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)
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Recently moved to a new place where Opticomm is the provider, experience was not great.
- speeds are the same as NBN
- prices are more expensive than NBN
- outages happen out of the blue, then take days to get resolved
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.
Don’t get your hopes up. If you are in a NBN serviced area there is almost zero chance of you getting another carrier to your area.
Part of the NBN legislation stipulates that existing fibre providers (Telstra, Optus, TPG/Vodafone, etc) can’t extend their networks more than 1km to existing locations.
A few years ago we lived in an estate with an off-brand fibre network.
The company had rolled out the infrastructure in collusion with the developer in hopes of monopolising the retail and wholesale, just like in the similar Telstra Fibre estates of the time.
The TCO called them out and they had to open up to third party retailers, but still charged the same wholesale price so retailers had to compete with quality of customer service and value-added service like VoIP.
The problem was that the wholesalers’ retailer was the only one that was able to provide decent Technical Customer Service, but since those business model had failed, they couldn’t afford to provide it.
I believe the wholesaler went bust and was bought out by Opticomm.
