John Linton On Friday we sent out emailed 'invitations' to those of our current ADSL customers in Willunga, Armidale and Kiama who are covered by the NBNCo trial areas. By Monday morning we had received requests to take part in the trial from around 15% of the total 'eligible' and we commenced submitting those 'orders' to the NBNCo yesterday via the cumbersome, '19th Century' facility they have made available at this early stage of development. It will be interesting to see just how the installation time frames and process actually work out and just how 'seamless' a disparate array of end users actually 'fare' with these new processes. By this morning we had received positive replies from 24% of the customers we emailed which, in other circumstances, would be an excellent response but I am surprised that a free trial of a new technology didn't generate a much higher percentage of acceptances.
It will be interesting to see what experience these trial users actually enjoy as I already see various 'claims' being made about 'how much better' one ISP's NBNCo service will be than another. I am assuming people who make such statements are lunatics whose comprehension of both reality and communications networks is far removed from the actuality of the NBNCo network. My knowledge of network engineering is far from comprehensive but it doesn't have to be to understand that NO ISP can influence, in any way at all, the 'performance' of an NBNCo service from the customer's home location to the hand off point between the NBNCo network and the ISP network which is in, currenty, a capital city data centre. Every end user customer connected to the NBNCo network will have the identical experience (whatever that may be) between those two points.
This is the same experience that has always existed on the Telstra, Optus or AAPT ADSL network for ISP's who use those services. If Telstra, Optus, AAPT and now NBNCo have enough bandwidth on their back hauls from pick up points to delivery points then there will be no congestion on that part of the network for anyone. If they don't then the subsequent congestion will affect all customers, irrespective of ISP, equally. Presumably even the lunatics and dummies can understand that simple piece of networking 'lore'. All an ISP can do to negatively 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. Then again, even the lunatics, dummies and paranoids could not hype their conspiracy theories about an ISP's fibre performance if, like Exetel, ISPs published the performance graphs of all of the bandwidth links used in customer data transit.You have to wonder why that isn't done?
I assume this particular line in lunacy has commenced because Internode published very high NBNCo prices (which will never be used in 'real life') as part of their political campaign against CVC charges and requirements rather than do what the more sensible NBNCo customers have done - point out a better price structure to NBNCo. The subsequent hysteria in the media shocked even me who never expects any knowledge or even commonsense from the overwhelming majority of 'journalists' covering the communications industry. The only issues that will determine NBNCo end user pricing are real commercial ones and those are not yet in place and won't be until Telstra and Optus work out how they will approach wholesaling NBNCo fibre and then selling those services to their own customers. In the mean time it would be nice if Australia's communications media took a far less hysterical line in what they choose to write.
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