The NBN mainland rollout is underway, but there’s some good news for any body who happens to live in one of the five mainland launch sites – there’s a chance you may get to trial the NBN for free.
NBN Co has confirmed that they will be offering its services to ISPs for free in the initial stages of the rollout to finetune the network’s performance. According to Lucy Battersby at the SMH, Telstra, Internode, Optus and iiNet have all confirmed that they won’t charge customers who are part of the trial during the initial stages either.
The catch, though, is that they also won’t waive the fees customers are already paying for their ADSL connections. So it won’t be free superfast broadband, it will be superfast broadband for the same cost as your ADSL connection.
It still makes me wish I were part of the initial trial…
[SMH]
Glenn
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 11:10 AMHow do we become a part of said trial? I’m ADSL2+ with Telstra, would love to get onto this!
Joe
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 2:28 PMThis illistraights the problem with this whole NBN rollout! I sit in Dunlop ACT (Australia’s Capital) on a RIM / Pairgain system and cant get a decent ADSL 1 connection speed….and yet they are providing people with ADSL 2+ speeds the new equip first?? What a slap in the face and a waste of money. No vote for Labour!!! Wan*ers
Daniel
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 2:48 PMThere’s only 5 launch sites. Grow up.
Nodeity
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 11:12 AMSo what are the places that will get the trial?? :]
nesci2
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 11:19 AMrollout sites here http://goo.gl/ehX4O
Gerry Satrapa
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 11:23 AMThat should more than make up for any teething issues…
Gerry Satrapa
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 11:25 AMhttp://www.itnews.com.au/News/219260,nbn-co-releases-14-new-trial-sites.aspx
Tim
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 12:08 PMI know this is going to make me sound really dumb. But I don’t get it. How can these remote-ish areas be on NBN without everywhere being? Doen’t this “superfast” connection at some point “plug in” to the existing infrastructure?
Tee Carter
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 12:25 PMADSL2+ technology is what connects your home to the ISP Exchange. However, the Exchanges are connected to the rest of the Internet though much higher speed links than the ADSL2+ maximum specs. The ISPs use fibre to connect the Exchanges to each other and to the rest of the Internet. So really Fibre to the Home (the NBN key technology) provides you more bandwidth from your home to the Exchanges (where the high speed already exists).
ozoneocean
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 12:24 PMBet you anything it’s highly political- The independents in the labor coalition will have the NBN trialled in their seats first and places like Tasmania.
That’s just a political reality.
matt
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 1:21 PMthats cool… so they are trying to get a real ‘under load’ indication?
good idea… if only AT&T had done that in the states with it’s wireless!! “oh yes!!! unlimited super fast wireless for everyone!!! … as long as only a couple of people actually take us up on that…”
still, even if you have a lot of people using it, you won’t have them using it for its unique benefits, (low latency, high bandwidth)… because really, there isn’t much that uses these benefits yet.
mogwai
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 4:24 PMI’ve had my box installed on the side of my house for free and i can tell you the only reason they are doing this is because noone in the trial area is signing up to pay for it.
My area has great ADSL with both optus, internode and Telstra DSLAMS in the exchange. why on earth would i want to pay more to get the same speed i can get from ADSL2+ (18Mbps). Yeah ok i can go up to 100Mbps. Wow.
I work in IT, quite often work from home and love music and movies but unless i plan on downloading tons of pirated material or run my own hosting company why the hell do i need all that speed ?
Outside of political reasons the only other reason i can think of why they would use my suburb first was because its very high density and they probably wanted to see what their worst case cost would be per property.
Its taken them months and they’ve had to dig massive trenches up and down all the footpaths and re-instate 5 peoples concrete driveways in just my block.
All this and people are too poor or old to care much about it anyway.
For christ sake start in the country or outter suburbs where they actually need it first. Noone in the city gives a crap about it.
They’ll have to pry my copper pair out of my cold dead hands before they can replace it with fibre in my home.
Marc
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 6:52 PMSo you’re saying we shouldn’t roll out the NBN because your present needs are satisfied?
Callie Rasmussen
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 4:44 PMYEAAAAAH BABY.
All my years of sitting on a RIM / Pairgained system with 1.5 mbps ADSL1 paying the same prices as people with higher speeds elsewhere has paid off! (I’m in Kiama Downs)
Mike Johnson
Friday, April 22, 2011 at 8:38 AMWorking in IT myself I can appreciate the uplink speed and the extra download speed will be of massive benefit when I work from home.
Callie Rasmussen
Friday, April 22, 2011 at 3:51 PMFor the last 10 years, 1.5mbps line speed has been the maximum I can get – the real time average ended up being about 900kbps – 1.2 mbps.
If I can even get that beefed up to about 5mbps with this NBN trial, I will be so happy. Not even being able to Skype with family internationally has been frustrating as hell, not to mention I’ve avoided all forms of netbanking or online shopping for fear of timeouts.