Strata owners and committees should not get too carried away by the “Broadband Bullies” rhetoric.
There was a time when the the approaches made to strata buildings constituted a threat to freedom of choice in the high speed broadband marketplace. The fear was that a single provider might connect to a building and offer one service only – its own retail product – and at the same time the presence of that wholesaler might “scare off” other potential providers.
Things have moved on since then and past fears no longer have foundation. I would suggest that the technical attributes of “vectoring” are not being properly understood and are being used by NBN as a means of deterring owners corporations from providing their owners with a choice of high speed broadband connection.
I draw on our own owners corporation’s experience to demonstrate that providers other than NBN may not be “broadband bullies” and that fear of vectoring may be very different from what vectoring actually is and does.
As an OC we were determined that our owners should get access to high speed broadband at the earliest practical opportunity. NBN was unable to provide the OC with even a general indication of when they would install FTTN (Fibre to the Node – our building). At the same time we did not want any single wholesale provider with its own retail operation to dominate our building.
Yes. We negotiated access for High Speed Broadband access for a couple of independent providers, who installed their Vslams in our comms room. This gave owners a good cross section of retail providers to choose from. No talk of “vectoring” and speeds as forecast of up to 100mbps.
And…as luck would have it along comes NBN six months later and installs their Vslam equipment. Great, even more choice and no interference by or from the NBN either.
The techo’s tell us that NBN never installed a “vectoring” module because they didn’t need to and … even if they had installed vectoring it wouldn’t have made any difference because vectoring affects not the connection into the building, but the copper wires distributing the signal to individual apartments. The copper to each apartment is not shared by providers – people typically sign with no more than one provider; so even if “vectoring’ was operated by NBN, it would not affect users of other networks.
My advice to OC’s is “before you spend money on by laws and restrict the consumer choice of your owners, get some independent technical advice about the vectoring bogeyman”
John Hutchinson
Mondrian Waterloo