NBN Discussion

Who does the offer come from?
When there is a FTTP rollout near your house about to get activated, you can get a free upgrade (provided your ISP is offering the upgrade). You need to sign up for a Superfast or Ultrafast tier plan for a least a year. You sign up via the ISP and they will arrange for the NBN to come out and run the fibre from the current end point to your house and install the equipment (a box on the outside of your house, and a box inside which your router plugs into).

There is also a program to upgrade apartment/townhouse complexes. If your have a body corporate and 5 or more units, you can apply for this program. It is quoted at $275 per unit (it was $250, but increased a few months ago). However there are reports that they then quote $1400+ per unit after NBN do a site inspection. If you get upgraded through this program, you don't have to increase your speed tier.

People have been reporting issues that they are unable to get either option because they live in a townhouse complex with less then 5 units and they have to try to convince NBN that they aren't a complex MDU.

They are currently only upgrading locations on FTTN or FTTC.
 
Can you combine two ISP’s in one house hold under one router? To power a more robust internet connection . Thanks for replies.
 
Can you combine two ISP’s in one house hold under one router? To power a more robust internet connection . Thanks for replies.
There are dual wan routers but they require a certain level of networking knowledge and use of "pro" level routers such as pfsense if you want to combine 2 WAN. Its called load balancing, but 1+1 = less than 2 eg 100Mbps+100Mbps under load balancing is not 200Mbps. It's a lot less. I have no experience with this.

More commonly you can do a primary wan and secondary wan for a backup. NBN with Starlink backup or NBN with 4g/5g backup

A backup which usesthe same path as the primary - different UniD but same fibre for instance, is not resilient. NBN fixed line with Starlink /Skymuster/4g/5g backup is more resilient

For the residential application, not even sure that the RSP will even support load balancing and is generally more hassle than it's worth.

Better to upgrade your connection.
What is your NBN connection?
 
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Though who needs a Telstra wifi dongle
I have so much shared data on mobiles which are on the one Telstra account -380GB/ month. And the mobiles can hotspot a data connection to a laptop
Sure but we need it for group zooms at work. Can't expect people to use their phones to tether. Thats messy. And then there's the need to stream movies. Agree we have loads of data but that's meaningless if you can't connect to a fast internet.
 
Sure but we need it for group zooms at work. Can't expect people to use their phones to tether. Thats messy. And then there's the need to stream movies. Agree we have loads of data but that's meaningless if you can't connect to a fast internet.
We always used our (company) phones for tethering - saved wasting money on additional equipment and accounts. Unless you're streaming 4K you really don't need much bandwidth for movies, it's a fallacy pushed by NBN that mixes up bandwidth with data volume - that's why everyone has more data than they generally need. Higher bandwidth can help reduce contention by getting your data across the airwaves quicker but that's of greatest benefit to the provider rather than you, yet you get to pay for the higher performance service that benefits then rather than you.
 
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We always used our (company) phones for tethering - saved wasting money on additional equipment and accounts. Unless you're streaming 4K you really don't need much bandwidth for movies, it's a fallacy pushed by NBN that mixes up bandwidth with data volume - that's why everyone has more data than they generally need. Higher bandwidth can help reduce contention by getting your data across the airwaves quicker but that's of greatest benefit to the provider rather than you, yet you get to pay for the higher performance service that benefits then rather than you.
We weren't able to stream last week using phones to tether to TV.
 
Luckily we have had FTTP since day one of the roll out on our side of the road. The opposite side of the road is in a different suburb. They got NBN much earlier so didn't get FTTP.
 
Question for TPG users. I have the same modem / wifi router issued in June 2019. I imagine the modem function itself is fine but thinking I could / should improve wifi since I’m on a faster plan than original.

Should I see if TPG will upgrade the hardware or just buy my own and disable the existing wifi channels?

I could also BYO modem/router but need to be mindful of compatibility issues…
 
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does the wifi reach the whole house
Can you get a similar wifi speed compared to the speed suggested by plan.

If yes to both not necessary to switch
Multi-story townhouse and the NBN box and modem are on the ground floor - which all works fine (250+/20+ over 5G wifi channel). Next floor (study & bedrooms) gets patchy and top floor (main TV / Apple TV) is borderline. So I have PL adaptors to study with Ethernet port for PC plus a wifi repeater that provides decent coverage. The BW loss up the PL is about 50%+ but still better than some get out of their primary modem/router.

I‘ve pondered a mesh network but they‘re still pretty expensive as a replacement for something that’s actually working…
 
Multi-story townhouse and the NBN box and modem are on the ground floor - which all works fine (250+/20+ over 5G wifi channel). Next floor (study & bedrooms) gets patchy and top floor (main TV / Apple TV) is borderline. So I have PL adaptors to study with Ethernet port for PC plus a wifi repeater that provides decent coverage. The BW loss up the PL is about 50%+ but still better than some get out of their primary modem/router.

I‘ve pondered a mesh network but they‘re still pretty expensive as a replacement for something that’s actually working…
30m back door to front door, double brick, 2 storey home. We use a TPG Deco network with great success.
 

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