When I first switched to the #NBN, I was sceptical. HFC doesn't exactly have the best reputation, after all; Who wouldn't be? There was also the fact that @NBN_Australia delayed my rollout for a year over HFC quality issues. Hmm...
Installation appointment day rolled around and ... nope. Nobody turned up. No phone call, no SMS, no nothing; I had cleared by calendar of meetings and stayed home for a day on the expectation that I might not have internet access, and NBNco was a no-show. Not a great start.
The rescheduled appointment @NBN_Australia offered was in the gap between Anzac Day and Easter. If they'd already offered the excuse that they were "resource constrained" for the first no-show, why on earth would they reschedule for a week when everyone's on leave? Fool me once?
So at that point I "escalated." MPs have a vector into @NBN_Australia which bypasses the usual front-of-house. If they're screwing you around, that's one way to make them reassess their priorities. I pulled that lever; New appointment the following week. Winning!
So like I said: Sceptical. I knew what HFC was an absolute crapshoot. But, no, the #NBN tech showed up for the second appointment, connected the Arris NTD, green light, and we're off to the races. 100/40 service performed exactly the way it was supposed to, so far so good.
Over the next few months, my scepticism waned. It was actually pretty good! It was performant, it was stable, it was available, it was dual-stack IPv4/IPv6. At a fundamental level, it did what it said on the box.
I'm pretty easy to keep happy: I don't use any value-add services from my ISP, I either run my own or use cloud services over-the-top; So the literal only thing I need is "a bit-pipe which reliably carries ethertypes 0x0800 and 0x86dd to an internet default gateway."
... and, in those early days, My #NBN HFC service was fitting the bill. And on that basis, I reassured friends who had similar scepticism about NBN: "Yeah, I heard the horror stories about HFC, but it's actually pretty good!"
Then September rolled around. I don't know what changed in September, but $partner called out and said Netflix wasn't working, and when I checked I discovered nothing was working. Further investigation; My router logged an interface flap, then a minute later it was good again.
"Back to normal, no big deal." Phew.
Then it did it again a couple of hours later. Then the next day. Then a day or two after that.
"Shit. This is getting annoying. I'll start logging it." I set up some telemetry and pager alerts for lengthier outages so I'd know when they were happening, and HOLY SHIT THEY'RE HAPPENING ALL THE TIME.
Outages are funny things. Your old analog telephone at home was never anywhere near as reliable as you thought it was; But you only used it for 15 mins per day, so you never noticed downtime when you were at work or sleeping, and you thought it was always available.
How would your availability perception have changed if you got a pager message every time it failed? You'd suddenly find out about all this downtime that you might never have noticed before, and would fundamentally reassess your view of the phone system's reliability.
Internet services are not like phone services. Internet services ARE used all the time. I'm a turbonerd, so I know I'm not completely normal in this respect, but my internet connection carries traffic ALL THE TIME.
Not necessarily a lot of traffic, but I run user-facing services which get traffic from all over the world, and people email me when they don't work, so I really care about reliability.
And I'm not getting reliability.
Since about September, @NBN_Australia's HFC service has been catastrophically woeful. I think I've scored one 24 hour period in the last two months without an outage; Most days have between four and ten outages.
On Oct 20 I had 8.5 hours of downtime. I had 1.5 hours on Nov 7th, a bit over an hour after an @NBN_Australia tech had left the premises after giving me a green report card. I had another hour offline last week. 16 hours yesterday/today. Hundreds of random 5-20 minute failures.
Not only can I not use this service to reliably offer services to my users, I can't even use it myself: It's been WEEKS since I've felt confident about being able to have a videoconference for work, one of the primary NBN use cases. They almost all get interrupted.
The upshot of all of this is that I've had to switch from being the kind of customer @NBN_Australia would *want* in their corner, the kind of customer who reassures sceptics expecting bad outcomes. I'm not that person anymore. Not now, not ever again.
I'm now the kind of incandescently furious customer who has no patience whatsoever for @NBN_Australia's bullshit. ESPECIALLY since Thursday, when they finally acknowledged a long-run issue in their network which has been causing my fault which they've kept secret the whole time.
I cannot trust them because they lie. I can't have faith in their services because they don't work and aren't fit for purpose. When they tell me a fault is fixed, I need to assume that it actually isn't and they're too unskilled about their own network to know.
I have had to go from a cautious advocate of NBN's HFC program into one of its critics. Forever. That's how customers respond when you burn them, they stop talking about your successes and will only ever care about your failures. Good job!
The HFC platform is just shite. It has no redeeming attributes. They should never have taken it off Telstra. They should overbuild the whole thing with FTTP. And smug idiot @TurnbullMalcolm owns it, the only enduring legacy of his entire failed political career.
