I’ve been hearing a fair bit recently about alternate/private fibre providers (ie DGtek/PineappleNet or Gigacomm), and I’m very intrigued (especially pineapple as they offer symmetrical upload and download speeds as opposed to whatever tf the NBN is doing with this gigabit down, 20mbps up garbage.
Unfortunately all of them only have teeny tiny coverage maps, and exclusively in inner city/affluent suburbs. But if anyone here lives in one, or knows somebody that does and uses one of them, what’s your experience been like?
I’m really hoping they start to rollout to more suburbs. The NBN rollout was mega bungled, and although they don’t directly sell to consumers, and are a publicly owned corporation, I think it’ll be nice to see more competition, or at the very least, more options. The NBN’s FTTP upgrades have helped, but are limited in scope, at least for now. And still have the downside of only offering asymmetric upload speeds (which I realise isn’t that big of an issue for most people, but would still be useful to see an improvement on)
Recently moved to a new place where Opticomm is the provider, experience was not great.
The Tuesday before last, we had to call our ISP because we were getting no internet access. It took until last Monday for a fix, so we actually had no internet access for almost a week. While this happened, a planned outage happened apparently (no warning obviously) so at least we missed that one?
I wouldn’t bet on your experience with the even smaller fibre providers being much better.
Opticomm still don’t have ipv6 support too, from what I recall. Maybe not mandatory for most people, but shows how backward their tech is.
Thanks for the info! I guess that’s the other thing, being a public company with very slim competition does mean the NBN isn’t under as much pressure to offer competitive wholesale prices to RSPs, and is under no pressure at all to keep up with modern technology and the latest standards. But, it does mean that they’re also under much more of a microscope, are directly reportable to the government, have their performance reviewed and publicly dissected, etc etc