On 23 June 2014 I tweeted this:
But it wasn't till yesterday, 15 December 2015, that we finally got connected to Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN).
Yes, this took 1 year, 5 months and 22 days.
What was particularly irritating was that our neighbours got connected several month ago. It took us this long because we're in an apartment building. Which meant that, first, our Body Corporate had to get their act together and network our building — which they finally did at the end of October.
We then had to wait till iiNet, our prefered ISP (who we've been with for over six years), released their Fibre to the Basement plans for selling NBN services to individual apartment building residents.
Once all these pieces fell into place, though, things moved quickly. And, six days after the NBN became available to us, we were online:
We're now enjoying download speeds seven times faster than our old ADSL2+ connection (an average of 46.7Mbps with NBN versus 6.9MBps with ADSL2+) and upload speeds thirty-one times faster (27.6Mbps now vs 0.9Mbps previously). We're also connecting faster, with an average ping time of just 2.5ms with NBN vs 27ms with ADSL2+.
It's awesome.
Of course these speeds aren't as fast as the NBN can theoretically reach ("up to 100Mbps") or as fast as my internet connection is at work (average downloads at 64.3Mbps and average uploads at 86.9Mbps) — but it still pretty darned good. And it's more than enough for any video streaming we want want to do.
So, yay! The NBN was a long time coming, but it was sure worth the wait.