[LINK] NBN fault maintenance

[David]

On Tuesday, 3 December 2019 2:01:03 AM AEDT Paul Brooks wrote:

>>  [...] a hotch-potch network with no end-to-end technical standards or quality control, and customer premise equipment for the most part made cheaply in China, to no national standard regarding ring-tones, etc., and probably with at least one back door]

>  ...which is exactly how the rest of the access networks around the world work, and exactly what we had back in the DSL days - actually worse, because back then it was customer BYO modem, with no inspection or validation of capability or standards-compliance of the devices pulled off the cheapest-possible shelf at a retailer, or imported from dodgy websites making gear for overseas markets , and plugging them into the bare wire of the phone socket. But oddly, mostly it worked OK.

The comparison I had in mind was with the old POTS voice network and the Rudd NBN, both of which had end-to-end design, implementation & management responsibility vested in a publicly owned organisation.

There's little difference between BYO routers and devices supplied by most ISPs.  I bought a popular router supplied by a number of ISPs when I migrated to an NBN FTTN service.  But its VoIP support was essentially Chinese (the default) and American, and after discovering some odd entries in various firmware tables I put it back in its box and bought a quality product (there aren't many).

Security of the whole network is a real issue and it would be naieve to think many imported devices don't contain back doors and scope for malware.  But I think customer premise equipment (CPE) is still subject to some sort of local approval, so if we keep the current model we might be able to slowly improve the end-to-end technical standard by making that approval process far more stringent.

The dud modem came in handy when my FTTN service degraded to unusable.  My ISP at the time was reluctant to report a fault because they'd be charged several hundred dollars (which would be passed on to me) if technicians found no fault.  The situation was only progressed when I showed the fault also occurred with the boxed modem, but it exemplifies, yet again, the lack of clear, end-to-end responsibility.


> As for rescuing Telstra - I hope its a cold day in hell before Telstra gets their mits on the NBN though - they are responsible for the need for the NBN in the first place, to break down their monopoly on local loop after the hatchet-job they did on the HFC rollout.  Telstra have been richly compensated by the cutover-bounty for losing their vertical monopoly, and crying poor now from a deal they were very happy to agree with a decade ago really doesn't wash.

Well yes, I agree, but good luck with that.

David L.