Friday, September 23, 2016

Celebrate the Small Things: the NBN


The National Broadband Network (NBN) is Australia's largest ever infrastructure project and was initially planned and commenced by Kevin Rudd's Labour federal government. It has been the subject of much political and community debate. Both the costs, and the timeline for completion have blown out significantly, but I for one, do not care how much it costs or how long it takes to build the network (although sooner rather than later would obviously be preferable.)

Australia is a bit behind the times with technology. Although we love the latest stuff and are quick to adopt new technology we always have a bit of a wait for it, and we always pay much more as well.



We have unlimited ADSL2 broadband with iPrimus. They contacted me yesterday with the good news that the NBN was no available in our area and we could now upgrade with no additional charges. We had to have a new modem which they would give us for free if we paid the postage charge. When I complained about that, I was offered a $50 credit, so we will apparently have a smooth transition to a faster and more reliable broadband service plus $35 credit (taking off the postage charge for the modem) I spent twenty minutes on the phone with the salesman, going over all the details.

The salesman could not say when exactly the upgrade would occur, but told me that we would be notified in due course.

Today I received a text message from iPrimus saying the NBN will not be available in our area until at least December...maybe. I laughed.

I do have NBN where I am living now in Darwin, and I love it. It is faster and more reliable, and thus far I have no complaints at all. So today I am thankful for my internet service.

10 comments:

  1. I don't really understand the difference between broadband and ADSL, but if you can now connect to the net, it's not too expensive, and you're satisfied with the service, I call that a big win! :)

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    1. Ha ha...I don't really understand it either, but the result, as you say, is good.

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  2. I'll second that celebration. It's so inconvenient when the internet is down. Sounds like you got a good deal on your service. I'm glad it's working well for you.

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    1. Thanks Lori. It's funny how dependent most of us are on the internet now. I remember when there was no such beast, and this laptop of mine was just science fiction. I wonder what's next?

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    2. I remember those times, too. I started out writing on a typewriter. Pretty soon, computers will probably be in our heads.
      By the way, I wanted to let you know that for some reason, your comments on my blog keep ending up in my spam folder. I don't know why. I haven't been checking it very often and just discovered them the other day. I'll pay more attention to it now.

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    3. That's strange. We're using the same platform. Thanks for noticing anyway. Speaking of computers in our heads, I tell my ESL students that I am much better than their various dictionary apps and some of them even believe me.

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  3. Nothing better than half decent internet! We moved to an area which had dial up until three years ago. The internet right now could be faster and more dependable, but it works usually well enough. So I'm satisfied.

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    1. Still using dial up 3 years ago?? Unbelievable. I thought Australia was bad. I remember the excruciating pain of waiting for photos to load using dial up twenty years ago. Now, I get impatient if the page or image does not load immediately.

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  4. Our service is okay, but I end up turning the modem off, then wait 30 seconds, then turn it back on quite a bit. For some reason that helps when it gets wonky.

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    1. I don't think that 'okay' service is good enough. This is the 21st century after all. I'm a little surprised by all these comments. Telecommunications companies make bucket loads of money which they should probably use to invest in infrastructure and improve the service they charge for rather than make multi-millionaires of their executives. Rant over. :-)

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