940Mbps over copper, but $641million bill to fix Telstra's 100yr old copper :s

Crappy Telstra copper

Interestingly, the Australian story of internet copper from the node to the home has some good and bad news.

The bad news is that the 100 year old Telstra copper network (surprise surprise) is in such poor shape that the NBN is having to rebuilt it in places. The latest estimate of this cost has expanded to $641 million, but I'm sure it'll end up being more than that. 

The federal government's strategic review of the NBN put the cost of remediating the copper at $2685 per node, but the leaked documents, sighted by iTnews, reveal NBN expects this will in reality sit at $26,115 per node.

The total cost to repair degraded copper connections will come in at $641 million for the 24,544 nodes NBN is scheduled to build before 2019.

The company also expects to pay $520 million to connect "high-cost" premises located large distances away from nodes.

The copper network forms the basis for the Coalition's favoured fibre-to-the-node technology. Most of the national network - 38 percent - will be connected by FTTN when the rollout is complete.

NBN warned in the internal documents that end user speeds on the network could suffer if the copper wasn't properly remediated.

“[The] state of the copper network is considerably worse than expected, leading to extensive work beyond the node,” the documents state.

They reveal NBN expects the task of fixing the copper network to be bigger and take longer than expected. itnews

The good news is, that when the copper is all smick and new and replaced, the National Broadband Network Co has been able to squeeze an astonishing 970Mbps out of it, albeit over only 20 metres of copper. This was using the new experimental G-Fast

Still,  experiments on older copper in a Melbourne office block over 100 metres, of 20 year old copper achieved 600Mbps; still massively amazingly fast for copper. 

In recent weeks, nbn has been conducting its first field trials of G.Fast in an office block in Melbourne. 

We have achieved fantastic trial speeds* of more than 600Mbps on a 100 metre stretch of copper that is more than 20 years old – this is more than five times faster than the maximum speeds most of our Fibre-to-the-Premises end-users currently order. 

In fact, had we not reduced the frequency band used in the trial to avoid affecting other broadband services being delivered over the other copper lines, our trial speeds could have reached around 800Mbps. NBN

Yes I know, fibre is much better. But this is what we have to live with now in Australia. Internet by bloody copper FFS. The great Australian copper experiment. Gotta try and look at the bright side I guess.