Starlink Approved in Australia by ACMA

[Bombastinator]

55 minutes ago, Maticks said:

This is big news for those on NBN Sat services, not for the fact its 10x faster because its actually fixed lined services that run at 100Mbps on NBN.

NBN Sat customers have 25M/5M speed maximum. The biggest news will be SpaceX doing unlimited data, the biggest plans on NBN Sat is 200GB for the month.

 

Recently introduction of 200GB Peak and 200GB Off Peak plans, but still.. thats not great for streaming.

 

If SpaceX can offer Unlimited Data Plans even with 50M/10M that would be a massive improvement and game changing for anyone on Skymuster right now.

I kind of wonder how the system works with data.  With garbage a garbage collector pays by the pound but offers by volume.  This is because most households have high volume low weight trash.  There seems to be some sort of similar conversion with data.  There’s total data limit and Theres bandwidth.  Most personal users use fairly low bandwidth things, and they don’t use a tremendous amount of data.  They do not like, however to buy more bandwidth than they need in advance or pay high metered rates.  Hence unlimited. 

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

I kind of wonder how the system works with data.  With garbage a garbage collector pays by the pound but offers by volume.  This is because most households have high volume low weight trash.  There seems to be some sort of similar conversion with data.  There’s total data limit and Theres bandwidth.  Most personal users use fairly low bandwidth things, and they don’t use a tremendous amount of data.  They do not like, however to buy more bandwidth than they need in advance or pay high metered rates.  Hence unlimited. 

Data caps are pretty much a mental barrier for customers to use less bandwidth, it's an indirect way of control bandwidth on the network. In reality data usage costs nothing and within the same ISP network there are no direct costs at all for bandwidth or data usage, it's all indirect costs through network capacity management and over subscription ratios the ISP is happy with etc. Transit bandwidth between networks is a direct costs but the way it's calculated can be amusing, for those who abuse it that is 

 

Quote

Most transit agreements bill the 95th percentile of utilization in any given month. That means you throw out approximately 36 not-necessarily-contiguous hours worth of peak utilization when calculating usage for the month. Legend has it that in its early days, Google used to take advantage of these contracts by using very little bandwidth for most of the month and then ship its indexes between data centers, a very high bandwidth operation, during one 24-hour period. A clever, if undoubtedly short-lived, strategy to avoid high bandwidth bills.

 

Another subtlety is that when you buy transit wholesale you typically only pay for traffic coming in (“ingress") or traffic going out (“egress”) of your network, not both. Generally you pay which ever one is greater.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/

[Vulpixe]

20 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

The only issue with Starlink is it wont be excellent for gaming, you're looking at an additional 30ms~ of latency using Starlink over a wired connection. The NBN isn't as bad a solution as most make out, they just fucked up with their extremely aggressive ROI time frame. The prices of NBN connections should be much lower.

Having played with dogshit ADSL for 6 years and moving to a fixed 3G wireless service in 2010 (30+ms to local city and generally 60-80ms to Sydney), it's definitely playable only as long as it's stable. Even now with 100mbps FTTN connection, sometimes during peak times I have to jump onto 4G for an hour or so because the CVC congestion is terrible (Superloop ISP).

A super competitive gamer might have some issues but I personally didn't and was always topping scoreboards in FPS shooters.

 

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Vulpixe said:

Having played with dogshit ADSL for 6 years and moving to a fixed 3G wireless service in 2010 (30+ms to local city and generally 60-80ms to Sydney), it's definitely playable only as long as it's stable. Even now with 100mbps FTTN connection, sometimes during peak times I have to jump onto 4G for an hour or so because the CVC congestion is terrible (Superloop ISP).

A super competitive gamer might have some issues but I personally didn't and was always topping scoreboards in FPS shooters.

Yep similar situation, being in NZ and due to size etc etc pretty much all online game servers (official ones) are hosted in Aus to service NZ so anything below 100ms back in the day was good, like actually good. Now you can get 30ms-60ms to Aus.

 

I use to play competitive FPS matches during that 100ms time, hardly ever felt the latency was putting me at a competitive disadvantage more than my own skill deficiencies. 

[SkilledRebuilds]

21 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I use to play competitive FPS matches during that 100ms time, hardly ever felt the latency was putting me at a competitive disadvantage more than my own skill deficiencies. 

30-60ms to AUS feels pretty good (considering the past)
I'm from South Australia, and way way way back, 2000s era, Dialup and 165-180ms (16vs16 Vietcong MP) but would also spike to 200-220ms
To me, at THAT time, anything over 240ms was getting a bit much... (Unplayable)
Then 1.5Mb/s Adsl hit those that could afford it, and all us Dialups hated them a little bit. /s

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

Then 1.5Mb/s Adsl hit those that could afford it, and all us Dialups hated them a little bit. /s

*game session crash* "Omg who picked up the phone, I'm in the middle of a match"

[schwellmo92]

1 hour ago, Vulpixe said:

Having played with dogshit ADSL for 6 years and moving to a fixed 3G wireless service in 2010 (30+ms to local city and generally 60-80ms to Sydney), it's definitely playable only as long as it's stable. Even now with 100mbps FTTN connection, sometimes during peak times I have to jump onto 4G for an hour or so because the CVC congestion is terrible (Superloop ISP).

A super competitive gamer might have some issues but I personally didn't and was always topping scoreboards in FPS shooters.

 

Yeah see that latency would be too much for me. I get 5ms to local dc in Perth and 58ms to AWS servers in Sydney. If I want to stay competitive I would want to keep that latency (or even go lower). The whole point about the broadband for all type stuff is about equal access to information, not really equal access to competitive gaming. Also Superloop is a bad RSP so you only have yourself to blame for the latency spikes during peak times.

[Semper]

On 2/13/2020 at 11:45 PM, mr moose said:

Our population is somewhat mostly in the suburbs of the 3 major eastern cities Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane).     The problem with the internet is that they are trying to upgrade an 80 year old system for an entire country.  The math just doesn't work, it was never going to work from the onset.   Yes there are people with really shit speeds and big issues, but the reality is they are not the majority. This is the current speed rating for the NBN according to the ACCC (Independent).

 

 

Keep in mind that Just because some people are getting 50-55% of their plan speed doesn't mean they are getting shit speed, they might be on a 100Mb plan in an areas only capable of 50Mb/s.

 

Overall the combined figures from the the ACCC and the NBN itself paint an better than average picture for the state of the network,  especially given how much it is costing compared to what they can charge for tit.

My perspective might be a bit warped here, but an average of ~61% of your rated bandwidth, ~93% of the time being the norm just doesn't seem acceptable to me. I'd find it acceptable if it were at 75% or above, but that is my cutoff. It's well established what ISP's are pocketing (if memory serves me, it's 91% gross profit here in the U.S.), if they're going to charge absurd rates for their service, they damn well better invest just a small part of that into improving their infrastructure. Granted, even 50D is still completely competent for the average user today, I still wouldn't pay full price for marginally more than half of anything, Internet service included.
I very specifically will forego service indefinitely, should I ever have to, before I will ever pay AT&T another penny because of this. I was perpetually unimpressed with their ADSL service throughout my teen years, and then again when I moved out on my own and had no option for another service. As late as 2016 they were advertising 5D 0.768U as "high speed broadband". When they started rolling out U-Verse in my area (ca. 2014), they added pitifully small data caps to their old subscriber lines, 10gb to be exact, to encourage people to switch over to U-Verse. Problem is, three houses down had U-Verse service, my house did not. last I checked (about two years ago), My house still does not have U-Verse service. Each gig over that 10/month ran another $12.99. Nobody in my area was notified of this change in any capacity. My service was promptly terminated after I was hit with a bill for nearly $400 on top of the $80/month only-option plan that we had. Atop all that (and really, where my "foregoing service" statement comes from) is the reliability and stability of those data speeds. It wasn't at all uncommon for us to be under 1Mbps down, a good day was considered 3mbps, I genuinely don't believe I ever saw above four. Uploads were functionally nonexistent, Submitting online homework assignments (things such as research papers) often took several minutes. The sole thing that AT&T (DSL) did (does?) better than Spectrum (Cable) is latency. My latency was excellent when I didn't have to deal with packet loss, on average, about half of what it is with Spectrum, but we're talking trivial amounts here, numbers like 50ms as opposed to 25.

The infrastructure in my area isn't exactly bleeding edge. It's not quite 80 years old, but it is pushing to the closer side of 70 (my city was officially established in 1978, though it traces it's origins as being part of a neighboring city as far back as the 1860's, some households still have area/zip codes from before we became independent). I can't imagine there was a substantial shift in technology or implementation in those ~10-15 years. While I'm technically considered a suburb of Los Angeles, I'm realistically nowhere within the realm of "important" or "close enough" to LA to have the likes of Fiber (or whatever may supersede that) installed in my area. I live in a small town of about 36k people (which is genuinely small, particularly for California) We'll be running copper until the days that it's less expensive to roll out a new deployment than it is to maintain what we have. Simple fact is, AT&T sat on their laurels and did nothing. Time Warner was given he green light to move into their area, and they moved in hard. I can't find where I saw the stats, but at the beginning of 2019, AT&T made up something like 6% of the service provider for my area. Even HughesNet has a higher market share than they do. Spectrum (bought out TWC) still to this day offer better plans, better reliability, and multiple tiers (with 100/10 being the lowest without data caps) at lower prices than AT&T (with their lowest being 25/5 with data caps). Taking a look at the logs, Ubiquiti's bi-hourly controller speed test has me below my rated bandwidth for one test in the past 27 days, 188/9. My plan is rated for 200/10. It's fairly common for me to be sitting above my rated, with 208-212D/10-11U being the upper end.

Some of the more remote areas of the U.S. (often composing large, empty, landmasses of the "flyover states") don't have fantastic service. Satellite internet is effectively, if not literally, their only option. HughesNet is the only one I have direct experience with, and their Gen5 Network offers speeds up to 50D/5U (with data caps of 10-50gb in 10gb increments), and even then, they reliably (weather dependent, obviously) get 80%+ of their rated speeds for the admittedly small sample set that I know of.

[Guest]

Great news, hopefully this is approved in NZ soon. Still on ADSL2+ at home! Chorus (the internet line company here) is absolutely useless. Can't wait. 

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, RorzNZ said:

Great news, hopefully this is approved in NZ soon. Still on ADSL2+ at home! Chorus (the internet line company here) is absolutely useless. Can't wait. 

Did you try talking to them? 

 

Spoiler

 

Chorus: "We don't talk to consumers"

But?

Chorus: "Here's our lawyers"

But I have more specific/technical questions

Chorus: "......."

Argh

 

 

[mr moose]

12 hours ago, Semper said:

My perspective might be a bit warped here, but an average of ~61% of your rated bandwidth, ~93% of the time being the norm just doesn't seem acceptable to me.

You've read the graph wrong,  That's 61% of users experience 90-95% of their advertised speed all the time.   When you look at the overall it means that less than 10% of all NBN users are suffering below 80% of their advertised speed.  Given the state of the infrastructure and the reach of the system that's actually a good outcome.  Not brilliant or as good as we can get it (we can do better) but it's also not the ball sucking load of rubbish that people are making out it is.

 

 

[Bombastinator]

24 minutes ago, mr moose said:

You've read the graph wrong,  That's 61% of users experience 90-95% of their advertised speed all the time.   When you look at the overall it means that less than 10% of all NBN users are suffering below 80% of their advertised speed.  Given the state of the infrastructure and the reach of the system that's actually a good outcome.  Not brilliant or as good as we can get it (we can do better) but it's also not the ball sucking load of rubbish that people are making out it is.

 

 

It’s a pile higher than has been seen in the US in a lot of instances.  Companies seem happy to sell you “up to” 1gb, when in reality that can’t actually deliver more than 128k.

[Maticks]

22 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

That's the kind of service my Mum was dealing with before she got then NBN (and that was at double the rated speed - being urban rural helped a lot), even 38Mb/s was a huge upgrade for her and my siblings.

I've been a bit spoiled with the internet in my apartment though, that has the full NBN, so ping and speeds are surreal, after years of shitty mobile internet (also went from dialup in 2009) and very late (1-2 years before NBN arrived) and slow ADSL. 

The biggest struggles people have is on their iphone they need to tell it not to download updates, not to download app updates. Most computers these days require big patch updates Apple and Microsoft. It only takes 2-3 devices needing an update and the months data cap is gone...

 

With the Billions of tax paying dollars spent to roll it out, i was shocked to see data caps. that is a bit unfair. But it sounds like SpaceX is here to break that monopoly right up..

[Bombastinator]

37 minutes ago, Maticks said:

The biggest struggles people have is on their iphone they need to tell it not to download updates, not to download app updates. Most computers these days require big patch updates Apple and Microsoft. It only takes 2-3 devices needing an update and the months data cap is gone...

 

With the Billions of tax paying dollars spent to roll it out, i was shocked to see data caps. that is a bit unfair. But it sounds like SpaceX is here to break that monopoly right up..

Something needs to be done with data cap structuring.   The issue is you’ve got 99% of the populace that use extremely small amounts of data but still need to very occasionally download a really big file, and then there are pros that have massive data requirements they don’t particularly want to pay for and get the other 99% to foot the bill for.  Streaming is also making that one vague, because you’ve got people who stream to their friends and do it occasionally, and people who stream professionally and produce absolutely prodigious amounts of data.  
 

I don’t really know how to approach this one because I don’t know how bandwidth is costed out and who pays who for what.  Unlimited is convenient because one doesn’t have to think about things, but is going to be ramapantly abused by the prodigious data producers.

 

One thing I’ve seen a great deal of is highly asymmetric data rates.  Download bandwidths 10 times that of upload.  This would benefit consumers but hamper producers.  It wouldn’t affect a downloaded of an update for example because it’s a download not an upload.  This sort of makes sense as something that is uploaded once can than be downloaded millions of times.  People are uploading more and more though. 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Did you try talking to them? 

 

  Hide contents

 

Chorus: "We don't talk to consumers"

But?

Chorus: "Here's our lawyers"

But I have more specific/technical questions

Chorus: "......."

Argh

 

 

When the internet companies tell you they are just waiting on Chorus to connect the fibre it’s like they are hide and seek champions. 

[Donut417]

16 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

I don’t know how bandwidth is costed out and who pays who for what

To my understanding to move data across an ISP's network hardly costs a thing. When the data goes to another network thats when it gets a bit complicated. Theoredially there should be an equal amount of data going out and going in. That would theoredically cancel out any need to pay. Though there have been issues. 

 

A good example of this is Comcast VS Level3. At one time Level 3 was the provider Netflix was using. Comcast found that large amounts of data from Level 3 were being dumped on their network. Most of it being Netflix traffic. The amount of data Comcast was putting on to Level3's network was not equal by any means. Comcast attempted to make Level 3 pay, Level 3 claimed that the data was requested by Comcast customers and they were not going to pay. So for a while Comcast throttled Netflix traffic. Until Comcast and Netflix came to an agreement. Netflix agreed to give Comcast a boatload of money and Comcast would not only stop throttling them but provided a direct connection to the Comcast Network. Also Comcast implmented Caps and Overages. This was to stop familes like mine from cutting Cable, it didnt work, but we do on some occasions come close to the cap. 1TB seems like a lot of data until you have 3 adults in a house and a lot of streaming happens. So now Netflix pays and the customer pays even more. Its a great starategy. 

 

16 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Unlimited is convenient because one doesn’t have to think about things, but is going to be ramapantly a used by the prodigious data producers.

I think this is another reason caps exist on residential connections. They dont want people using the service for comerical means. Streaming can make people money and I would consider it a business in some cases. There hopes with the low upload rates and the data caps is that those people will pay more for a business class connection. 

 

[leadeater]

34 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

I think this is another reason caps exist on residential connections. They dont want people using the service for comerical means. Streaming can make people money and I would consider it a business in some cases. There hopes with the low upload rates and the data caps is that those people will pay more for a business class connection. 

Some of that asymmetric disparity is also actually the technology being used to deliver the internet service, it's why I don't like the US beating that dead horse cable/DOCSIS because as a technology purely for internet service it's vastly inferior to other options. The problem is you only have so many channels you can assign and as far as I understand it (we don't really have DOCSIS here) that is quite a fixed nature, so with limited resources and little dynamic flexibility an allocation of subscriber channels are assigned to them and a greater ratio is given to downlink.

 

GPON on the other hand is WDM for Downlink, Uplink and per service (IPTV, VoIP,POTS etc) with time sharing for the utilization of those wavelengths. So for GPON you have dedicated downlink bandwidth and dedicated uplink bandwidth and each subscriber can dynamically be assigned as much time as they require within that set bandwidth budget.

 

These hangups and deficiencies all originate from DOCSIS being an RF technology not a data transport technology.

[Donut417]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Some of that asymmetric disparity is also actually the technology being used to deliver the internet service, it's why I don't like the US beating that dead horse cable/DOCSIS because as a technology purely for internet service it's vastly inferior to other options. The problem is you only have so many channels you can assign and as far as I understand it (we don't really have DOCSIS here) that is quite a fixed nature, so with limited resources and little dynamic flexibility more for each subscriber channels are assigned to them and a greater ratio is given to downlink.

 

GPON on the other hand is WDM for Downlink, Uplink and per service (IPTV, VoIP,POTS etc) with time sharing for the utilization of those wavelengths. So for GPON you have dedicated downlink bandwidth and dedicated uplink bandwidth and each subscriber can dynamically be assigned as much time as they require within that set bandwidth budget.

 

These hangups and deficiencies all originate from DOCSIS being an RF technology not a data transport technology.

The issue is the US is a vast ass country. Running Fiber is not feasable in many areas, corporations expect a ROI and quickly. Remember most of our infustrure is privately owned. Also, the issues with Docsis are due to the bandwidth being shared. However, each new version of Docsis has been pusing Fiber closer and closer to the customer. Comcast for instace is doing Node +0 as far of their Docsis 3.1 upgrades. This will eliminate any equpiment after the nodes. Which means no more AMPs and that also means more Fiber has to be ran to the area because the signal cant be sent as far, so more Fiber and more nodes and that also means less subs per node. I think the number now is like 128 people per node. But the fact is the Coax already exists on the poles and they are not going to pay to upgrade that all to Fiber. They will milk this copper for as long as they can. Hell in my area AT&T is milking the copper for all they can with their 18 Mbps service, compared to the 1 Gbps service you can get with Comcast. 

 

Only way Fiber is being ran is if the government pays for it, or I should say the tax payer. In some states its illegal for local governments to build out a network. Because the telecoms wrote those laws. With the lack of support from our elected officals and the fact people fear government invovment in the internet, which is part of the reason Net Neutrality got repealed. We will have to deal with what we got. I for one have not had really any issues with my Docsis connection. It works well enough for my puproses. 

[leadeater]

33 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Also, the issues with Docsis are due to the bandwidth being shared.

Bandwidth is still shared on GPON, the issue as pointed out is how it's shared which is where the problems stem from and why uplink bandwidth is so limited even with 10Gb DOCSIS standards being banded around.

[Tweedilderp]

I can just see some anti-competitive BS being brought up in court by NBNco.  "HEY! we can't reach these speeds, why can they?!?" Sad but most likely to be true.

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

It’s a pile higher than has been seen in the US in a lot of instances.  Companies seem happy to sell you “up to” 1gb, when in reality that can’t actually deliver more than 128k.

We can thank our ACCC for that, they forced the RSP's (our version of ISP on the NBN) to advertise the average peak time speeds they can provide on their network. The ACCC also does their own independent testing and consumer can find out pretty easily  what causes any speed limits they may have.    

 

[Donut417]

38 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Bandwidth is still shared on GPON

Verizon FIOS uses GPON, Last I heard 30 customers share a line. On Comcast 128 people share a line, other cable providers could be more historically nodes would carry 100-300 customers. On top of that I think Comcast only provides 2Gbps of bandwidth per node. Thats why Docsis connections tend to slow down more. Also technically all internet connections are shared. Its just a matter of where. 

[suicidalfranco]

Reading about data cap horror stories meanwhile in Italy haven't seen them since the move from ISDN to ADSL

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Donut417 said:

Verizon FIOS uses GPON, Last I heard 30 customers share a line. On Comcast 128 people share a line, other cable providers could be more historically nodes would carry 100-300 customers. On top of that I think Comcast only provides 2Gbps of bandwidth per node. Thats why Docsis connections tend to slow down more. Also technically all internet connections are shared. Its just a matter of where. 

There's actually two ways PON can be used for the US situation actual BPON/GPON and DOCSIS encapsulated in EPON, DPoE. Verizon is the better BPON and GPON. Problem is you have the others grasping on to DOCSIS as long as they can.

 

Quote

Comcast Corporation, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks collaborated to develop the interoperability requirements to support business services products using Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) as an access technology.

https://community.cablelabs.com/wiki/plugins/servlet/cablelabs/alfresco/download?id=503c9c7d-d1f1-45f3-953e-6d9c2755afd1

 

GPON split ratio is what ever the ISP want's, 1:32 is the reference design architecture you see from the network equipment providers but you can do more or less.

 

But GPON is shared just as is DOCSIS, at the subscriber level directly. You have 2.5Gbps downstream bandwidth for everyone connected to the same switch port and 1.25Gbps upstream. Downstream is a broadcast to all ONTs and data packets are encapsulated and encrypted and the ONT drops anything not for it, what ever fits in 2.5Gbps fits or it could even be less. Either way it's a fair share/QoS of 2.5Gbps for everyone on that port behind the splitter. For upstream it's TDM and the ONTs burst transmit. So there's half the upstream bandwidth and a slightly less flexible bandwidth sharing manor but still better than DOCSIS.

 

I really have no idea of the benefits, downsides, implications of DPoE though.

 

If an ISP is only provisioning 2Gbps out of a network service node then they need a swift kick in the balls.

[Donut417]

9 hours ago, leadeater said:

Problem is you have the others grasping on to DOCSIS as long as they can.

Like I said, the infustructure is already on the poles. Do you expect a corporation to just replace it all? Verizon acutally tried, and you know what? Shareholders figured out that Fiber didnt have the same ROI as the old ass copper they had on the poles already. Also, Verizon also figured out that Wireless gave them a much better ROI. Then they stopped deploying FIOS in most areas. Remember Internet service is a business here in the US, its not provided by the government. The government has little control over ISP's. Remember Title 2 got revoked, the FCC doesnt have hardly any authroity over ISP's. States seem to do very little as well, with the exception of the few who are trying to uphold Net Neutrality, or the few that support muni broadband. No business is going to spend a lot of money on upgrades if it doesnt bennfit the bottom line. 

 

9 hours ago, leadeater said:

f an ISP is only provisioning 2Gbps out of a network service node then they need a swift kick in the balls.

Comcast gets away with it because they have data caps and dont expect someone to leverage their connection to the max. They keep upstream so low that streaming is not really an option and with Net Neutraltiy dead they can go back to throttling services. Comcast has been shown in the past throttling Bit Torrent traffic. In my area we have a bunch of older poor people. Which means most are probably on the cheapest, slowest connections they can get, if they have itnernet at all. Comcast charges $83 just for 200/10 service, its like $129 for Gigabit, all capped at 1TB.