Truth: This week’s flooded FTTN nodes are just the start

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16 COMMENTS

  1. If the copper has been cut over as a dedicated line for FTTN it then holds that if the Node is depowered due to electrical hazards at the node, fixed communications are dead and people are required to rely on wireless communications channels?

    Does it further hold that the depowering of a node can be independent of depowering of all premises served by said node? (i.e. the scenario where the houses have power, and therefore are able to support their own infrastructure, but the communications path of FTTN is cut preventing fixed communications)?

    Given how unacceptable FTTP endpoints without redundant supplies were for maintaining communications paths in outage scenarios, does it thus hold that all FTTN nodes should be build with an ingress protection rating of IP68 to ensure that the NBNCo’s infrastructure is no longer the weakest in the chain? What reporting mechanisms have been provided to ensure that failure to comply with such requirements are transparent to the customer base? What penalties apply for conducting cheap builds that do not meet an IP68 rating?

  2. The Liberals are good investors in the economy I believe.

    They upgraded everyone’s ADSL with ADSL.

    They went absolutely nuts the past 6 months. After spending the whole time in expensive reviews and experimental testing in their faulty copper crap.

    To try and sabotage everyone. So they are stuck on faulty copper and suffer the same amount of downtime.

    Great for business and the economy.

    Condemned to faulty rubbish yet pay exactly the same as if it was an FTTP connection so a scam.

    Until Labor can get in raise the extra money by suing this lot and bulldoze these abomination ADSL exchanges and set it up right again.

    • Technically, they “They upgraded everyone’s ADSL with VDSL.”, but I take your point.

  3. This is an understood trade off – active electronics need power & powered devices generally don’t like water. The FTTP network also uses active electronics (though with different placement – an advantage of the approach).

    I’m not really certain why this qualifies under ‘truth’.

    • If by uses active electronics you mean only at either end and nothing in the middle, then yeah they’re totally the same thing.

    • This uses power at an extra unnecessary point which is the point that is flooded.
      Without this weak link the infrastructure may still be working.

    • As Opticomm says about it’s FttP:

      At Opticomm we have a motto of “Ban the Box” because we believe Fibre Distribution Hubs (FDHs) are detrimental to the aesthetics of an estate. The traditional large above ground hubs are also vulnerable to damage and are not waterproof. OptiComm’s cable infrastructure is ALL underground and 100% waterproof, so even in a flood, our services continue to work. These advanced features enhance the sustainable efficiency of our networks.

      They don’t have active electronics sitting in puddles…

  4. The year is 2010, the location is Queensland, and the weather forecast is: “Heavy rain”.

    The infamous Queensland floods first started to hit the state in December 2010.

    Yes, I remember this well. Few weeks later Abbott was calling for the correct NBN to be scraped to pay for the recovery. Very telling that there are no such calls from Abbott or any coalition clown to scrap their MTM clusterfuck to pay for more recent floods…

    • Yeah, the irony being in 2010 scrapping the NBN would have generated the government negative dollars (as it would go from a revenue positive investment to a written off sunk cost), Vs today where it is already revenue negative, so stopping it before they spend billions on FTTN would actually save money and make rational sense…

    • Yes, I remember this well.

      Me too, I went up to Cairns for a weekend and got stuck there for a week…it was chaos, you couldn’t get money out of the ATM’s, hardly anyone could take EFTPos (some did do manual, but most shops weren’t so trusting) and the mobile/landline phone systems were both out.

  5. Yet another solid, non-political, reason the FTTN is flawed. Is penny pinching really all thats going on here? I really do detest considering conspiracies but in this case I can’t imagine how the MTM has gone this far with so much criticism without an ulterior motive.

    Malcolm sounds like he is technically minded and would understand the criticism and preference for fibre. I’m sure he would preference fibre. But why do we have this continued cognitive dissonance?

    A side note: with FTTN, is copper voice service transferred to VoIP? If so, with FTTN’s being more prone to downtime is that not a breach of some service availability regarding emergency call access? Or is it assumed everyone has a mobile phone now?

    • Yes, you can’t have standard POTS services on the copper bundles which are being managed by hundreds of modems running cross-talk compensation. Alien crosstalk (which is what is introduced by anything using the copper that isn’t XT-compensating, such as current ADSL modems and other non-DSL related stuff such as electricity induction, ground leaks, bare copper, telephones & lines that aren’t shielded such as POTS phones, Security alarms that are still wired up etc, etc, etc, etc…. etc..) has a major impact on the speeds achievable for the whole copper bundle.

      Suffice to say, its amazing that people do achieve 25mbps+ using VDSL, but that’s probably because of the aggressive port-locking implemented by nbn(tm). That doesn’t stop the alien crosstalk though, it just reduces it; so that the entire bundle won’t come to a screeching halt and end up with sub-ADSL1 speeds.

  6. Mitch likes to tell us how many connections NBNCo has made. But does he tell us how many are working? My daughter and her neighbours living near Lake Macquarie are “connected” but they have had no service for more than a week, it could be two or more by now. Her daughter had to go to the library to complete a school assignment.

    This might be a first world problem, but remember we are spending $50 billion to get to this point.

    Many would like to revert to their old ADSL system which was more reliable, but needless to say, they can’t.

  7. Great article Renai, though I note you missed the safety angle (you did touch on it with the radio bit) with the NBN taking over things like medical alarms/landlines.

    A lot of older Australians don’t use mobile phones and still rely on their landlines.

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