Kiama is the eastern Australian guinea pig for the National Broadband Network ( NBN ) roll-out and yesterday the service was turned on. Predictably there were rapturous reports from the users with some commenting that download times were forty times faster than " ordinary " broadband. In some cases users experienced 80 Mpb's, close to the 100 Mpb maximum possible.
There seemed just one rather odd feature of this report. The NBN is available to 2350 homes in the test area - and for yesterdays turn-on ceremony - just nine homes were actually connected to the network.
That seems an incredibly small sample to trot out singing the praises of a system that is going to cost billions of taxpayer dollars across the entire nation. Some people may wonder if there are some hidden problems that the NBN have failed to declare that are holding back a more reasonable sampling of the new service.
NBN expects to go " commercial " in September or October - and reports that by then this number will have expanded to over a hundred users - and that is still a very small segment of what was touted as a mass market of eager consumers.
Is it a matter of price ? A tentative price structure has been released and there are suggestions that competition will reduce this further, but to any thinking person the connection of just nine consumers on release date is not up to public expectations.
It seems possible that NBN has encountered some unforseen difficulties and this switch-on has been very carefully stage managed to select a small number of preferential customers who will sing the praises of the system - and keep silent about any difficulties.
It certainly has the "Geeks " who understand this technology wondering !
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