Australia's Internet Will Not Be This Good By 2020

In perhaps a masterful or highly depressing bit of trolling, NBN Co has started promoting an idea of what the internet - in Australia! - might be like.

It's a simple pitch: the internet will be so fast and capable that you'll be able to draw on a screen and have that beamed to a classroom (somewhere). And screens Of The Future will apparently be curved and about 40", despite the fact that curved screens are on the way out.

Also not pictured: the months of annoyance and confusion of actually getting connected. But let's see what people who aren't on the NBN are missing out on, shall we?

The majority of Australia is scheduled to be connected to the NBN by 2020.

It will not be this much fun.


    The word: 'clusterfuck' wouldn't even begin to describe what one political party has done to the NBN...

    Beach side suburb 10 minutes from Adelaide's CBD - no plan to even start NBN line construction here til 'sometime in 2020'.


    88 down & 14 up in Alice Springs, worked out alright for me.

    My mates in a green field and gets 94/23

    NBN are useless. NBN has come to our suburb but our house was missed. NBN wont give details why or if EVER it will be fixed. And I know that some friends who did actually end up getting it and constantly complaining about disconnects etc. The whole thing is one big mess.

      That's going to be interesting in a couple of years when Telstra cut of services to the area.

    I've got FTTP and realise I'm incredibly lucky. Problem is, the original plan called for 93% of Australia to have FTTP, not just the lucky ones.

    The NBN has gone from being an expensive but vital piece of national infrastructure to being an even more expensive clusterfuck of a joke.

    Last edited 30/01/17 10:03 am

      Absolutely! I thought I was hard done by having to wait until the end of 2015...

      But what I waited for was a premium grade service. And it operates like one...

      Anyone waiting for FTTN or other tech is going to be left in the dust in reality

    I don't know if I will ever stop being angry about this.

    Well the ad is correct, it stated

    "We are doing things differently" - and ignoring how the rest of the world is moving to delivering internet
    "Seeing things differently" - to the Australian public, who have been constantly slamming our plans, so we remove the information about what we are doing
    "And we are just getting started" - Yep, cause this fuck up is going to take decades to fix!

    I just don't understand how it ended up this bad when they finally decided we needed internet that's slightly more comparable to the rest of the first world countries.

    I got a notification in the mail last week that NBN is available in my area, will be getting it installed sometime this week. Looking forward to it.

    The NBN aloneshould be enough of a fiasco to turf out this clueless, incompetent government. They can't blame this one of the Labor government; Labor had a simple, efficient plan for the internet but the Coalition said "nah, that's too practical, timely, efficient and useful for us, chuck it all out and replace it with something clumsy, impractical, inept, slow and outdated which will hold Australia's internet back for decades and, despite our reason for doing it, is actually far MORE expensive than Labor's plan, largely because of inefficiency and wastage". Simply STAGGERING.

    Had to switch from Cable to HFC NBN this week. Technology is basically the same isn't it?
    I was paying $70 a month for 30Mbps, now have to pay $70 for 25Mb. Progress hey :(

      I'll probably be switching to HFC NBN sometime between now and 2020.. so in 3 years time, I'll go from 100Mbps to 100Mbps (and it will probably cost me more). Wow.

      I'm in an area which currently has optus HFC, but I refuse to sign up to that mess and am sticking with Internode DSL [annex-m + ipv6 are huge pros]. Also, their plan has 100Mb down and 2 [TWO!!!] Mb up. I get more than that on annex-m DSL.

      With the HFC network moved over to NBN co, and now with choice of provider, what are the plans like? Are there plans available with decent upload speeds?

      Also, have they improved the backhaul of the HFC to adequately service the number of users on the shared line? How does your bandwidth hold up during peak periods?

      Sorry for the questions, but these have really been bugging me for the last few weeks as I plan out what to do.

        I believe Optus HFC network was to be dropped for FTTdp.
        I can only hope you are a lucky one and this is the case.

          Oh gee I hope you are right. sigh :/

          Building is scheduled to start "Q3 2017", so will see what happens by the end of the year I suppose.

        I haven't actually been connected, a tech comes out at the end of February to actually hook my house up. Not sure on how the bandwidth holds up, I was hoping to put off the change for as long as possible until reports on that came in but Optus aren't honoring the 18 month grace period. There's about a 60 day period between when my house was connected and the date Optus have given me that they're deactivating all cable services.

        I ended up complaining about the slower download speed for the same price and they're now putting me on 50/20

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