[LINK] A national broadband network?

[Paul Brooks]

On 20/11/2011 6:40 PM, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
> Feeling somewhat peeved regarding this ..
>
> All over the net today .. "In all, about 18,000 homes now have access to
> the NBN, but only about 2,000 paying subscribers have been registered by
> the NBN Co, making for an 11 per cent connection rate." 
>
> A national broadband network?
>
> Surely, with an 11 per cent network connection rate the NBN can hardly
> be called a national broadband network, which must include actual take
> up, and utilization, to be correctly termed any computer etc network.
"All over the net"?  - this article was in the Australian. 'nuff said.

The commercial Wholesale Broadband Agreement is still being completed, and won't be
finalised until the Telstra deal is in place, and the ACCC has looked over that and
the NBN Co Undertaking.
Until that happens, all current connections have been made under the trial agreement.
Under the trial agreement, there are all sorts of 'no guarantees' clauses, so while
the 2000-odd people with connections have been trialling the service, they have mostly
kept their previous broadband services running as well, as a fall back. Many of the
current connections still won't be being charged for taking part in the trial.

As well, many people will still be under contract with their existing supplier,and
won't take up a NBN service until their current agreement expires.  It will take a
year or two for the majority of people in a serviced area to even look at swapping
over, assuming their current service provider has gone through the onboarding process,
or the existing providers that are accepting NBN services start actively marketing to
poach other service provider's customers - which they haven't yet.
Telephony isn't running yet except in limited trials, so anyone looking to move over
will still need to maintain their existing telephone technology and possibly lose any
benefits of bundling they might have now.

Further, all the existing services are running through temporary PoIs. The service
providers know there will be an element of pain and probably an outage when the real
PoIs are completed and they have to migrate the services over, so I don't expect they
are in a huge rush to sign up too many customers and make their migration nightmare
bigger than it needs to be.

>
> Seems to me that ongoing usage costs must be the problem? Whatever, at
> this rate, it's a dud. And, something needs to be done. Quickly. Hence
> though a firm supporter roll-on any and all competing net technologies.
The only thing thats a dud is the article. Its just too early to tell anything
meaningful. Nothing needs to be done quickly, that would just be a knee-jerk reaction
to insufficient time to gather data or for many service providers to connect and start
accepting customers, and nobody having a service contract to give up their existing
connection. Those subset that are being charged for a trial connection have been
"paying customers" for only 6 weeks.
Come back in two years and see the take-up in areas built now and see the take-up
before making any rash calls.

P.