As losses narrow, nbn™ says business will drive growth in ARPU (that'll be how much it extracts from each punter) The outfit building Australia's National Broadband Network has outlined how it plans to achieve the per-user revenue mix that underpins its eventual profitability. Announcing nbn™'s preliminary Q1 fiscal 2019 quarter results [PDF] yesterday, CEO Stephen Rue promised residential users won't be stung with price rises. Rather, he …
so if consumers aren't going to be hit with price rises that means it's either going to come from efficiency gains (looking at these clowns, that's not likely) or reduction in speed/quality (which in turn will have them paying refunds or see users switch to lower tiers if that's all they can reliably get)
It only takes 1.5 megabits to run Netflix (I know, I still have a shitty ADSL line). So 12.5 mbs is huge for most households. Given 25mbs costs the same, people will go for that, but very few are going to pay more.
Backhaul is a different matter, and maybe your 25mbs line only actually gets 5mbs in peak times. But the NBN does not want to admit to this issue, let alone charge for it.
And most (60%?) consumers were perfectly happy with their fast ADSL or cable systems which let them watch Netflix just fine. So it is politically impossible to charge them more for what they already had.
So, it is the tax payer that will be left wit the lemon.
This is where Turnbull lost all his credibility IMHO. He inherited political gold from Labor's NBN, but never capitalized on it when he was minister.
Things may be getting a bit better according to nbnco: About half of users are now on nominal 50Mbps (56KB PDF). Apparently they can now expect >30Mbps at evening peak time. This would be consistent with my retirement village’s 100Mbps $33/month unlimited data wholesale plan where we get about 85Mbps down and 38Mbps up during the day; and ~70Mbps down and 30Mbps up at peak times during the late afternoon (Schoolchildren have come home?).
Constant and repeated speed-tests - to understand network performance - contribute to deterioration of network performance during peak times.
So... stop testing it and just use it.
[Smart salesman] "Your new car will do 200mph".
[Suspicious customer] "I'll be the judge of that" and then runs the car to 200mph every day.
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