We are currently evaluating whether we continue offer 250/100 (250Mbps down and 100Mbps up) services in Canberra. Unfortunately due to NBN’s CVC pricing construct it is extremely expensive to offer these services for a relatively small number of people and we are very disappointed to say that it looks like we will just have to stop offering it.

So what’s CVC and what’s the problem with it?

NBN charges providers, such as ourselves, in two parts. The first is the AVC charge and is a single price per connection based on the peak speed of that connection. Higher speeds are higher priced as you would expect.

The second part is the CVC charge, which is the total bandwidth requested by the RSP to be used across all services in an area (called a CSA, which is pretty much just a POI – point of interconnect). In Canberra there are two CSAs: Civic and Queanbeyan. If an RSP does not purchase enough CVC then the result is congestion at peak times as there isn’t enough bandwidth to go around. NBN and the RSPs assume that a certain amount of CVC, typically just a few Mbps, is used on average per connection.

So for example if 2.5Mbps of CVC is allocated per connection, then if you have 1000 services, then your CVC should be 2500Mbps.

The problem with that calculation is that it doesn’t scale down. You have to have a minimum amount of CVC just to allow a service to work at all. Clearly you have have at least 100Mbps of CVC just to allow a single connection to peak at 100Mbps. However when you have two you probably need 200Mbps so they can both operate at the same time. However when you get more, you can start going back to the old formula. The received wisdom is that need about 3 times the highest speed of your services as a minimum on your CVC. 

NBN recognised this scaling issue and allows an RSP to get a minimum of 300Mbps of CVC effectively for free to get past this. This was clearly aimed at supporting 100Mbps services.

Great what about higher speed ones? Unfortunately NBN has done nothing to help. If RSPs want to sell 250Mbps and above, they need to buy more CVC, at $8/Mbps/month. The problem is that all that extra CVC is really just to support the higher speed services and it gets really expensive per service.

Let put some numbers on this. To support 250/100 services we really need to buy 750Mbps of CVC – that’s an extra 450Mbps, $3600 per month over what we need for the 100/40 services. We don’t actually buy that much, about 600Mbps and unfortunately we are seeing some occasional congestion when two people on 250Mbps service fire up at the same time, during peak times.

We don’t have many 250/100 services – around 15 – so that’s $240/month per connection – around $8/day. This is just the CVC! Add in the AVC charge and it’s about $11/day just for the NBN component. So yes we are making a big loss on 250/100 services!

The problem is that the higher the price, as you would expect, the less people will want to buy it, but the CVC cost is the same just spread over fewer people, making our cost per service higher. A vicious cycle.

To make matters worse our daily pricing works against us – people, quite reasonably, will just upgrade for the day just for some big downloads. The problem is we have to keep (i.e. buy) the bandwidth on hand regardless.  

Why don’t we have this problem in Tasmania?

Because we are well past the scale issue – we have about 10 times the number of connections in Tasmania that we have in Canberra, plus we setup our gigabit network in Tasmania mainly for businesses, whose CVC capacity we can use at night!

So where to from here?

We recognise that the 250/100 service is one of our unique points of difference and we are loathed to turn this off. However we have been running for almost a year and it is clear this problem is not going to fix itself.

We also recognise that some people get the 250/100 because of the higher upload speed. We could keep this part of it, by offering a 100/100 service (which is just a 250/100 service with the downstream side speed limited to 100Mbps). This would be cheaper than the current 250/100, but still at least $1.25/day more than the 100/40. Would people want to buy this?

We have considered providing a sort of “best efforts” speed where people can use the high speed if no-one else is using the CVC, however this could get quite complicated to explain and I really don’t want people to buy something thinking it’s one thing and then being disappointed.

I would appreciate any comments you have on the above – feel free to message resi-support@launtel.net.au where our staff will ensure that the emails are forwarded onto me.

Damian Ivereigh
17 Jun 2019

 

The 2019 Budget is almost upon us and unfortunately it appears that yet again our various governments (State, Federal etc) seem to prefer spending large amounts of (our) money on old-world, outdated infrastructure rather than the infrastructure we know we will all need in the future.

I note that another $115m is to be spent on the approach roads to Hobart which will join the $461m to build a new bridge across the Derwent River (at Bridgewater). That is almost $600m on roads and bridges just in Hobart! Now don’t get me wrong I like driving on roads and bridges, but having lived in Sydney for many years, Hobart’s traffic congestion still doesn’t come close to what’s going on over there (although I admit having a plan for the future would be prudent, but it should include the likely effects of technology).

Just for comparison, the cost to upgrade all of Tasmania’s fixed line areas, those currently using NBN’s Fibre-To-The-Node technology, would be about $200m. So take your pick Tasmania: a few minutes less commute time or ultra-fast broadband which would mean that you could probably work from home and avoid the commute in the first place, oh and you’d still have $400m to spare – maybe bolster the Fixed Wireless network with delivering fibre to the towers, as originally envisioned, instead of the limited (but cheaper) microwave backhaul links they currently use.

I get it that pollies, quite prudently, want to invest in technology they know will be useful and not soon get outdated. However I would argue that an investment in roads is riskier than fibre. Looking forward 40 years, are we sure we are going to need these roads, or at least such wide, multi-lane ones? By then there’s a strong likelihood that we will have self driving cars – ones that can drive at 110kph 1 metre behind the vehicle in front. They will be synchronised so that all the traffic moves in an amazing high speed dance through areas where we currently see congestion. We will need no traffic lights, cars will just call ahead to the other cars, then speed up and slow down as they approach intersections so they seamlessly join or cross the traffic flow. Will this happen? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me. It is certainly a cloud on the horizon for road investment.

Compare that with fibre. There is just no possibility we won’t need this and lots of it over the next 40 years. Every part of our lives is increasingly connected and our demand for data carriage seems to grow completely unabated (anyone see any hint that it is going slow down?). Forget 5G, it will be a great technology, but it will only ever be a “fill-in” where mobility is important, it will never be able to do the heavy lifting that fibre, with its almost unlimited bandwidth capabilities, will provide. Hands up anyone who wants to predict that the internet is just fad and in 10 years time we won’t need it! Investing in fibre is seriously a dead cert.

Tony Abbott said: “Do we really want to invest $50 billion of hard earned taxpayers money in what is essentially a video entertainment system?”. I wonder if this is the problem. A fundamental misunderstanding in what the internet really is. Let’s face facts, typically the most formative years of politicians, in previous business life, were before the internet really existed. For some, those who have been in politics from school, they’ve not been in areas where innovation has been needed . Perhaps, they just don’t get what the internet is about. For them the internet is just about entertainment. How do we change that?

Yes the internet can be used for entertainment and why not? When I last checked governments everywhere invest in stadiums, parks and supporting the arts. Not to mention that roads also get used by people in their leisure time. This is about making our lives more enjoyable, we don’t want to just live to work. However the internet is so much more than entertainment. It is now a key driver to our economy – sadly it’s becoming a bigger key driver in other economies. You try taking almost any business and disconnecting their internet – it isn’t long before staff are sent home. Xero published a very interesting report showing how the arrival of NBN has caused businesses to do more sales and employ more staff – oh and these business no longer have to be in the centre of the city, at the end of a long commute, in order to operate or even do sales.

So yes I get it that everyone is getting excited about 8k TV and many people are saying it won’t work here, but that’s not the only reason we should be rolling out fibre.

Underpinning our mindset with technology ensures our ideas are innovations at a global standard. But if ideas are constantly held back by the limits of technology then we’ll always be playing catch up to other parts of the world who are turning their economies around. In fact, as the pace of other gig-cities picks up our opportunity to be a leader in the new world economy falls further behind.

I get it that pollies love to turn up and cut a ribbon, great for roads, but there is no ribbon for a fibre project – it’s not all in one place – in fact that’s the point. Unlike a road that typically only connects two places (or crosses a river etc), what makes fibre great is that it’s a web of many points to many other points.

Indeed, roads themselves are being reimagined. China is likely to build the first truly smart highway and auto makers are investing heavily to ensure their model lineups stay relevant!

For anyone who clings to the idea that the current government are good economic managers, clearly has not understood the extraordinary damage they’ve done both to the financial viability of the NBN project and worse to our economy as a whole by switching to old copper technology. This damage is just beginning to show now, but there’s lots more to come as we continue losing our place in a connected global economy.

What do we have to do to get governments to plan for the future before the damage is too hard to repair? Does anyone care that Australia could in the not too distant future lose our place as a first world economy.

Damian Ivereigh
Launtel

We’re all rather used to politicians (of both sides, but mainly the current government) spruiking their achievements in rolling the NBN. However the latest one from Senator Mitch Fifield, the Minister for Communications and the Arts titled ‘3 in 4 premises able to connect to the NBN’, is so full of inaccuracies and half truths that I feel it needs a response.

Senator Mitch Fifield’s Media Release on the NBN

The media release talks about how they’ve achieved 3 in 4 premises being able to connect to the NBN and that they’ve done this more cheaply and quicker than Labor’s original FTTP rollout. He then goes on to quote some figures about why the Coalition’s MTM model is so much better than the original Labor plan.

The first thing to note is that regardless of the politics, the Labor party under Rudd actually went to the 2007 election promising a $4.7bn FTTN rollout in a partnership with private industry. However they soon came up against a recalcitrant Telstra (remember Sol Trujillo?) who essentially said:

“It’s our copper and you can’t have it unless you give us $20bn. We will then take that $20bn and roll out fibre to all the cities in competition with you”.

The country would have been left with a very expensive, poor quality network.

So the FTTP model wasn’t Labor’s initial option, but at the time the only viable one.

They managed to negotiate with Telstra (paid them a bunch of money and waved a big stick in the form of spectrum allocation) for them to get out of the access (delivery to the home) market. This then laid the foundation for the Coalition 6 years later to return to the FTTN model.

It is also worth pointing out that the previous Coalition government under Howard had created the problem with Telstra in the first place by, against a wealth of expert advice and experience in other countries, selling off the government’s controlling stake in Telstra without structurally separating it into retail and wholesale divisions. Indeed one of the early achievements of NBN was to force this structural separation.

Fifield criticises the Labor FTTN model:

“Under six years of Labor, 50,000 premises were connected. The Liberal National Government connects almost 100,000 premises every month.”

This may be technically accurate, but it is highly misleading. By measuring progress in terms of premises connected, they are completely ignoring the massive amount of planning and preparation that is required for a project of this size. IT systems, national network design, procuring construction contractors, designers etc – all that preparatory work needs to be done before the first premise is connected. This is not like building Snowy Hydro which is essentially a single project where each task is done once or just a few times.

Rolling out NBN is like operating a distributed factory – it is the same task over and over again in different places. Lessons are learned, economies are found, production ramps up. The feedback I got from engineers at NBN that they had reached their 3rd iteration of the design and were just hitting their straps when it all came to a halt.

“Labor’s NBN would have taken six to eight years longer to complete and cost an extra $30 billion. Every household would have been charged an extra $500 a year for broadband.”

Mike Quigley, the first CEO of NBN, fully expected the build to be completed for $54bn (about the same cost as the revised MTM cost) and to finish just one year later than the current MTM rollout – 2021. The cost savings and production ramp up, that Quigley expected to attain, have easily been achieved by Chorus in NZ, yet NBN and the government stick doggedly to their $4400/premise price for FTTP to justify their use of the MTM.

A recent article posted on The Monthly shares a very detailed reflection of Quigley’s views on how the Coalition broke the internet.

When the Coalition came to power the first thing Malcolm Turnbull (as Communications Minister) did was to launch an enquiry into the current FTTP rollout. They took the current rollout progress and simply extrapolated it to get their 8 years longer and $30bn more – clearly the enquiry was totally self serving and designed to justify their change to MTM. The old joke of a politician never announcing an enquiry unless they know the outcome seems very apt.

However the worst part of the whole thing is that Australia has spent all this money (same as the FTTP rollout) and we have been left with a dud – it may not be a complete dud now, but it will be in five years time. We got the expensive, poor quality broadband that the Labor government had originally considered and rejected. NBNCo is struggling to meet it’s revenue targets as people connect to the NBN at a lack lustre rate.

When rolling out infrastructure, which is slow and expensive, you don’t look at what the market needs now, but at what it will need in 10 or 20 years time. Anyone can see that our need for fast, reliable broadband is only increasing (40% per year according to the ABS). In the long term what the Coalition have done is set our economic future back at least 10 years. It will end up costing the country significantly more overall when we have to do the inevitable upgrade to full fibre (and no 5G isn’t going to cut it). This from the party that calls itself “the better economic managers”.

We will look back on this period as the greatest wasted opportunity. It’s an extraordinary shame that we failed to grasp it.

If you want to hear Mike Quigley talk about this much more eloquently than me, I highly recommend you watch his opening statement (the first 12 minutes) of his recent testimony to the Senate Committee. 

It is not clear what the long term fix for the NBN is, but the first stage has to be to recognise that we have a problem. The sooner we can get the politics out and the engineers in, the sooner we can make a start.

Damian Ivereigh
CTO Launtel
25/02/19

The company building Australia’s National Broadband Network, NBNCo, have said on many occasions, that they are confident of reaching their $52 ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) target at the end of the rollout in 2020. This is important because it underpins the value of the company as a whole and therefore any discussions of whether there should be a writedown in the debt that it owes to the Commonwealth.

They have made much of their various business offerings including Enterprise Ethernet and the business bundles as how they will raise this extra revenue. However they have really only hinted at where they actually expect most of this extra revenue to come from: CVC Overage.

A quick recap: CVC is the bandwidth charge that NBNCo levies on RSPs for the amount of bandwidth that they deliver to NBN for delivery to their customers. It was the cause of much argument in the latter half of 2017 as RSPs were clearly restricting their CVC purchases (in order to keep their retail prices down), allowing their customers to get very congested connections. Most people blamed NBNCo’s choice of FTTN, HFC etc as being the root cause of the poor performance, rather than the RSPs buying decisions around CVC.

NBNCo temporarily solved the problem by offering first “Focus on 50”, then the bundled plans that included enough CVC (at the time) for a reasonable discount to the RSPs.

Over the course of 2018 many RSPs took up Focus on 50 and then the bundles and the ACCC reported that congestion seemed to be a thing of the past. But is it?

The sting in the tail with taking on the bundles is that an RSP has to commit to not congesting their CVC – in other words NBN does not want them to sell a congested product over the NBN. They do this by explicitly stating that they must not exceed 95% utilisation for more than 7 hours in any 7 day period – there’s more in there, but that’s the gist of it.

The amount of CVC included in the bundles is 2Mbps for an nbn50 connection and 2.5Mbps for an nbn100 and above. However Australia’s bandwidth is currently increasing at about 40% per year and doesn’t look like slowing down anytime soon, indeed with the growth of high definition TVs it is only set to accelerate. So if 2Mbps was enough a year ago, it would need to be 2.8Mbps now just to keep pace with this growth.

So if you’re an RSP selling unlimited data plans what do you do? You can’t constrain your users (or even get more money from them by upgrading to higher data download plans) yet you also can’t let your CVC become congested. You just have to buy more CVC – more than the included bundled amount – to avoid congestion. This extra amount is called “CVC overage” and NBN currently sell this for $8/Mbps/month.

So some quick maths, if you are selling an nbn50 with its 2Mbps of included CVC, but actually have to allocate 3Mbps to avoid congestion, now instead of that connection costing you $45 per month, you are now looking at $53 per month. NBNCo’s revenue problem solved!

So will the RSPs actually stump up the extra money? If history is anything to go by, it is not looking good. Most RSPs are already complaining that they are making no money from NBN products so they have little incentive to play ball.

The good ones probably will go ahead and they will either have to stop selling unlimited plans or put their prices up. The others will simply restrict the bandwidth before it reaches NBN to keep it below the 95% threshold that NBN have set, in order to stay within the rules. So we will be back to 2017 with its congested networks all over again. At which time we can expect the finger pointing to restart.

NBNCo is clearly banking on RSPs buying this overage, only time will tell if they actually do.

For the record at Launtel we are already finding that the allocated CVC bandwidth with the bundles is not enough for a congestion free service and have started buying CVC overage. We believe that a high quality, low congestion, network is our primary goal, even if it means we have to charge more than the others.

Damian Ivereigh
Launtel
18 Feb 2019

Lately there has been a lot of calls for the next government to write a good portion of the loan that Federal Government has made to the company charged with building Australia’s national broadband network (NBN). I believe this is much too simplistic and short term.

These calls have come from a number of places including the large telcos who have seen their margins squeezed as the NBN rollout continues. It is easy to dismiss these calls as ultimately self serving by companies who just want a price cut. The Labor party has not ruled it out should they form government after the next election.

It is understandable that this is happening; the NBN, with it’s inferior copper based technologies, is not capable of supply the fast reliable speeds that people would be prepared to pay more money for. So currently Australian’s feel like they are paying over the odds for a dud internet connection.

So should the debt be written down? I think it is important to look at the wider issue here: we have a less than stellar network and this needs to be fixed. So the Federal Government can write down the loan, which would allow NBN to reduce its prices, but then how do we get the network upgraded? How is that going to paid for? Will it even be done?

I believe that if the debt is written down (essentially turning the loan into a gift – a budget expense, like roads and bridges or submarines) that should also come with a financial plan (possibly another loan for $25bn) that will pay for the upgrade.

At the end of the day we all know the end goal is FTTP. There is no other technology that comes even close to the same reliability, stability and performance. We can argue about whether we need it now, but we know that in 20 years time we will absolutely need it. When a commercial company (a telco) performs upgrades they do it slowly, using interim technologies such as FTTN, FTTC and HFC, to guard their cashflow (get enough revenue on the way), but it is not an efficient way to do it. Governments can instead take the long view, see the end goal and just map a direct course there. Governments can understand that their return on investment isn’t just the money, but also the societal and wider economy benefits.

FTTC (aka FTTdp if you’re from outside Australia) is touted by many as a good fix for the NBN. However I see many potential issues: Firstly, it is a very new and untried technology – Australia is the first country to roll it out in a big way, secondly it is unclear if there is an easy upgrade path from FTTN to FTTC (an FTTC service can interfere with your neighbours FTTN) and thirdly nobody knows how long those units in the street will last in the hostile environment of the street pit. Finally it is yet another interim technology that is just a distraction from the end goal – FTTP. Australia is a big country – we can’t keep rolling out new technology over and over again.

Unfortunately we have to accept that the move to MTM by the Liberal government in 2013/2014 was a colossal mistake, we have essentially thrown at least $25bn down the drain (though to be fair this money has entered our economy, no government spending in the local economy is ever wasted – people get employment for example). Had NBN stuck the course with FTTP we would have spent about the same amount of money and almost had the FTTP rollout finished by now (don’t believe that $96bn figure put out by the incoming Liberal government).

We cannot change the past, but let’s not make the same mistake again. Let’s stop thinking about how we can give everyone a price cut and instead think about how we get the network that Australia clearly needs.

Damian Ivereigh
CTO Launtel

Footnote: Why putting FTTC into an FTTN area is problematic

All copper technologies (ADSL, FTTN, FTTC etc) use very high frequencies to essentially ram a signal down copper telephone cables, that were never designed for it, in the hope that enough of the signal will make it to the other end and be able to be picked up by the modem. Unfortunately these high frequency signals will jump from one copper pair to the adjacent one due to a phenomenon called “cross-talk”. This then becomes noise in the adjacent pair and limits the performance of that connection.

FTTN gets around this problem by carefully measuring the induced cross-talk (in concert with the user’s modem that reports back) and then managing what frequencies are being used on each pair to minimise this. This is all done with very sophisticated technology in the node and relies on the node knowing exactly what’s going on in the copper side of the network.

An FTTC DPU (the unit that sits in the pit) that is placed downstream (towards the customer) is completely uncoordinated with existing node and essentially for the existing FTTN users just becomes uncontrolled noise in the network. This reduces everyone’s performance as the node scales back to get a reliable connection. For a single house it’s not a big issue because essentially the copper pair connected to the DPU is well separated (physically) from the other copper pairs being used for FTTN.

However where you have a small block of units, which is very common in the city suburbs if one customer in the block is switched over to FTTC, the others in the block can expect their services to be disrupted until they too switch to FTTC. This presents a changeover issue for NBN. They could switch the whole apartment block at once, but this has to be coordinated with the customers and their RSPs (“switchover day”). We could have an additional co-existence period, where the power and performance is reduced but this will mean that people on FTTC will get a significantly reduced service and they will wonder whether it is all worth it (more bad press for NBN).

Some months ago I wrote a post expecting some providers would get into trouble as their margins are being squeezed between NBN price rises and the unwillingness of the telco industry to raise their prices (and the market to accept them).

Since then two small providers, Telecube and Mungi, have gone bust and another, Amaysim, has exited the market claiming there is no margin to be made. Then there is Vodafone Australia who has decided to join forces with TPG rather than continue on it’s own in the NBN space.

To understand what is going on here, it is important to understand that there are different ways to provide services on the NBN. Most small providers want to have national coverage – i.e. be able to sell internet services all across the nation. Due to the NBN 121 POI model, it is prohibitively expensive to connect directly to every POI just to get started. So small providers take the only alternative which is to go through an aggregator. An aggregator is a large telco who has paid for the physical fibre access to all the POIs and agrees to on-sell capacity in the form of aggregated bandwidth across all the NBN POIs to the small provider. The aggregator simply charges an access fee per connection and a price (per Mb) on the sum total amount of bandwidth allocated to the provider’s clients.

However there are four big downsides to this method:

1. The small provider has little or no control over the congestion at each POI on the upstream aggregator’s network – the provider’s traffic is lumped in with all the aggregator’s other customers including possibly their retail arms. It is very hard for a small provider going through an aggregator to promise a “high quality” network when they don’t control the part that creates most of the congestion (the connection to the POI – the CVC).
2. There are only a small number of aggregators in the market so competition is not strong and prices for the bandwidth are quite high (of the order of $15 to $20 per Mb – including NBN’s CVC charge).
3. The small provider can really only offer products that their aggregator offers. They cannot, for example, offer higher priority traffic or more bandwidth per connection unless their aggregator chooses to. This limits the ability for the small provider to innovate and it becomes yet another “me too” provider competing on price. A good example of this is some aggregators unwillingness to provide the NBN’s new (cheaper) bundled plans, something Mungi blames for their collapse.
4. The small provider has no direct access to NBN and NBN’s management systems. Everything has to be done through their upstream aggregator. If there is a fault for example, the client calls the RSP, the RSP calls the aggregator, and then the aggregator deals with NBN. Some of the automation is very poor in the aggregators, performing what has jokingly been called “swivel chair management”, where the aggregator receives an order through one system and manually retypes it into another system. This is not efficient, leads to errors and unhappy clients.

At Launtel
We got so fed up dealing with the above we decided to eschew the aggregators and connect directly to NBN. We have had to give up (for the moment anyway) national coverage because of this. Aussie Broadband I understand found exactly the same issues with their aggregator and decided to embark on an ambitious (and by all accounts expensive) project to connect to all 121 POIs.

So in a nutshell, the small provider generally has higher costs and less ability to innovate in the market (i.e. create more value) due to their use of aggregators. It is worth doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see what these small providers are up against.

Let’s say they want to compete with TPG’s 50/20 unlimited download service, currently priced at $69.99 including GST. To provide a low congestion, unlimited download service you must allocate at least 2Mb per connection (on average). It is debatable if this will be enough long term, but we will use it for now. Let us assume the following monthly costs (ex GST), note we are not using the bundled pricing, because few aggregators seem to be using it:-

Ooops! So our 50/20 unlimited service on the NBN, with a very low profit, comes out with a retail price of $97.02 – for a service TPG is selling for just $69.99

OK, so let’s work back from TPG’s retail price, remove all the known costs and see how much profit they are making (note TPG are likely to be using the bundles):-

So that means even with TPG’s massively reduced costs (they own a lot of their own fibre), they are making less than $2/month (about 2.5%) profit on their 50/20 services. It is also worth noting that TPG’s service includes unlimited telephone calls. Few people use home phones these days, but it likely this will cost something. So it is even possible the TPG are really making no money at all or running at a slight loss.

Yes, all the above is back-of-the-envelope stuff, but it demonstrates the fundamental problem. This is why the small providers are going bust! It’s a bit of a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes here. New providers startup thinking that everyone else must be making money and they just need to get more efficient and increase their scale and all will be well. However, as they are finding, it’s not.

It is worth noting that NBN are hoping to increase their revenue (“ARPU”) from the current $44 per user to $52 per user. They may not be raising their prices, but they are expecting RSPs to hand over more in higher connection or bandwidth charges. The point is, NBN are unlikely to be reducing their prices here.

The only way to survive is to not play this price game. At Launtel, we found we had to connect directly to the NBN to improve our ability to provide a good service, be innovative and flexible in the type of service we provide that allows us to charge a little more. For example there is no way we could offer our daily pricing system through an aggregator. We knew that if we were competing on price, we would lose the game.

At some point something has to give here. Either NBN has to lower their prices (very unlikely) or the telco industry has to start raising their prices. If nothing happens the NBN market will continue to be dominated by the same big players whose only interest is to spend as little money as possible in providing the most minimal service they can get away with.

Damian Ivereigh
Launtel
21/11/2018