The history and issues around broadband in the Gungahlin area

This video describes the history, technical issues and the impact on users resulting from the broadband issues in the Gungahlin area. The video includes commentary from Senator Kate Lundy, Russ Gillon (from ACT Broadband) and Palmerston resident, Greg Wells.

The captions are on the video, and there is a transcript below.

Transcript:

Kate Lundy

This video is the next installment in telling the story of the broadband problems in Gungahlin.
Russ Gillon has been a senasational advocate on behalf of the residents in that area about the ongoing broadband problems and I urge you to pay close attention to this video to gain a better understanding of of how RIM technologies are being used by Telstra and how that puts an inhibiting effect on your broadband service, and can in fact make sure that some people don’t get an ADSL broadband service at all.

Gungahlin has quite a complex history when it comes to its broadband problems. In fact it was in 1996, one of my first press releases as an elected Senator for the ACT, was criticising Telstra for scrapping their then Gungahlin broadband project, which way back then in 1995, was a project they were putting forward which would put fibre to the home of 5000 new homes in Gungahlin.

That’s quite extraordinary when you think about it. It’s 15 years ago and unfortunately for Gungahlin residents, Telstra scrapped that project as the new Federal government, the Liberal government, tightened up their bottom line and put pressure on Telstra to go into the privatisation phase. So we were unfortunate to lose what would have been a groundbreaking project back then.

Once that broadband project was scrapped, Telstra, I think right around the country started cutting back their capital expenditure, and for a whole range of reasons that meant the extensive use of remote integrated technology.

This technology was used in Gungahlin quite extensively and it has a broadband blocking effect, as I’m sure many of you are aware. We did our first community survey back in 2002 asking Gungahlin residents what their service was like and asking them to provide us with some details about speeds. This came on the back of a public meeting about that time at Gold Creek school, which was really well attended.

Other big news along the way was the opening of the new Crace exchange. This was widely welcomed and I remember Telstra promising that it would make a real difference. Unfortunately, Telstra continued to roll out Remote Integrated Multiplexor (RIM) technology which continues to inhibit peoples access to ADSL services. Some of you also may recall the scandal where other carriers tried to get access to the new Crace exchange and Telstra put a great big padlock on the gate. And access was denied for another period. This wasn’t anything illegal, but it was an example I think of what the industry knew as Telstra’s passive gaming of some of the rules and regulations about the access regime.

We did another survey in 2006, showing that there was still a huge per centage of Gungahlin residents who were on waiting lists for ADSL, or were finding great deal of problem experiences with their actual guaranteed speeds or the speeds that they thought they would be entitled to through the ADSL services that they did have.

And finally, where we’re at now is on the eve of the NBN rolling out I think that there’s a wonderful prospect that these problems will be resolved once and for all. Because the answer is not trying to manage Telstra’s deficient copper network. The NBN, the National Broadband Network is about a new fibre network which I think will be the ultimate solution to solving the Gungahlin broadband network problems.

So anyway, over to Russ who is going to go over some of the technical aspects of what is going on in Gungahlin with your connectivity, with broadband and with how the impact of RIMs has affected customers.

Russ Gillon

Gungahlin is unique in Canberra in the fact that when Gungahlin was rolled out they rolled out RIM technology into Gungahlin and it’s very rarely used in other parts of Canberra but it is prolific in Gungahlin.

There’s 75 RIMs in Gungahlin which all go back to a single exchange in Crace, and those 75 RIMs are essentially ADSL blocking technology. So for every 200 odd phone lines being terminated in the RIMs there’s only anywhere between 90 and 140 ADSL ports available. Also when they put those RIMs in,the backhaul – the actual fibre they put in between the RIM and the exchange – was significantly slower as it was only to deal with voice. And now they’re trying to pump more data and those sorts of things across it it’s becoming difficult for that technology to keep up to speed because of that technology limit. The backhaul isn’t there, and everyone’s performance is therefore limited. Now to deal with that Telstra have actually dropped everyone’s ADSL 2 maximum sync speed down to 2Mbps. Now I’m paying for up to 8, *up* to 8Mbps but they are actually capping it down at 2. They capped it down at about 3 and a half or 4 about 3 months ago, but dropped that cap again because they fully acknowledge that there’s a congestion issue with those older RIMs.

When someone raises a ticket, calls out a congestion issue, when someone is on a waiting list, the communications path is difficult to work through. You have to work through the ISP as a user who you have your commercial engagement with to work out whether or not you’re on a waiting list or how long that waiting list is. And then if there’s a wholesale provider – in the case where RIMs are deployed there is a wholesale provider – your ISP then has to go to the wholesale provider on your behalf and find out what’s going on. In the end user ends up not finding out a great deal at all of what’s going on. They don’t understand and they get frustrated.

Now there are places like Harrison and Franklin where they have rolled out RIM, that CMUX technology as well, but when they put those devices in they’ve put multi-gig backhaul in so we’re talking about extreme high speeds still terminating 200/400 phone lines, but there is so much backhaul coming out of those devices that everyone is actually getting fair share of that available backhaul and actually they get good speeds, they get low latency and low packet loss. Here with the old RIMs we’ve got low download, apertures, very high latency – 6 or 7 or 8 hundred milliseconds to point of presence, or the first layer 3 hop in technical speak, and the packet loss can be up to 16-20 percent packet loss during those peak times.

Those congestion issues affect the user experience significantly. There’s a lot of people out there are using online gaming and the latency and delays with that communication causes dropouts from that game. And those things are subscription games, so people are paying for the right to play those things but they’re not yet able to get that experience very well.

But it also affects things like Voice over IP (VoIP). High latency and packet loss affect Voice over IP significantly. If we were to try and use Voice over IP here, that phone wouldn’t operate properly. We would talk and a second or a second and a half later I would get a response if I actually got a non-garbled response anyway. So that also affects things such as video conferencing, other things like VPN. Excessive packet loss and excessive timeouts can cause issues with VPNs so people who are telecommuting, people who are working from home, they difficulty doing that because those sorts of technologies don’t deal with that sort of low download, high latency type connectivity.

Greg Wells

Hi, my name’s Greg Wells and my family’s lived in Gungahlin for the past 10 years. For my family, accessing the Internet is more essential than accessing a telephone these days. We use it for email, paying bills, job applications, school work, we even use it to access the ABC. However, Gungahlin has extremely low Internet speeds from midafternoon most weekdays after school and most of the weekend making it very difficult if not impossible. When I say slow I mean slow. It can take ages to download your email, it can take over a minute to download even the most basic website page, and you can forget about any kind of multimedia content like BigPond or YouTube.

This problem’s been around for a number of years and I fail to understand that with over 30,000 people living in Gungahlin, paying large amounts to access the Internet it hasn’t been fixed.

It’s been suggested that NextG is an alternative, but it’s very expensive and with its low download limits it’s impractical for families.

We’ve not only the worst Internet in Canberra but it’s worse than many regional and rural areas. And we’d appreciate if you could fix this problem sooner rather than later.

Thank you.

Russ Gillon

There’s a set number of ports and if more people want access to that RIM ADSL then they are essentially queued in a waiting list. And it’s only when someone disconnects a service, an ADSL service that the next person on that list can actually then take up that port. So people can be waiting a significantly long time for that turn over.

I believe Gungahlin should be prioritised for early NBN rollout, for three reasons. The first reason being that the Gungahlin town centre is slowly dying due to the lack of government departments and office space and it’s purely due to poor communications in the area.

The second reason is to fix existing issues in the environment. There’s a whole heap of people in this area who cannot get ADSL because they’re on waiting lists. For those who can get ADSL, the performance of ADSL is horrible. It doesn’t work.

The third is purely based on the growth, the expected growth of Gungahlin. We are the largest growing area in the ACT. If our telecommunications system isn’t working now, then as that growth continues over time then we are not going to have a sustainable network to cater for all these new people.

So we need that addressed, and the only viable alternative to Telstra at the moment is the NBN, and Telstra’s not fixing the problem.

Further information on the history of broadband in Gungahlin:

• Russ Gillon’s community effort around broadband in the Gungahlin area – http://www.actbroadband.net/
• Gungahlin Community Council website articles on broadband
• The Senator’s 2009 Pair Gains update
• New articles on this website relating to Pair Gains, RIMs or Gungahlin
• Privatisation plan threatens critical broadband project – http://www.katelundy.com.au/1998/06/21/privatisation-plan-threatens-critical-broadband-project/
• 1999 Gungahlin Broadband Survey results – http://www.katelundy.com.au/1999/11/29/desperate-liberals-mislead-gungahlin-residents-on-broadband/
• The 2006 Gungahlin Broadband Survey – http://www.katelundy.com.au/2006/11/22/radio-kate-gungahlin-broadband-survey/
• Broadband in Gungahlin – http://www.katelundy.com.au/2006/11/23/broadband-in-gungahlin/
• The truth about broadband – http://www.katelundy.com.au/2003/05/03/the-truth-about-broadband/

Tagged: ACT, broadband, democracy, government, Gungahlin, ICT, Internet, NBN