Welcome to #mybroadband, lots of facts and no truth.
There are a few major things missing from the all new singing and dancing My Broadband Site.
Firstly, the lack of upload speeds on any data. Upload speeds are critical in creating the work place of the future. The sharing economy, telehealth economy, learning economy and the cloud economy. Sure you can download “fast”, but if you can’t up upload you can’t share, create or engage. You can’t have a remote health uploading content to a Dr in another city whilst you video stream in high definition to him or her. You can’t cloud backup your personal camera which takes 20mb+ files already to the cloud when upload speeds are so slow. You can’t generate the high quality print files as a designer to telecommuting when you have made edits to the final document.
Next is the lack of speed definition. Telstra advertise HFC connections as “Fast”. “Fast” broadband, what does that even mean? I don’t walk into a shoe shop and ask for “big” shoes. If Telstra can’t even tell us what “fast” is on their HFC, but they can charge us an extra amount for “extra fast”, then we have major issues. And of course they don’t mention upload speeds at all.
Then there are the overly optimistic “ADSL” speeds they are using. My area is listed at 12.2mpbs. Congrats to those in my neighbourhood getting those speeds, but sure as hell I am not. Nor does this speed factor in things such as many peoples ADSL slowing down when it rains for example. I get 4.5mpbs according to this funny thing called Speedtest. (tested at midnight!)
Obviously this Speedtest site is unaustralian, reporting facts against what the current government has told us are facts, my like the ABC reports facts I guess.
Surely someone in the Comms Department told Turnbull about this, people will share the data showing how slow their connections are, not the steaming pile of crap numbers that they deemed important enough to put on their website.
And finally, it shows just how much of Australia will never get the 1gbps/500mbs speeds that NBN was going to offer.
So now we have a new website to look at, one that tells us what we don’t have, what we won’t get and nothing about when we won’t get it.
Money well spent if you didn’t want a real NBN really.
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Check the fiction here https://www.mybroadband.communications.gov.au/
And your reality here http://www.speedtest.net/
Then add your numbers to this survey http://yathink.com.au/article-display/my-broadband-vs-reality,106
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