I've decided to give Optus the boot because their speed was disgraceful and the tech team even agreed with me.
I live in a apartment complex, need unlimited or something similar with download speeds of 50 - 100 mbps.
any recommendations on a ISP would be great!
i wonder if this provider suffer just as much congestion as optus
Optus seems to get mentioned quite often in people's comments about congestion, so the problem is most likely limited to mostly them.
From comments about skymesh, they seem mostly favourable.
One good thing about them is they offer 30 day minimum term. So worst case you can switch after a month if you're not happy without any penalty.
whats the difference between fibre and wireless for Skymesh?
@itschrisraymond: If you're talking about the plans listed here
That's for NBN Fixed Wireless customers. NBN over fixed 4G essentially.
Do the ISPs not use the same backends for NBN services? I thought they were just reslling the services they are getting from NBN Co.
@ProjectZero:
No.
NBN connects the houses to the POI's (essentially the Telephone exchanges) It;s the ISP's responsibility to connect the POI's to the actual internet. And that's where the speed issues arise.
@ProjectZero:
NBN don't service ADSL connections.. so it's a slightly different situation.
But yes, congestion that you can see in budget ADSL services are due to the ISP's connection to the Internet being congested.
ADSL adds another bottleneck as speeds are determined by the distance between your house and the exchange. Issues arising need to go through your ISP to Telstra to most likely a contractor. At least this is one extra bottleneck NBN doesn't suffer from.
@neil: I was curious to know because according to my parents, the internet connection at home is not as good as the Telstra one that we used to have.
Even though the speed is the same and if anything AusBBS seems to be a little more stable in the speed.
@ProjectZero:
The sync speed is dependent on the quality of the line and may vary slightly according to the type of hardware used in your modem and in the Telephone exchange.
The actual internet speed will depend on the "size of the pipe" to the internet.
Telstra owns a big, fat "pipe", AusBBS rents a portion of a smaller "pipe" from M2 communications.
@scubacoles: This part seems to be flying all over my head lol. From my experiences so far, my speed remain pretty much the same from when I was with Telstra. Never really checked the sync speed as I'm not too sure how to do so in DD-WRT, I tried to find out once before but didn't find out how.
@ProjectZero:
You wont find sync speed in DD-WRT. DD-WRT is router firmware.. The device doing the syncing is the modem.
Think of it like a water network. Your home has a thin 1.5cm copper pipe running to it. The factory down the street has a 3 inch pipe running to it cause it needs way more water than your house. The water main under the street is 1m in diameter cause it needs to supply water to the entire neighborhood and back at the pumping station, the pipes are 2m in diameter.
Internet is similar. data is the water, Fibre is the big pipes, copper are the old, thin ones.
But the internet is global, not just Municipal, so the pipes heading overseas are MASSIVE!
Sync speed is limited by physics. The longer (and/or crappier) the phone line, the more electrical noise and therefore the less bandwidth for signal, therefore less speed you'll achieve. Imagine a water pipe.. the noise is crud constricting the pipe… the more constriction, the less water (data) can flow through the pipe and therefore the flow into your home is less.
Fibre to the Home NBN doesn't suffer from this.. there's no electrical noise in glass fibre.
Fibre to the Node or Basement and ADSL do suffer from this.
For ADSL you have copper from the telephone exchange to your home.. The copper is like an antenna, picking up TV/Radio signals, plus it has electrical resistance, so the longer it has to travel, the more noise it has and the slower your internet.
For Fibre to the Node or Basement, a glass fibre runs to a box at the end of your street (or into your basement (in an apartment block). The box contains a device to translate the data coming in over the Fibre into electrical signal to transmit over the Copper telephone line into your home. Once again, the longer the distance, the more noise and the slower your speed.
That's the Physics..
At the other end of the line your ISP has infrastructure to connect your internet connection to everyone else's and then to the globe. If that pipe isn't big enough, it doesn't matter that you have Fibre to the Home… that's not the bottleneck anymore, the ISP needs to buy a bigger pipe (or in reality buy more capacity from the existing pipe.
ISP's don't pay per litre (Gb), they pay by rate of flow, ie Gb per second.
If they don't buy enough flow, then everyone has to share the flow rate that they've bought and suffer from slower speeds.
@scubacoles: With FTTN there is also a hard limit on capacity per node. You are sharing the available capacity with however many households are connected to the node (in my case up to 236).
Currently each node has 2Gbps, this can be upgraded in the future, but don't hold your breath, see http://blog.jxeeno.com/poor-nbn-fttnb-design-may-lead-to-dec…
@Abaddon:
Yeah, I've been steering clear of that little complexity…
Not happy about it either. My node will go live in the next few months… although I live in a neighborhood of retirees, so there's a fair chance the node backhaul limit wont be a problem for me.
@scubacoles: Mine went live last week. Mix of retirees and commuters (central coast). But I think I'll stick with ADSL2 for the time being as though it's slow at least it's stable (6.6Mbps down 700kbps up). And I don't believe there is a way to change back.
@Abaddon:
You're mental..
With a quality ISP you'll see improvement on 6Mbps no matter what the time or congestion in that sort of community.
Even if during peak times it does drop to the node limit of 5mbps (1Gbps node backhaul/200 users), you're only barely worse off.
I'm no fan of FttN, but I'll probably still be jumping across from my 20mbps ADSL2 tophat connection when it goes live.
@scubacoles: There are lots of examples of people ~1-5Mbps during peak periods. I'm giving it at least a month so I can cancel during the cooling off period, rather than joining now with nobody else and having it slow down a couple of months in.
Not about to pay for a new router and at least an extra $10 a month for a slower service.
I also haven't located my closest node yet, so I can't even guess at a speed yet. As I work from home regularly (often during peak congestion times) I can't afford to be less than I'm currently on.
@scubacoles: We're talking a guarantee of 12/1 at least once per 24 hours. For 18 months.
Everyone I know who is on the network is telling me it's awful and I should hold out as long as possible.
Anyone have any good experiences to report?
@Abaddon:
Plenty of good experiences on Whirlpool of people on FttN getting 100/40 and syncing higher than that at distances up to 400m from the node.
I'm more like 500m, so I'll probably only be signing up at 50/20 (couldn't bring myself to pay for 100/40 only to get 80/30)
Just need to steer clear of the cheap ISP's.
Incorrect! Absolutely makes a difference.
Optus customers would beg to differ. Especially at 8pm
No worries, got this one wrong! Hopefully I'll have NBN soon myself.
@deanylev:
It's only heresay I've picked up on Whingepool. But if you apply a mental filter to all the many anti-NBN comments in the NBN section, there aren't many left who aren't Optus customers or customers of ISP's reselling Optus service.
ive only been with two different companies iprimus and now tpg and iprimus customer service was terrible they didn't care one bit about my internet crapping itself every afternoon preventing me to online game at all
like 5 months or thereabout now with tpg with not a single problem other then standard planned maintenance which is on there website. ,ive had no outages or congestion like i had with iprimus i don't have any plans or thoughts about ever changing isp from TPG.
Telstra, doesn't matter if you hate them their network is the best, not that your going to get unlimited downloads. The reason your Optus service is poor is due to congestion because of leeches who want unlimited plans and suck the bandwidth dry leaving not much spare to go around.
For NBN this is a bit of a simplification. Any congestion is likely at the provider gateway to peers/transit/international IP capacity, so it would be quite possible for an ISP like Skymesh or others to adequately provision these links. Telstra has an advantage in coverage, especially mobile, but not so much where NBN is available.
I'm gonna give Skymesh a go, seeing as they have a 30 day no lock in contract application.
I was in a similar predicament as you are right now a month ago.
I went with Skymesh and have not looked back since then.
Speeds are great (WA) and consistent where I am, and Netflix quota free to boot!
thanks for the heads up! how long did it take for your router and account to be activated?
@itschrisraymond: I'm with skymesh as well and they've been great. No setup fee, thirty day contract and good speeds, 12TB off peak data. It only took two days from application to starting downloads, but fibre had been installed before.
@itschrisraymond: I have fibre to the house and NBN provide the modem, I used my own wireless router pluged into the ethernet port of the NBN modem.
@iratepirate: I'll be using WIFI connection as I don't have a desktop. Whats the difference between fibre and wireless option?
@itschrisraymond: believe it or not, everything was set up in merely slight above a week.
Most of that time was waiting for the NBN guys to come over and install the kit inside my apartment, but once that was done - internet connection was ready to go!
(The making of the appointment for NBN personnel was made by Skymesh (for asap) and just had to wait for the next available - which was 7 days)
@itschrisraymond: as someone else had said, wireless option for NBN is essentially a connection over 4G
Fixed is via the fibre cabling - with a modem supplied.
You can have the fibre option ( which the NBN personell says it's the best and more stable) and still have personalised wifi at home using any off the shelf wifi router (I'm using linksys router plugged into the supplied NBN modem)
Telstra still has a large advantage on the NBN as they own backhaul to most exchanges which in most areas is where NBN is deploying their equipment as well.
If you're in a house with nbn, you'd expect good speeds. i'm in a apartment so it's pretty congested most of the time and most of the neighbours are with Telstra and optus
FTTB?
Check whether skymesh is available if it's an apartment block. For our apartment block, they are not listed as one of the NBN providers on the NBN web site (unlike just about every other NBN ISP), so I emailed them directly to ask about this:
++++++++++++++
Our apartment building has recently been wired for the NBN, and I've
heard good things about your NBN service, and I can see a long list of
available providers for our address on the NBNco website, but
unfortunately skymesh is not one of the listed providers.
[and then included our building address details, in Pyrmont, Sydney]
++++++++++++++
… and they replied:
++++++++++++++
Thank you for your email. I have checked your address and can see NBN Fibre To
The Building is available. Unfortunately, SkyMesh aren't close to being ready
to servicing Fibre To The Building at this stage. SkyMesh will eventually start
servicing this product, however it isn't a plan anytime soon for SkyMesh.
I'm sorry we couldn't help further, thank you for considering SkyMesh.
++++++++++++++
So I have to choose from one of the remaining ISPs.
FWIW, I've heard bad things about Exetel congestion, internode seems okay, and I'll have to check whirlpool for comments on TPG and iinet.
TPG won't supply NBN over FTTB as they have their own FTTB Network Infrastructure provided through Wondercom.
It's partly about the ISP you with are but also dependent on your location. I'm with Exetel in Brunswick and is way overcongested. Supposed to get 100/40 but nowhere close. Was fine when I first got it 2 years ago but getting worse and worse (complained to Exetel to be told its a decision for upper management).
It's a bit of the luck of the draw as someone might have a great experience with say TPG in one suburb but could be awful in the next. Just keep trying until you find a good one.
No lock in contracts are a must i say as from previous experience your net could go form perfect to crap really quick so good to know you can change without being locked into a contract.
agree to this. sky mesh have a 30 day cooling off period, so no lock in contracts.
How much worse are your actual speeds? (I just signed up to exetel…)
Exetel Speedtests go from about 25-55 Mbps. Local speedtests do well however once you try international the speed gets quite slow. At nighttime, it sometimes gets unusable (forget streaming).
Are you in in a apartment or house?
Apartment but it's FTTP (not FTTB) so I'm competing with everyone else with my ISP on the exchange. Brunswick was one of the 1st areas to get the original NBN.
Currently 27/35 however it's not a fully accurate test as I'm on a wireless (AC). To get the most accurate results I go into safe mode and plug an ethernet cable directly into the NBN box from my computer.
Local sites are never the issue. It's the international that has issues. We mostly watch Hulu & Netflix streamed from the US (via Getflix DNS). Has been OK pretty muchsince everyone came back from holidays.
@neil: it's silly that speeds reach what we pay after midnight. Yet during the day, it's slow as a snail. Eh
I'd be careful with them. There has been quite a lot of publicity about them forcing people off their plans.
They have also kicked people out who have "abused" and "downloaded too much", when a lot of them were using less than 30% of their monthly quota.
If you're not paying $100 for a service where you check for 2 emails once a fortnight, I'd be wary.
Yeah I'm in West Foots and Optus is terrible in this area, particularly the newly renovated/established areas. Hopefully Skymesh can pick me up from where I left off with Floptus
Optus NBN has a bad rep, read all the posts on poor speed at Whirlpool.
I'd sign up to iiNet, Internode or Telstra for NBN.
I'm a little confused by this whole thread, I mean doesn't everyone wholesale of NBNco, therefor there is no priority on bandwidth, as every company including Telstra are wholesaling from the same source?
Thanks that was an interesting read!
Although it was all speculation as the article was done in 2011, would love to see it re-visited now to see if the predictions were accurate (although by the sounds of this thread it was).
I guess I have just been lucky with my FTTP on dod, speeds are generally pretty good and I can count the amount of times I haven't had internet on 1 hand and never for more than a few hours. If I didn't have the above presumption that the supplier wouldn't matter (which was advise I got from speaking directly to NBNco so I know I got negged, but I was just expressing an incorrect viewpoint due to being misinformed, I think it was a valid contribution to people who had the same belief), then I wouldn't of ever gone with them, as I am well aware their customer service is atrocious.
Definitely not.
Correct. But to get from NBN to the rest of the world (ie the actual Internet) you need to pay NBN a fee and that fee is speed based.
Cheap ISP's pay the barest minimum and as a result their speeds throttle terribly in peak times.
Premium ISP's pay for the extra capacity (reflected in the higher price you pay them) and as a result their peak speeds are significantly better.
what is classified as a premium ISP?
@itschrisraymond:
Telstra, Internode, Skymesh
In NBN world that's the extent of the list.
DevotedNBN, TPG/iiNet fall into the mid range category (Internode although owned by TPG/iiNet still uses their own dedicated network)
Everyone else - make up the bottom tier
Most of whom are Optus resellers.
@scubacoles: gave sky mesh a call and they said it isn't available in my area, when their coverage online says they do… i guess internode or telstra it is
@scubacoles: Thanks for your detailed information on this. I was about to sign up with IINET and not anymore !. Skymesh my choice, thanks to you.
Skymesh only offer service over NBN Fixed Wireless and Fibre to the premises at this stage..
Fibre to the Basement and Fibre to the Node are in Test phase according to their rep on Whirlpool.
Yeah figured that last minute haha, thank you. Got with Telstra at the end
Skymesh have rave reviews, but unfortunately they are not available everywhere unfortunately. I'm hoping they expand soon. I would love to see them cover all FTTP POIs and even expand to FTTB/FTTN/OptiComm. They are losing a lot of customers by dragging their feet on this, they would be a clear winner, but potential customers have to settle for a another ISP because they need something now.
Yeah they said they're supposed to be reaching my area is 1-3 months and sadly, i can't wait that long!
http://www.devoted.com.au/plans
However is suffering in TAS
Service Degradation Announcement.
Tasmania (ALL)
CSA700000000406 (Hobart CSA)
CSA700000000822 (Launceston CSA)
Due to the recent Bass link break, we are experiencing service degradation during the height of peak periods 9pm -11pm. Our upstream provider has a redundancy temporary link with a different bass link carrier, however due to their price gouging capacity is not the same as being routed on the Basslink fibre.
We apologies for the inconvenience and hope services to return to normal once the fault is repaired. We ask for all users to please delay downloads during this time.
Another vote from me for Skymesh
Some info on Skymesh international speeds, just as FYI:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/2313322
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/2438718
First link is from 2014… so fair to say it's outdated without even bothering to read the thread
Second link is specifically about overseas speedtests… numerous commenters stating they have no issue.
DODO lol. With the catchy 'internet that flies' tune you can't go wrong. On a serious note I'm with TPG and it drops out at 4AM in the morning for no apparent reason.
119 days online according to my router, with DODO unlimited metro and performs fast. The bird is alright.
Here I was thinking of going with Optus since they have unlimited deal for like $115.
do yourself a favour and go seek another provider. i could think over 20 problems with optus.
Any you would recommend?
It's a bit of a gamble. As most users on here are recommending Skymesh, Telstra and Internode, maybe iiNet too.
@justmiike: I would definitely go with Skymesh or Telstra. I've had no trouble with Telstra in the past and Skymesh looks promising.
Belong is not selling a Telstra service even though they're owned by Telstra.
Belong Resell service from telcoinabox.
As such, do not equate Belong's service levels to Telstra's service levels cause they're completely different products over completely different networks.
It's the equivalent of saying that Mildara Cask wine is the same as Penfolds Grange Hermitage cause they're both products owned by Treasury Wine Estates…
Thanks scubacoles, I was researching Whirlpool and Belong was having slow speeds across several posts.
So, it looks like Skymesh or Telstra is the go. Funny enough, on Speednet, Optus was ranked the fastest internet provider, but don't want to risk it.
Another +1 for Skymesh.
I initiated by NBN with them when first available in my area (Gladstone Park VIC) in Mar 2014 - Their service has been 100%, direct debit billing, call centre that was from from their Brisbane office. Plans are great value and no significant issues with dropouts. They also have a reliable 'My Skymesh' page where you can change plans, check your hourly usage etc.
if they rollout in west footscray later in the year, i may consider going with them
Thanks for your input rawm, I'm around there, I'll hit up Skymesh!
No probs! Good luck!
Vaya = Optus
anyone heard of Harbour ISP?
Also, Skymesh can create a custom plan for you or give you a comparison product if you ask. Anyone had any experience with this? I'm going to inquire when I need to in a few weeks time.
Its not all about the speeds, I am getting 95mb and 37mb from 100/40 but my ping is quadrupled in peek hour. And this is what screws everything for me. If it was just the speeds, I'd be happy…
On Whirlpool for unlimited, skymesh seems to get mentioned a fair bit.
https://www.skymesh.net.au/services/nbn/fibre/plans.php