news SkyMesh has launched a set of broadband plans with symmetric speeds of 100/100Mbps over the National Broadband Network’s Fibre to the Premises infrastructure, banking that customers will take up plans offering higher upload speeds.
Previously, the company only offered the standard 100Mbps plans with 40Mbps upload speeds. However, a SkyMesh representative noted on the Whirlpool forums on Friday that the company now offered the symmetric 100Mbps plans in most locations. The company is waiting for nbn itself to upgrade its network in some areas until it can launch the plans in every location that the NBN’s fibre network exists.
The company’s plans — as first reported by the jxeeno blog — start at $99.95 per month for a 100/100Mbps plan featuring 30GB of on-peak and 60GB of off-peak data (between midnight and 7AM) and range up to a maximum of $199.95 for 2.4 terabytes of on-peak and 16 terabytes of off-peak data.
The company said on Whirlpool that it had been able to construct the plans by using wholesale NBN plans supplied by nbn which actually featured much higher download speeds which have been ratcheted down by SkyMesh for the purpose of creating the symmetric plans, along with the 100Mbps upload speeds.
SkyMesh expects a “few” customers to take up the plans. “$200 per month is quite affordable for small and medium businesses, such as graphic artists and film production companies, that need more upload speed,” the company said. “DropBox and backups to the Cloud benefit from that extra speed. I’m not sure we’ll sell too many to residential customers given the extra $40 per month, but maybe we will.”
Theoretically the NBN’s fibre is capable of speeds up to 1Gbps downstream and 400Mbps upstream, however only a small handful of customers are believed to have signed up to these higher speeds so far. nbn chairman Ziggy Switkowsku has even questioned the need for ordinary Australian households to have access to 100Mbps broadband speeds, telling a Senate Estimates session in November 2013 that a “whole lot of assumptions” needed to be pushed to their limits to demonstrate how such speeds would be used.
A number of technical commentators have consistently highlighted the future need for symmetric broadband speeds as being one of the reasons why the NBN should feature a full-fibre network architecture rather than a Fibre to the Node or HFC cable design as is featured in the Coalition’s Multi-Technology Mix version of the NBN. Neither of these platforms are as capable as fibre of offering full symmetric broadband services.
opinion/analysis
Like SkyMesh, I don’t expect many customers to take up these plans — they’re too costly for the ordinary Australian household. However, I do expect anyone working from home with large files to take them up — these are precisely the kind of plans which many small businesses want and need. Good to see that the NBN marketplace has started to offer them.
On another note — 16 terabytes of off-peak data??? Now we’re cooking! :D
Image credit: Clix, royalty free
Loving my 25/5 NBN with Skymesh. For a company that is very adamant about no ‘unlimited’ plans, those sure are some pretty incredible data limits.
Hi,
We operate a small business from home and this sounds fantastic. We will be checking them out because upload speed is what we really want.
Dale.
Really brings into perspective just how pathetically limited the coalitions MTM is. The 100/100mbps plan SkyMesh is offering is based on the 250/100mbps plan, I think I mentioned on this very site not too long ago that this would be the plan I would choose. Not for the download but for the upload so I’d be happy with a 100/100mbps plan if it were available for sure. FttN really cant compete with this. 100 points to SkyMesh for thinking outside the box.
Ziggy can say what he likes, he is a copper relic from the copper age everyone would rather forget, the only assumptions seem to be coming from him and they are very short-sighted, but I’d expect that from someone that has to push coalition clown car propaganda. He wont be missed when he inevitably leaves GimpCo. 12 points for trying though Ziggy.
The Govt has never discussed upload speeds but that is what will make working from home practical and enable us to become content producers instead of just consumers.
“The Govt has never discussed upload speeds”
The reason for that is it would highlight a big glaring problem with their FttN plan. Short-sighted people have primarily viewed the internet as a “broadcast” network and they view it as a “broadcast” network because the downstream speeds have always been much higher, since that’s changing they know their FttN plan just wont cut it, thus the best way to fix that problem is to ignore it. It worked for the last 20 years after all. Maybe they’ll be able to distract everyone just long enough this time and at then end of it when it’s shown to be inadequate they’ll get in their clown car, wave goodbye and say “that’s someone else’s problem now! the private sector can roll-out fibre! look how much money we saved!”
opinion/analysis
Like SkyMesh, I don’t expect many customers to take up these plans — they’re too costly for the ordinary Australian household.
Yep, when in Japan you can get it at a fraction of the cost.
Unlimited symmetric speeds of 100/100Mbps are like 3000yen in Japan
GB fiber is like 4000yen
https://flets-w.com/cpn/webmotto2/
because Japan is like this huge country with a tiny population….
Indeed, a huge majority of the Australian population is in less than ten cities. For example, Sydney, Melbourne, Gold Coast, Brisbane, and Adelaide are all in the top 150 cities by population density. Each doubling of Internet speed adds billions to the annual GDP by the conservative estimates. Australia’s loss and simply because of people who see the Internet as another way to do things cheap. http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-density-125.html
indeed, we should have fibre connectivity and it shouldn’t cost $30b to do it.
I don’t get the need to dig the cable in. The government could have just laid it on telegraph poles. The roll out would have been done already for godsake.
but even with a bloody bulldozer its not difficult.
See all the government nedes to do is buy up AGL and the electricity network conduits. Whereever there is a gas line a fibre optic line could be threaded in the conduit space next to it. For people who don’t have gas the NBN should be teaming up with AGL and other utility providers to share the cost of laying out conduit to unserviced addresses.
They could have easily bought up AAPT/PowerTel and gotten their exclusive licence to use the conduits of electricity networks.
How do you think TPG is rolling out so fast their fibre to the basement product. When they bought AAPT they got the licence.
This means for next to nothing TPG can lay 100m of fibre optic cable via the conduit that serves the apartment building for power. Bam, NTU in the apartment, everyone has FTTB.
For rural users they should just go hard with the satellite option. They wouldn’t need to lay. Redirecting expenditure would allow them to expand the salivate program, improving dramatically the bandwidth.
Not to mention owning our own satellites would allow us to move away from renting bandwidth and time on other birds for our defense needs.
What a pity most of the country won’t get anywhere near that speed, never mind worrying about being able to afford it or not.
“2.4 terabytes of on-peak and 16 terabytes of off-peak data”
As Frank likes to say on Everyone Loves Raymond “Holy Crap!”. You’d want to be a serious torrenter (or video editor) for that plan!
What happened to the 1Gb/s plans? Torpedoed bu Turnbull by pricing them out of the reach of ordinary users, for what is effectively just flicking a setting somewhere?
25Mbps should be more than enough eh Malcolm?
The 1Gb/s plans were destroyed by the ACCC’s BS 121 Points of Interconnect. As a result it’s just not economic to order 1Gb/s CVC for all 121 POI, even questionable if some ISPs would even get enough customers in one area to justify that sized link.
Yep the 121 POIs are a problem.
No Skymesh in my area yet (among many others) despite it being over a year since fixed wireless became active here.
FYI dropbox seems to barely get up to 20 Mbit on my 100/40 connection. Not that I’m complaining – it doesn’t take all month to do a backup anymore :)
Ingenious solution, as the CVC links ISPs have to order from NBNco are the same size up/down. Yes it’s a cut down 250/100Mb/s link, so your paying for upload speed that isn’t used, but it’s well worth it for the upload speed.
I know of us that upload video to youtube etc, could make good use of the lower priced plans. Time is money and the upload time for video is always annoying.
I’m in! 100/100 would be ideal. Hell, I’d be happy with 25/100. We are high volume photographers and need upload speed badly. Ever tried uploading 5gb at 550Kbps… Not fun.
“Ever tried uploading 5gb at 550Kbps… Not fun.”
Ha! 5gb! pftttt! Try uploading 400gb at 895kbps only then you will know true pain. It’s torture. 3 months. 3 months. 3 MONTHS.
Post it
Of course I have to wait for the day in the dark distant future when fraudband comes to our exchange and then hope I don’t have to sell my house to afford pulling the fibre the rest of the way.
Pity that the inner city areas with the highest concentration of graphic design and video production businesses aren’t covered by the NBN Fibre rollout. I’m a freelance video editor and I’d LOVE to have 100mbps upstream – it would increase my productivity to no end (heck, I could work on international projects from my bedroom), but I’m never going to get anything beyond FttN under this mob. With that sort of connection, my productivity stays where it is and if I want to expand my business horizons, I’ll just have to get on a plane and leave.
Great to see these new speed offerings. Currently on 100/40 NBN and I could not imagine ever going back to anything less.
Hi Sean, can you tell me what your your real world upload speed is, and if you are on FTTP or FTTN, and if FTTN, how far are you from the Pillar / Curb Side cabinet?
Cheers
Craig
@Craig
We have FTTP and get 95/38 real world speed 24/7.
Thanks for letting me know, Sean. I am going to go sit in a corner and cry now, lamenting my 1.5Mbps / 500Kbps connection. ?
@Craig
I feel your pain. It’s been a bumpy ride to have what we have now:
2000 Moved into our house and went from 56Kbps to 28Kbps modem speed due to a ni-RIM in our suburb.
2001 Upgraded to 128Kbps ISDN. Fantastic stable connection.
2004 Suburb was enabled for ADSL 1.5Mbps with the installation of a mini-CMUX in our RIM cabinet.
2007 Telstra unlocked 8Mbps for everyone and our ADSL went from great to unusable for the next 3 years due to backhaul congestion (RIM) and not being able to cope with the higher speeds. Plus everyone started using torrents and watching YouTube videos.
2010 Telstra installed extra fibre optic cable to our RIM to solve the backhaul congestion issue and I was able to get full speed 8Mbps ADSL1 and actually use my internet again.
2012 Telstra installed a “TopHat” unit on top of our RIM and I was upgraded to ADSL2+ full speed.
2015 (27th Feb) My NBN was installed and activated.
What a long and winding road it has been and my suburb was almost removed from the NBN install list. We have no intention of ever moving to a non-NBN serviced area and given what we use our internet for now could never imagine going backwards ever again.
Just take my money!!
My friend in Brisbane recently terminated his lease on an office block as ADSL2 was not sufficient for his uploads (he’s a real tech guy, 3d printers/soldering irons/all kinds of crazy devices, its a geeks paradise and I have no idea what he ‘really’ does). He’s actively looking for a new place (reverted to working from home in the meantime) and it must have fibre to the premises for uploads.
Amazing how the copper brigade don’t think of these small business guys who are the lifeblood of the country.
“Like SkyMesh, I don’t expect many customers to take up these plans — they’re too costly for the ordinary Australian household. However, I do expect anyone working from home with large files to take them up — these are precisely the kind of plans which many small businesses want and need.”
What about SMBs in, you know, business premises and office complexes? Why is this sector so comprehensively ignored on the NBN topic?
Currently, a 10/10 fibre plan with Telstra is something like $5k to connect and $1,000 per month (assuming you’re within range for a short fibre run). Synchronous VDSL at the same speed is close to that in price. That’s with no other services switched on and no data package.
NBN fibre would be game changing for SMBs in Australia. Do you know how many businesses are asking about Microsoft Azure, offsite servers and even offsite backup that simply have to be told it is not a possibility due to upload constraints – on-premise solutions are the only workable solutions for most SMBs across the country. NBN fibre would change all that – they could forget about costly on-premise hardware and complicated systems that invariably run for much longer than their intended life because they’re so costly to upgrade, and move to an on-demand provisioning service. Heck, they could virtualise their whole office and move to thin-clients operating RDP with sufficient bandwidth, but only where the connectivity has the requisite bandwidth and reliability (something ADSL can’t meet and even FTTN VDSL will have trouble with, unless you aggregate/bond multiple services together).
So while the fibre NBN is nice to have and will provide much needed headroom for the growth of services and uses home users might want to put it to, SMBs can make heavy use of it TODAY, and will see significant savings over existing alternatives (that don’t come close to its performance, anyway).
Why does discussion of the NBN seem to completely ignore those who will actually benefit the most from it right now, today?
“What about SMBs in, you know, business premises and office complexes? Why is this sector so comprehensively ignored on the NBN topic?”
I’d like to hazard the guess that it’s because so many of “Malcolm’s Troopers” have made it that way? Most of the folks that support Malcolm’s version of the NBN support the theory that “The Internet is for Movies and Porn”. I feel this I a good example of Reinforcement Theory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_theory ), in that this is what most Liberal/Right aligned politics in Australia use “The Internet” for (at least that’s how it seems, I could be wrong, but I’m yet to see a sample that disproves it…most anti-FTTP protagonist’s seem to be wankers IMHO).
This whole situation has become way too political. Technology should be chosen on it’s merits, not it’s political/social merits (although that should be a part of it’s choice).
Cant even get good speeds from overseas with skymesh. Maybe if u only wanna send and recive data from australia only. Then u will be in luck. But i pitty the fool trying to download large file from overseas with them at 200kbps when others rsps can do it at 1-2mbps.
Thats 10MB/S to 20MB/s for most people on another rsp.
1Mbs or 2Mbs. 10 or 20 is a bit of an over or be it under estimate.
Unless one be torrenting.
Regards. Bob
Comments are closed.