I think in fact when the fibre optic is laid copper wire will be withrawn so what choice is there?

Building a fibre infrastructure in Oz is not the same as building one in the UK. You have the larger areas to cover, the expanse of empty land, the refriderated heatproof cabinets to protect the cables from the harsh sun, the connections between homes being further apart...the list goes on. All this costs money.

I looked at the pricing and I will be better off with NBN. You do not need to pay line rental.

ADSL is great close to the exchange but useless at 4kms.

Fibre has lower latency which makes it much better for voice and video conferencing. For business the ability to centralize services and get rid of costly site servers will be a big productivity gain.

For me I save money and work saves money.

ADSL2+ is download speeds up to 24mbs. The speeds slow the further you are from the exchange. At four kms the technology becomes unstable.

This is an Optus rip off, not an NBN rip off. iiNet's prices are much better. Still ludicrously expensive compared to the UK, but heading in the right direction.

Agreed.

It is difficult to understand why anyone would stick with an arrangement that is slower and more expensive than the NBN contracts.

Dont forget to add line rental to the UK prices... With IInet.= no line rental.

With iinet, if you want to use their VoIP phone service with their NBN offerings it's an additional $9.95/month.

Don't tell me, the government lied to you AGAIN!

No line rental with Internode. With most my communication on Skype or mobile phone I will get better call quality.

From our research even with line rental included it is still far cheaper especially for complete packages.

So you skip that and sign up with MyNetFone instead, where you can set your own monthly payment. We've chosen a plan which doesn't even have a monthly fee; we just pay for calls as we go.

All the resellers. In many places in Australia there is no choice right now. NBN will give choice. For business it is great.

Yehp I dont use IInets voip either.... Pennytel voip for me

Seems from their website that Virgin are charging 40 pounds a month for 3 months and then 45 pounds per month from then on?

45 equates to $99 which is not much different to the $99 100Mb plans offered in oz. Of course the Oz plans have download limits (500Gb) but that is nothing to do with NBN as there was no promise that the NBN would address this. As has been said this is a geographical limitation of having to lay very expensive trans pacific cables and then share this throughput. Virgin in the UK use their speed limiting to keep usage down.

The promise of the NBN is of course universal high speed access. The private rollout of ADSL has left us with a mish mash of services with many having no or poor access. Virgin are only cherry picking one third of UK homes. With the lower density here cherry picking by private companies would leave us with even poorer fibre optic access.

I think the NBN has the promise to be one of the best policies of the decade. It will allow all sorts of innovate proactive and reactive govt service delivery in health, education, social services, transport, registrations etc just when the aging population and reduced tax base begins to really strain govt services.

The NBN will remove choice. It's another government monopoly.