What Happened With The NBN This Week?

This week: The NBN hack that wasn’t, Exetel’s NBN pricing undercuts Internode, Dodo promises unlimited plans, and the second mainland trial goes live in Kiama.

• The week started with Exetel releasing its proposed NBN pricing, and as expected, the plans were significantly cheaper than those Internode unveiled last week. Exetel’s high-end 100Mbps/200GB plan will be $100 per month ($20 cheaper than Internode), and 12Mbps/20GB will be just $34.50. And unlike Internode, Exetel connections won’t count uploads towards quota. Sure, Exetel is famous for chopping and changing plans, but the cheaper cost is welcomed news. [Gizmodo]

• Exetel chief, John Linton, also got busy blogging about how NBN providers will operate when it comes to performance. “All an ISP can do to negatively or positively affect the performance of an NBNCo service is to under provision the CVC (the cross connect between NBNCo and the ISP) or the IP bandwidth made available to the NBNCo services which only the truly paranoid would consider possible. Why paranoid? Because it would be so obvious that it is being done that no-one would use such an ISP’s service.” More at [Gizmodo]

• We’ve still only seen NBN pricing from a handful of ISPs, and next cab off the rank might be Dodo. The budget ISP previewed this week that it’s definitely planning unlimited plans, though they’ll cost more than ADSL2+. [Gizmodo]

• As we know, there’s more to the NBN than faster video streaming. And The Australian had a detailed piece about using the NBN to drive e-health developments. [Australian IT]

• Mid-week NBN news was dominated by the 25 year old truck driver who allegedly hacked into Platform Networks, an ISP which has signed on for (but not yet begun) NBN trials. That didn’t stop much of the media incorrectly attaching the NBN to the story, so Gizmodo appeared on 7 Sunrise to set the record straight. Video: [Gizmodo]

• And on Friday, the second mainland NBN trial kicked off in the Kiama Downs and Minnamurra region of the NSW south coast. Lifehacker was there to cover the story:

“It’s not a large scale test to see how the network itself works. The initial rollout in Kiama goes past 2,350 homes and has just 9 test customers during the pilot phase, which runs until October…”

Treasurer Wayne Swan noted that as of the end of June, the NBN has passed 18,423 homes. “There’s a long way to go but we’ve come a long way in a short period of time.” [Lifehacker]