I truly fear the day the NBN comes to my area. I am currently with Telstra and fortunately have HFC, I get pretty reliable speeds between 112 and 115mbps, with ping of 9ms. I am a developer and I rely on my currently decent connection to make money, video call clients in other countries, transfer large files (to and fro) if speeds were to suffer resulting in the inability to communicate properly, it would be crushing.
The fact that retailers are not purchasing enough bandwidth means you're buying a Ferrari with a broken engine that is being pulled by a single horse. My area is slated for NBN 2019, let's hope they do something about the bandwidth before then (apparently at an estimates hearing a solution was promised by Christmas this year). What a joke.
Just go with an RSP that is honest and provides decent bandwidth. Aussie Broadband are great and won't even let you sign up if they don't believe they have enough capacity in your area.
Telstra with added speed pack gives me 115mbps down and 2mbps up. I actually get a little over 2mb though. If I go onto the NBN and the bandwidth issues aren't sorted out, you can have the fastest speeds all you want but still experience ADSL speeds during peak congestion.
Likewise, providing I had a connection with Telstra (I tried Optus and had nothing but issues), I regularly had D/L of 100MB/s almost all of the time but upload was never more than 2.5MB/s which... yeah. Sucked.
I'm still on ADSL2+, and even feel a little the same way. It's a rock solid 14 Mbps line speed for all hours. Was set for 2019 roll out of NBN HFC, but, quite coincidentally, noticed some guys out the front of our unit today, and they said they were NBN and we should be connected in 6-7 months.
Given the dramas with actually getting connected, the peak hour speed drops, and the higher monthly costs, there's a bit of trepidation.
The Liberal / National government has so much to answer for IMO. It truly is a monumental disaster that will negatively impact the economy for decades when we fall further and further behind the rest of the world, or spend many more billions to upgrade to what was going to be built in the first place.
Having switched from Telstra HFC to NBN HFC my biggest complaint is variable latency. Ping to the same servers tends to vary from 20ms to 120ms. I haven't looked into too much but probably coincides with peak hours in the evening.
I also have Telstra HFC 115/2, and our suburb is going through the NBN migration right now. We are getting the HFC NBN, and today we just got a call from Telstra saying that they can't actually guarantee even 50Mbps once we switch...
When migrating from 56K modem to ADSL it was amazing. The same cannot be said from the migration from ADSL2+ to NBN Fiber to the home was nice, but wasn't WOW.
The whole NBN has turned into a complete joke. If they would of stuck to rolling out fiber everywhere it would solved everything. Nope we now have to have a hybrid of everything.
This depends on your ADSL2+ line. I'm paying for "up to 24mbit" but the line length means I get 3.
The rest of my street is now on HFC NBN but my house is an outlier, still waiting on additional work. Been waiting since May, I suspect it'll take until the next May.
With 3 people in the house, going from 3 mbit to 25 or 50 will make a pretty huge difference to us. Probably about as much as when we first jumped from 56k to 256k ADSL 15 years ago.
How far away are you from the nearest house w/ NBN connectivity?
Second important question: do you have fiber to the premises, ie an NBN box on each house? If you do...
Remember that the NBN box (unless they changed it) has 4 data ports, each of which can be associated with an isolated ISP plan. Presumably your neighbor is only using Port 1.
If you're close enough, you could probably get away with a couple amplified 802.11ac dongles. A Pi3 or modded router could handle the Wi-Fi point-to-point setup at the remote house.
If that wouldn't quite work, point to point microwave links (which don't require a license, and are basically a pair of boxes that you stick on REALLY tall poles, and which have Ethernet ports on the back) are around $450 a pair. (For example, http://store.freenet-antennas.com.au/product_info.php?cPath=...)
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If you have fiber to the node (ie the street), I have no idea if extra connections can be added for a house NBN-box-style or what that looks like. It probably means provisioning an extra phone line, which obviously wouldn't work.
But you could viably rent the neighbor(s') actual bandwidth in this situation - in fact, if you can successfully describe and sell a "0% QoS" structure, where whatever bandwidth is not being otherwise used at any given moment is allocated to you, you could probably get away with paying very little. :P
You could also rent from multiple neighbors, too. Supposing an ideal scenario where you rent from 10 neighbors which have 100Mbps each (I know, I know...), you could get a VPS with decent bandwidth in a Real Country™, connect to the VPS from each borrowed connection, bond the resulting TUN interfaces together at both ends of the link, and hey presto - absolutely disasterous ping and jitter, but 1Gbps throughput at 1 o'clock in the morning.
I have the "good" NBN (FTTP) it is much faster than my old ADSL2 (eg Netflix youtube etc. don't buffer constantly anymore) but also less reliable there are semi regular outages. I've had 3 1 hour+ outages in October so far. I normally wouldn't have an issue except during one of the outages I was working remotely from home and needed to make a semi-important skype meeting.
The fact that retailers are not purchasing enough bandwidth means you're buying a Ferrari with a broken engine that is being pulled by a single horse. My area is slated for NBN 2019, let's hope they do something about the bandwidth before then (apparently at an estimates hearing a solution was promised by Christmas this year). What a joke.