NBN Proper: Installed
At the end of 2024, cutting their self-imposed forecast awfully close (“End of 2024”, we got the letter in the last week of December) we were notified that the fibre outside of our house was lit-up and they were accepting connection upgrades for it. Hurray!
All we had to do was bump our internet plan up to one that doesn’t work on the FTTN (read: VDSL) connection and they’d schedule the upgrade. So I did that, and while I neglected to write down the date the initial site survey was done, it was sooner than I expected. The results of it, however, weren’t that great.
“Please direct me to your outside phone termination point”. Bad news, there isn’t one. The phone cable comes in off the street who knows where, goes inside up the wall, terminates in the ceiling where it fanned out in a star of multiple cables, before we chopped all those off and sent it to one point. That means they’d have to run a trench, and put a new box on the side of the house. We had several options:
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We put it near where the current line goes in. Aesthetically the worst choice, so I turned it down, but if NBN had communicated clearly and accurately what they needed I would have gone with it. We could have put an outdoor pot plant or something in front of it.
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We put it near the power ingress. Aesthetically the best choice, being on the side of the house away from everything. However, this meant cutting a trench in our very nice driveway cement and then patching it, not gonna happen.
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We put it near the bedroom. It must go on the front of the house, as between the gas meter, the downspout, and the brick wall separating the back yard from the street, there was no clearance to put it on the side of the house, plus they’d have to dig around the gas line. This is what we went with.
For the NTD, this meant they wanted to put the NTD in the bedroom. I knew this would be an argument, but I didn’t realize their suggestion would be this silly… the master bedroom? No thanks.
So we suspended the install, while I waited for our electrician Baz to come out and set up a conduit + pull string for us to put it where we wanted it. He got to that in February, and then we let NBN know, and they scheduled it for Thursday the 6th of March.
A different tech come out, and wow I cannot knock this guy for work ethic. He was here until just after 8pm, trying to find where the conduit came in from the street. He eventually gave up, and did the bits that would at least get him some money: the indoor bit (which went fairly smoothly), and pulling the fiber down the street. Apparently there isn’t a GPON (I think that’s the term?) in every pit, our pit’s actually around the corner, a couple pits away. I got to sticky-beak at this process a bit, it also went fairly smoothly. He ended up leaving as it was getting dark, and said that he’d try get back tomorrow, or maybe NBN would have to make another appointment. No worries, I’m here all day if you’re able to come back, and if not I can’t say you didn’t try!
Anyway, he made it back about midday on Friday, and tried a different approach: instead of ramming a set of empty wires up the conduit and running his tone tracer up those, he unhooked our VDSL and sent the tone back from inside the house. We found the conduit, deeper than expected, sent a pull-rod up the conduit and shook it around a bit to make sure it wasn’t a water pipe, then he cut into it.
So at this point the installation went very smoothly. He teed into the conduit (not 100% sure it’d be easy to pull another one through, but hey, that’s NBN’s problem), ran it up to the PCD he’d put on the wall, pulled the fiber all through, sliced the end off, stuck it in a connector (how about that, I thought they’d splice it to a pigtail, but apparently they get a good enough signal just cleaning up a really nice cut to the fiber and pushing it into a connector). Inside into the air conditioning to run some checks, and then it was active.
AussieBroadband message me a few minutes later, so we swap the cable over into our router from the modem to the NTD. Maybe a plan change would fix that, so I teed up moving to their absolute gold-plated plan for giggles. That kicked us off for a bit, and I thought we might be behind CGNAT as well, so I rang up support - they were pretty great, definitely not behind CGNAT, everything looks good their side… they kicked the VDSL connection (we’ll keep it, for free, for about 10 days, in case the other one breaks), and I turned the modem off. Reboot the router, and it came up, everything working correctly, but speedtests still only show the VDSL speeds.
After a bit of thinking, I poked around the UDM-SE’s settings and noted I still had smart queues set up for the 50/20 connection. Set those to appropriate values and bingo, it’s working. Sheepishly hung up with support, and then went off to test things out.
I don’t think we’ll keep the 1000/400 plan - it’s terribly expensive and much greater than what we need. I could use the extra upstream, but the downstream isn’t super useful for us… looking at our stats over the weekend we very rarely reach the point where we’re bursting to even half a gigabit. Steam is capable of saturating the link, but then doing so we have to throttle each client to prevent pings from going up. I might be able to fix this with QoS, but it seems like a bandaid on a bullet wound.
If I put LANCache back on, it’s good for about 300mbps. I’m not sure why that is - it could be the hardware it’s on, or the extra hops through the router. I’ll have a look and see if I can do better than that, but 300mbps is heaps, if we had like a 500mbps downstream that’s plenty of overhead for other things.
As far as upstream, everything I care about has a Linode proxy in front of it, so 100mbps or 400mbps doesn’t really matter that much. Everything else, anything better than the ~12mbps we were getting is gravy.
So I think I’ll drop our plan back a bit next billing cycle and see how we go, to save some money.
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