[LINK] Revealed: the fastest telcos and cities in Australia for broadband

[Carl Makin]

Hi David,


> On 10 Nov 2017, at 11:44 am, David Lochrin <dlochrin at key.net.au> wrote:
> 
> On 10/11/2017 10:01, Roger Clarke wrote:
> 
>> Much of the city uses TransACT VDSL2.  Is it an appropriate characterisation to call that an updated version of an early form of FTTN?  If so, then 32/14 MBps could be seen as being current state of the art?
> 
> I'd suggest it's an updated form of ADSL2+.  But you should be grateful for the 72/18 Mbit/s speeds you're seeing with VDSL2!

I would agree, ADSL/ADSL2/VDSL could all be called early FTTN, they’re just moving the node closer to the customer.

> I think the data rate is much more a function of network engineering, principally the copper distance between user and node, and then the fibre architecture.  I'm under the impression TransACT uses much denser nodes, and fibre to the building in the case of apartments; is that correct?

In the areas that got serviced before the rollout stopped yes, however Transact nodes all hang off a suburban “supernode” which then goes back to the data centre.  In the first rollout of VDSL2 in Transact/iiNet apparently the VDSL2 DSLAMS would only fit in the supernodes.  If your house hung off a node, then your connection was jumpered via copper up to the supernode.  In my case, in Kambah, we are apparently jumpered through two nodes before we get to the supernode which results in our connection rate of 33/3 and, recently, reliability issues.  iiNet were rolling out “micro DSLAMS” which would fit in the nodes, but I haven’t heard of any new installs in months.

Much as I would rather support Transact/iiNet than Turnbull’s NBN I got sick of the reliability issues with Transact and the slow upload speed and since NBN FTTN was just rolled out in Kambah I had it installed last Wednesday.

Sometimes you get lucky. We’re getting 95/35 via ookla (with sync of 107/44).  We must be very close to the node.


Carl.