And it would have worked incredibly well but during the rollout, the conservative party got in and caused the countries biggest infrastructure fuckup.
Australia is NOT the example to follow, its worse then Canada they sold the public network to a private entity who then sold it back to them 10yrs later. EXACTLY the same situation. BUT WORSE!
It was really gamers trying to grab 100gb updates and workers transferring large files who were hit hardest.
[0] - https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/anthony-hilton-st...
However, to cater for rural areas, they rolled out Wireless NBN, which is just a dedicated 4G connection and 50% more cost over standard NBN... staying on 4G is cheaper and has a closer tower (so the signal is better).
Starlink is starting to look better... (if only I trusted Elon Musk).
And even semi-rural, just outside the main cities, you might find yourself with "Fixed Wireless NBN" that promises to hit 25Mbps at least once per 24 hour period.
Broadband in Aus (I'm a recent migrant) is so far behind Europe and so expensive!
(the original FTTP plan was replaced with a "multi technology mix" plan -- the new federal government argued that their plan would be cheaper because instead of laying new fibre, just buy the existing degraded legacy copper lines from telstra, and also buy and reuse the HFC from telstra and optus.
so instead of spending tens of billions of dollars of public money building brand new infrastructure, spend tens of billions of dollars of money and reuse existing degraded infrastructure! think of the savings!
from memory getting the HFC regions to actually work was a bit of a fiasco, that part of the rollout was heavily delayed.
anyhow, it is great to see the coalition lose another federal election, albeit entirely unrelated reasons)
It is, or at least was, insanely expensive to use the Australian next generation network. It cost ISPs providing service on the network thousands of dollars per month if a fiber customer actually used their gigabit connection, instead of a fixed line rental fee.
Batshit crazy stuff.
In other words, an ISP customer taking full advantage of their gigabit fiber connection could cost the ISP almost $8000 per month.
And that was just the cost for the local bandwidth in Australia. Add all the costs for cross connects and Internet capacity in addition to all the normal costs of running a business.
Obviously this was and is a millstone around the ISPs’ neck. You can find a plethora of complaints and write ups on the ISP business in Australia illuminating the extremely thin or negative margins in the business.
The only thing that kept the ISPs in business was statistical multiplexing at scale and aggressive traffic shaping.
Concepts involved: