No, Bill Bennett, fibre *is* better

Forums › New Zealand Broadband › No, Bill Bennett, fibre *is* better

quickymart

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#315024 8-Jun-2024 12:19

https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1403/S00055/what-does-vodafone-know-about-ultrafast-broadband-anyway.htm

Came across this today, while re-reading a story when former Vodafone CEO Russell Stanners was lobbying the Government to stop building fibre in Christchurch and Wellington, and get everyone to use their cable network instead (lol). Fortunately they paid no heed to his suggestion and carried on, giving us the world-class fibre network we now have.

Must say Mr Bennett's article hasn't aged particularly well.

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#3246183 8-Jun-2024 14:16

Pretty sure the latest ComCom stats show that HFC outperforms UFB... Interesting.

nztim

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#3246196 8-Jun-2024 14:51

myfullflavour: Pretty sure the latest ComCom stats show that HFC outperforms UFB... Interesting.

Yes saw that too, put that down to everyone leaving the cable network and moving to UFB meaning the cable network is less congested.

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Jase2985

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#3246199 8-Jun-2024 15:05

what speed cable do they offer compared to what they offer for fibre?

the reason for poor fibre results is people testing on Wi-Fi.

boosacnoodle

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#3246201 8-Jun-2024 15:11

Good grief. And how many times do they need to be prosecuted for misleading advertising? I see they’re still at it! This isn’t a like-for-like comparison. The opposite could be argued for Hyperfibre.

RunningMan

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#3246225 8-Jun-2024 16:00

On what planet is HFC double the speed of Fibre? Their own website says 912Mb/s for HFC download and fibre plans up to 8Gb/s are available.

cyril7

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#3246243 8-Jun-2024 16:56

What a load of crock, even the fine print states they are comparing HFC with 300/100 fibre, sure those two services are roughly price matched, so using price only as a comparison is misleading, imho it's reckless to state HFC is superior to ufb fibre.

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#3246244 8-Jun-2024 16:59

I would expect the proportion of people testing on WiFi and Ethernet to be roughly the same between fibre and HFC.

It looks like the only HFC plan is gigabit, so performance is likely better than 300Mb/s capped fibre. Performance at peak times will be dependent on congestion, which might be not too bad now.

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Jase2985

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#3246245 8-Jun-2024 17:00

RunningMan:

On what planet is HFC double the speed of Fibre? Their own website says 912Mb/s for HFC download and fibre plans up to 8Gb/s are available.

Read the fine print, they are comparing a 900mbps plan to a 300mbps plan. of course its going to be at least double. I suspect they are doing the comparison on the cost of the plan, "look my own 900mbps connections is better than one we have to pay a LFC for".

quickymart

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#3246268 8-Jun-2024 18:22

This paragraph in particular struck me as being somewhat out of touch with, well, reality:

Need for fibre?

Fibre is essential for businesses who need bulk data and sold, consistent bandwidth. 4G isn’t an alternative, it’s a complementary service. Smart companies will buy both.
How many companies do this though? Probably some but not a huge number. Fibre seems to work perfectly well for most small (and a few larger) businesses, and is more reliable than wireless.

Things are more complex with home broadband. Not everyone needs lots of data, nor do they want to pay for it. Many would be happy to stick with copper.
The uptake of fibre indicates otherwise.

For most people, buying fibre services only makes sense if it opens the door to new entertainment options.
Which is exactly what happened!

There was a danger the residential component of the government investment in fibre would do little more than give Sky TV a taxpayer subsidised delivery mechanism - that no longer looks to be such a risk.
I guess Neon wasn't around in 2014? (I honestly don't remember). Anyway I don't remember seeing or hearing about that that as an effective argument for fibre not to be rolled out at the time.

Ironically I bet that Mr Bennett probably has fibre himself now!

Wombat1

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#3246272 8-Jun-2024 18:51

I would like to see some latency comparisons, when I lived in Kapiti we had vodafone "gigabit" "fibrex" cable for a while, speed was not too bad to be honest, but the reliability was crap. It often use to go down and when we finally got fibre I do recall it being about $15 more per month for a slower plan, but there was never any downtime, and latency was far superior. I ended up with both fibre and cable connections in my coms cupboard.

Oh, and then there are those ugly repeater things hanging from the electricity poles all the way up Te Moana Road.

Here in Aus many people are on NBN HFC, and its also a lot cheaper than fibre.

nztim

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#3246284 8-Jun-2024 19:26

Jase2985:
what speed cable do they offer compared to what they offer for fibre?

the reason for poor fibre results is people testing on Wi-Fi.

This is samknows boxes plugged in with ethernet, which takes wifi out of the mix

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nztim

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#3246285 8-Jun-2024 19:28

Com Com sam knows boxes were comparing 900/500 UFB vs HFC Max

Obviously HF yeild different results

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lxsw20

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#3246315 8-Jun-2024 21:06

While it could be argued that UFB was always going to be better, why pull apart a 10 year old opinion? No one has a time machine.

trig42

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#3246821 10-Jun-2024 10:21

quickymart:

This paragraph in particular struck me as being somewhat out of touch with, well, reality:

Need for fibre?

Fibre is essential for businesses who need bulk data and sold, consistent bandwidth. 4G isn’t an alternative, it’s a complementary service. Smart companies will buy both.
How many companies do this though? Probably some but not a huge number. Fibre seems to work perfectly well for most small (and a few larger) businesses, and is more reliable than wireless.

snip

Where I work, we have both in every site (we have ~20 sites).

Mainly because we have a need to transact in real time, and an internet outage costs money. We looked at having a copper and a fibre connection, but didn't stack up (and also, if someone whacks a digger through a cable, it could more conceivably take both with it).

We have auto failover, and since everything runs over the internet (including our phones), we need the uptime. In the rare case we've had a fibre outage (I can count on one hand the amount in the last 3 years), staff don't even notice it failover to 4G - even phone calls do not drop.

We were offered HFC in sites that had it potentially available (WLG and CHC) and turned it down.

MadEngineer

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#3246918 10-Jun-2024 13:02

Yeah is super common and you’re silly not to have it on a business connection

You're not on Atlantis anymore, Duncan Idaho.

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