tired of Telstra's drop outs and speed humps. Our telco system in Oz is a shambles, for all of the reasons already pointed out.
Density helps too. I'm in a thoroughly non-marginal seat (the PM's) and have just upped my service to the gigabit tier (still only 40M up though). Works pretty nicely, but it costs about twice as much as Steve's US service. Chalk that up to the Australia tax: we're useless at driving a bargain or being competitive, in general.
I live in Silicon Valley, so of course internet service here is terrible. I pay about that much but don't get within an order of magnitude of gigabit, and reliability is awful. You might think the sheer weight of techie/nerdie numbers here would create enough demand for some decent networking, but apparently the market doesn't work that way.
I hotspot at work, which works fine for what I do, and charge my phone at work (because I'm a tightarse and don't want to buy another charger for home). One morning my phone was beeping at me, in a tone that wasn't a text, ring or alarm. Turns out I'd been hotspotting all night (watching Netflix and other after hours tooling around) and didn't even notice the difference between that and my NBN connection...
Zactly! Also, thoughts and prayers for your data allowance.
Aldi $80 family plan - I think we still have a TB or two rolled over (which is weird considering there are two teenagers on the plan).
When we all get Elon’s Neuralink inside our scone, the signal will come direct from the radio mast atop the Central Services building. The day will be coming soon, when we will own nothing and be happy.
<white hot rage font>Don't talk to me about fucking Optus ... jerks</white hot rage font>
ditto
Internode and 46mpbs downloads , ping at 13. Internode also have a top notch help desk in Adelaide, who I don't call much because it just works. Infact it was so fast I downgraded it and used the difference to get the TV box thingy.
do you get Aussie Broadband there? We got absolutely jack of optus and switched. Easy and haven't looked back. (Being rural we are on wireless broadband). We have a hiccough every now and again but aussie broadband actually contact us to let us know there are problems and they are working on it - optus we didn't hear from once. Takes work but these companies need us to move more often to keep them on their toes. They love a sleeping beauty customer (i think that is what i heard them called - a customer that doesn't ask for any contract improvements and just pays their bill on time paying shiteloads more than people moving around for deals)
Why is internet so slow in Australia?
In the US, I pay $65.00 a month for gigabit service downloads and uploads.
We had a plan for a national service like that, but then that government lost, and the new one was all: leave it up to private industry, and just cobble something together with the ancient copper pairs that are already in place, because that'll be faster and cheaper. Turns out that with sufficient mismanagement and active malevolence you can make the crappy option more expensive and later... (BTW I believe that there are significant chunks of the USA that also have pretty crappy internet, don't they? But the dense bits have the good stuff, sure.)
As well as being free market neoliberal tight arses the new government were staffed by Luddites who thought fast internet was only for gaming and pirating nerds and who wants to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure to support THOSE weirdos?
Turns out that in the decade it's taken to build the network, technology and what we can do with it has advanced pretty rapidly and then a global pandemic hit and everyone had to work from home if they could and turns out fast internet would have been SUPER handy in 2020. Who knew? (Only every tech savvy person in the country who were shouting from every rooftop that they could find that the Plan B version of the NBN would be a white elephant and were tragically proven right).
I live in one of those internet deserts in the US. Fortunately, a friend pointed me to a way to get decent internet for way less than I was paying my old provider. Still not 100% awesome, but better than what we had.
Thanks for the explanation. The US has some areas without good options, but the telecoms, railroads and utilities (basically anyone with rights of way) strung significant amounts of fiber optic cables all over the country and it took a while for the demand to catch up with the infrastructure.
Australia has extensive high bandwidth backbone fiber infrastructure too. It's the last-km that is slow (in some places). As Dave W pointed out, if you happen to be in the footprint of the previous government's early roll-out, like north-west Tasmania, then you've got fiber to your house and are (presumably) grinning.
There are a lot of Australians who don't do much with their internet, I suspect, and aren't very demanding. Also Rupert put a _lot_ of effort into delaying uptake of online services, so that video-on-demand didn't eat into his cable-TV footprint.
Turns out that the internet isn't so slow in Australia...if you have the presence of mind to live in a marginal electorate.
For others, who live somewhere that politicians can just take for granted, well, why would you have the audacity to think that you'll get a quality service?
Even in a marginal electorate, with a strong independent candidate, I've had to do a deal with the muskman to get reliable fast internet out of the sky. Costs a bomb too ($140pcm) - but at least it bloody works. Got so tired of Telstra's drop outs and speed humps. Our telco system in Oz is a shambles, for all of the reasons already pointed out.
Density helps too. I'm in a thoroughly non-marginal seat (the PM's) and have just upped my service to the gigabit tier (still only 40M up though). Works pretty nicely, but it costs about twice as much as Steve's US service. Chalk that up to the Australia tax: we're useless at driving a bargain or being competitive, in general.
I live in Silicon Valley, so of course internet service here is terrible. I pay about that much but don't get within an order of magnitude of gigabit, and reliability is awful. You might think the sheer weight of techie/nerdie numbers here would create enough demand for some decent networking, but apparently the market doesn't work that way.
Murdoch the malevolent, told Turncoat that he didn’t want an NBN optic cable to be competing with his Foxtel cable.