Originally Posted by
Stewge
I agree with you there as I work for a company which is in exactly this situation. Charged enormous amounts for a tiny pipe. An SLA is NOT worth $9000 a month on top of the actual bandwidth cost. An SLA will not save businesses from general failure. Routers still fail, people still make configuration mistakes, idiot workers still dig into the dirt and cut fibre cables.
The reason the costs are so high (in regional areas at least) is the cost of back-haul. Taking Ballarat as an example, there are only 3 private providers which run fibre from Melbourne, so they know they can charge whatever the hell they want, regardless of what it actually costs them to do it. On top of that, if you wanted to get a service from a metro provider, but use the private provider to back-haul it out to your city/town, you effectively get charged double.
What the NBN will do, is flatten pricing and remove the "charge whatever we want" attitude from providers as they will simply be beaten by competition. Competition is exactly what is needed in regional areas, as without it, there's simply no options available.
As for Greenfield estates, you're correct. I'm living in one and there's no copper lines, only the NBN fibre. The prices are also not as absurd as people make it out to be. Although, the prices have essentially been "squashed" in that the top consumer plans top out around the $100 (where-as DSL from similar providers tend to be well near $150-200 once you consider line rental etc).
As an example from iinet (the minimum plans for the cheap-arses who seem to be the most vocal about the prices being too high, funny that):
Minimum ADSL2 Off-net (with a median speed of 8-9/0.5mbps with ~70% of people being below 15mbps): $39.95 (10GB+10GB) + $29.95 Phone = $69.90
Minimum NBN Fibre/Wireless (fixed speed of 12/1mbps): $49.95 (20GB+20GB) + $9.95 Optional netPhone (same call costs/terms as regular phone) = $59.90
If you're on fibre, it costs $5 extra to go to 25/5, $15 to go to 50/20 and only $20 to go to 100/40. On top of that you can max out the quota and the whole thing is still only $99.95 + $9.95(Optional phone)
Maxing out an ADSL2 off-net plan comes up at $149.90.
So, it's $10 cheaper on NBN to start at the bottom, and $40 cheaper at the top end. On top of that, most people only have a home phone out of habit, it's not required and I wouldn't be surprised if most people simply don't get one (saving $9.95) as almost everyone has a mobile now.
What people don't take into account is the removal of line rental (although one could argue we effectively pay that in taxes) and you are simply getting more for your money. You get a significantly more reliable service and the speed is fixed, not varying depending on copper line noise or if everyone decides to jump on youtube at 7pm and clog up the back-haul. Since moving in we've only had 1 "outage" which was in fact caused by the provider DHCP server having problems). While there might be 5% of people getting exactly what they pay for from ADSL2 (20+mbps), there's %95 of people getting less than that.