While that National Broadband Network has begun its rollout in small pockets of Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales, it has now reached South Australia and we finally get a detailed write-up from a user. This week Internode switched on their first customer in Willunga, 1 hour south of Adelaide.
Mr Raaj Menon is not just any customer. After early release sites were announced at the start of this year, Mr Menon convinced his family to up and move to Willunga just to be one of the first connected to the NBN. Spouses have to put up with a lot when it comes to their partner’s geeky habits, but this has to be up there with the best.
Mr Menon is the CEO of PCRange and has published his experience with the NBN in a blog post, providing a first-hand breakdown. Unsurprisingly Menon whipped out Speedtest.net got a workout to show off the new 100Mbps FTTP connection. The results speak for themselves.. impressive.
“The connection for the trial I have is 100Mbit downstream and 40Mbit Upstream. I was also given 200Gb data for the month which should be ample at least for now.” says Menon.
A ping to the closest server was returned in just 3 milliseconds. Hard core gamers would kill for a ping that low. By comparison a speedtest on my ADSL2+ connection landed a 35ms ping, decent, but every bit counts when it comes to twitchy FPS. The download speed was 95.12Mbps – only a 5% degradation from the theoretical maximum. The upload speeds were equally impressive, 35.99Mbps. While not symmetrical, this is around 35x ADSL2 upload speeds.
Image credit: The Digital Dreamer
Stats are fun, like specs on a cpu, but its real life applications that will impact our lives. Menon goes on to say “I can download a 1.3 Gigabyte file in under 2 minutes at 9 megabytes per second”…”I can upload a file just over 400MB in under 2 minutes.”
To put this in perspective, each episode of the techAU podcast is around 800Mb, the uploading process currently takes hours, using the NBN this would be done in 4 minutes.
Menon says he will continue to update us as the months roll by, so be sure to subscribe to his blog, Twitter or Facebook.
