We are now connected to the NBN. Here's a run-down on the install. And the speed!

Today was the long-awaited connect to the National Broadband Network day. Yay!

After being involved for years in the community campaign to get Gungahlin's parlous internet access upgraded, it was lovely to be able to see the end result.

We've been paying Telstra the same price as someone in Sydney pays for an ADSL2+ service running at 20Mbps, but getting only an 8Mbps service. Except what it really ran like was this (speedtest.net):

And that was at a good time, with low congestion.

We went looking a while back for the NBN package that seemed the best-rounded solution of the well-respected major providers, so we'd already changed our internet and phone service to iiNet in preparation.

So as soon as we knew the NBN was ready in our area we got the install booked through iiNet, for "between 8 and 10am" today. The process of the install kicked off well, with a reminder call the day before from the contractor, who I found out later has been brought in from Melbourne because NBN Co has been having troubles with their prime contractor. I'll explain the whole process here so you know what is involved and can plan your conversion without surprises.


This morning we got a call at 7:30am—they'd be here in 30 minutes. There's a timeliness and service you don't get with too many Canberra tradies...

When they arrived, I explained about the mashed conduit under the courtyard wall due to the original Telstra phone line installer not bothering to put the line deep enough. Consternation ensued...Could they get a line through my gaffer tape repair job, now buried under a garden bed? If not, it would be a deal-breaker, making it a "non-standard installation", come back another time, and fees to be paid by us... But pull through it did.

Next concern was that on the other side of the wall was an ensuite—not somewhere for electrical boxes, and due to a design fault in our house build, there was no way to get a fibre line through to the garage at the other end of the house—where the hub is that distributes CAT5 cabling to most rooms in the house, and where we wanted all the ugly boxes and things to be mounted. The solution was to instead mount the required boxes up near the ceiling in the nearby walk-in wardrobe. I had a sparky arranged for the same day to replace a failed greywater pump and to cover any NBN-needs, so he could install a powerpoint in the WIR and then we could use the existing CAT5 cable that ran from the Telstra junction to connect the NBN gear to the hub at the other end of the house. This would also allow us to shift the modem/router/wireless unit to the same location, ensuring much better wireless reception for all our various portable devices (8!) than when it was shut in a steel box inside the garage!

Here's the box that goes on the outside wall near the existing Telstra phone junction box. It's much bigger than the phone line one because they need to wrap some spare fibre cable in there and it can't be bent too tight—it is glass after all. I wanted the Telstra box removed but "laws" prevent them from removing this now redundant fixture... Le sigh...

The conduit takes the fibre up to the ceiling space, and is snug behind a downpipe so is minimally ugly, less so after a lick of house paint.

And inside this cable is the actual fibre-optic "cable" that carries this incredibly fast bandwidth. What does this modern day miracle look like? This:

Yes—that's it, nothing bigger than a human hair! To be handled with great care, because it could easily stick in you and break off, becoming extremely hard to dig out... And this is what the internal NBN install looked like when finished, just two hours after they started:

Top left is a junction box, on the right is the power supply, including a battery backup so you can still call out in a blackout, and the bottom box is the Network Termination Unit—a box that converts the digital light signal into a digital electrical signal. So as you can guess, there's a fair bit more in the way of "phantom" electricity consumption there, making us thankful for those solar panels and the roof and electricity bills that say "do not pay". Unfortunately this NTU box isn't also a router, so you need to add your own but they are cheap these days. Remember it means you need two powerpoints.

This is what it looked like after the sparky added the powerpoints and relocated the router, with CAT5 (blue) cable coming out of the NTU, into the router, and another out of the router, back into the wall and down to the garage to feed into an 8-port switch and then the patch panels that allow us to select which of the various data sockets around the house are live, depending on changing layouts and computer/TV/PVR/network drive/printer needs:

So the finished product is a bit ugly, but essentially tidy and stashed away behind stuff on the top shelf in the wardrobe, so no biggie. I'm showing you what's involved though, so that you can plan for all the bits you have to include in your own install. This is not something you want on your loungeroom wall!

I'm yet to sort out the conversion of the old-fashioned voice landline to VOIP, but it's been ordered, and will probably mean we have a phone base station plugged into the router too. But the old landline is history!

Oh—and what happened with the speed? This:

Yes that's a big grin you can hear! Websites now snap onto the screen, scrolling through your Flickr photostream involves a couple of seconds per high resolution photo. Podcasts download in no time, even mobile devices using the wireless are responding snappily. No doubt we'll get a better idea over time, but so far, so wonderful!

I can only hope now that the NBN roll-out continues, and the rest of Canberra and indeed Australia get to experience what really fast internet access is like. Meanwhile, if your area comes online, get in and get it—while the connection is free. Because later it will cost you to get the connection done.