back to article Woeful NBN services attract ACCC's attention

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has opened an inquiry into whether it needs to intervene in the National Broadband Network's (NBN's) service standards. The decision follows sustained and growing complaints over a range of service problems, chiefly connection delays, fault repairs, and over-contended …

  1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

    Yes well if people insist on signing up with the cheapest, nastiest ISP they can find (e.g. DODO) of course they're going to run into trouble.

    1. Phil Kingston

      The inquiry's not about that though.

      1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

        It seems to be one of the things it's about.

    2. Griffo

      You may be suprised

      My mate is on 100/40 FTTH and was one the first suburbs deployed. He's been on Dodo since day 1 and claims to get full speeds pretty much full time.

      I blame the ACCC and the F'ing craptastical 121 POI decision for most of the over-subscribed CVC issues.

      1. mathew42
        FAIL

        Re: You may be suprised

        While the ACCC decision has had significant impact, RSPs choosing to offer unlimited plans is the significant cause of congestion. The tragedy of the commons has been known since the 1800s.

        Your mate on Dodo is simply lucky, but that could change very quickly if a few heavy users join his PoI. A couple of short posts naming the PoI and claiming good performance should achieve this..

        1. Robert Heffernan

          Re: You may be suprised

          Unlimited plans aren't the source of congestion. Data limits are a construct designed to take the focus off the fact they the ISPs, Wholesalers, NBN, etc do not have enough bandwidth to supply their clients needs and to provide a way to charge clients more for using their connections.

          The easy way for this to be mitigated is to monitor the backbone, see which links routinely see traffic above a specific threshold and then add more capacity to that link via upgrading the gear on either end of the link to higher speeds, or by aggregating more parallel links.

          1. mathew42
            FAIL

            Re: You may be suprised

            > Unlimited plans aren't the source of congestion.

            If a world without constraints that is the case, but we are in a real world.

            > Data limits are a construct designed to take the focus off the fact they the ISPs, Wholesalers, NBN, etc do not have enough bandwidth to supply their clients needs and to provide a way to charge clients more for using their connections.

            This might surprise you, but it actually costs money to run an ISP. $100 including GST is a common pricing for an unlimited 100Mbps plan. NBNCo charge $38 AVC and ~$14/Mbps in CVC.(excluding GST) Considering just the NBNCo Wholesale charges, purchasing more than 5Mbps of CVC (inc. GST) will cause the RSP to lose money. We know the majority of RSPs allocate only 1Mbps per user. I very much doubt that you are willing to pay double or more for better performance. If you were then you would move to an RSP with quotas.

            Quotas provide a very fair and reasonable way of controlling congestion. If you are downloading large amounts of data then you pay more to cover the increase in RSP costs. Off-peak quotas provide an incentive to schedule downloads to a quieter time, reducing the RSP's costs. If you download more than average then other customers of the RSP are subsiding you. If you download less, then you are subsidising the heavy downloaders who are causing poor performance in the weeknds.

            Other utilities tend to charge for usage. The exception to this is mobile phone plans, but the terms and conditions are interesting. Consider amaysim which 'Unreasonable Use' states Leaving a call connection open for purposes unrelated to making a call, or while in an unattended state for a prolonged period of time eg. as a baby monitor. Are you sure you want to head down that path?

  2. Phil Kingston

    If it will save the ACCC some time, and God knows how many millions, I can answer the question of whether they should intervene for them now: Yes.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    regretably it could worse

    if the end user lives outside a capital city relying on the Oz dominant telco via 3 and 4G is a much much worse experience and literally over ten times the price in my recent experience.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's Mal-ware!!

    Thanks Malcolm.

    Not.

    1. david 12 Silver badge

      It's Beazley-ware!!

      Thanks Kim.

      Not.

  5. JJKing
    Flame

    The top head(s) should roll for this mess.

    Considering the size of the fibre pipe to the effing Node and the number of users crammed onto them, bandwidth issues are not surprising, however the inquiry is not about this. It is about NBN's inability to reliably connect users to THEIR infrastructure. 457 Visa Man is a joke.

  6. DownUndaRob
    Facepalm

    ACCC already intervened.

    The ACCC's intervention in the design phase of the NBN is what caused this issue (and they were warned that it would happen).

    The original 14 POI plan was technically superior.

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