Internode hooks up first NBN household in Adelaide
Michael learned in September last year that fibre-optic cabling for the National Broadband Network (NBN) was to run past the home he was building with fiancée Jacinta. "I didn't know I was getting the NBN until after we had started building," Michael said. "After the builders put the frame up, my fiancée got an email about the NBN's rollout plans, which excited me more than the frame going up on the house."
Today, Michael and Jacinta actually live in their dream home at Lakeside, near Munno Para, which sports a 50 megabit-per-second NBN broadband service from Internode.
Michael said his NBN service was eight times faster than the ADSL broadband link he had at his previous home. "It's pretty fast," he said. "Last night, I used it to download TechNet ISO (disk) images for some virtual machines I'm building. Normally that would take me about three or fours hours to do as these are 3.3-gigabyte files. With the NBN, I was able to download four of them in half an hour."
"That obviously saves me a lot of time, so it's definitely a good thing for my work. Another benefit is it's really fast at streaming tech videos about how to do things. The video is smooth and seamless - it works really well."
Jacinta said the NBN made the Internet much faster for her when doing banking, Facebook, shopping and generally searching on the Web. "I haven't really been on the computer a lot, so I've hooked my iPhone up to the service and that works a lot faster than it did before," she said.
Internode's first Adelaide NBN household comes just over a year since hooking up its first South Australian NBN customer, Raaj Menon, who lives in the country town of Willunga, south of Adelaide.
Michael Siddall said the NBN was also a life-saving tool - at least for his online game-playing. "The NBN makes a real difference," he explained. "I'm currently playing some first-person shooters like Brink, Borderlands, DayZ and Rage. Normally, because of the 'lag' on a slow broadband connection, you're dead before you can turn around because other people have faster connections."
"My new NBN service provides a significantly different experience of gaming because there is hardly any latency. The faster link levels things out a bit."
As well as using the NBN for work, gaming and Web browsing, Michael plans to use Internode's NodePhone Voice over Internet Protocol telephone service, which provides national landline calls for just 18 cents - untimed.
Michael said the only problem with his new service was "NBN envy" from his friends. "My mates are jealous," he said. "One of my friends came by this morning to check it out. At the moment, only the geeks get excited about it, but hopefully more people will realise the potential that NBN will allow for everyone from gaming to business and become excited about it."
