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from the they-don't-make-em-like-they-used-to dept.
It's a day for Australia as Telstra, one of the main ISPs providing internet access with the newly built NBN network, declares 100Mbps plans will no longer be sold as they cannot be used. This change has been made due to the determination that the NBN cannot deliver the speeds promised. With the original plan in tatters after the Liberal government downgraded the network components to use "Multi Technology Mix" many customers lack the physical components to connect to the NBN to be able to receive the full speeds available. While some of the initial rollout delivered fibre to the premises the Liberal government switched the rollout to use copper and existing cable systems with many customers connect via FTTN leaving a lot to be desired in terms of speed. Farewell 100Mbps, we hardly knew you.
No large scale infrastructure plan survives contact with an incoming government.
(Score: 1) by Sabriel on Wednesday March 04 2020, @04:36AM (1 child)
Yeah, and too often all dial before you dig gets you is "fucked if we know". What I'd give for comic book x-ray vision.
But that kind of "scratch just deep enough" mindset is exactly why we ended up with what we got instead of the original NBN goal of "do it properly". Weird how doing the right thing tends to cost more - initially. You'd think we'd learn, but no, it's future someone's problem until it's suddenly not. I'd rather it have taken an order of magnitude longer but done right the first time instead of this farce.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday March 04 2020, @08:20AM
That was one thing that monopoly telcos were good at, when cost didn't matter they could spend the money and do it right. Of course you then got a level of service that you'd be quite used to if you lived in Yugoslavia or East Germany - how many months was it to get a basic thing done like a phone line moved? - but when they were run as taxpayer charities they had the leeway to get it done properly. Not that I'd want to go back to that, but a good halfway point would be nice rather than the current quick, cheap, and nasty.