In the Sydney Morning Herald, this article suggests that it could cost $400 per room to wire for the NBN. The information came from network engineers who provided the SMH with a quote — in both senses of the word. Here is the thing: no it won’t. I know because I have done it. Back in 2002, we bought a new house and I decided that I wanted a shiny new network in it. We put in 28 connections — yes, 28 or at least 2 per room — with Cat-6 cabling. Why? Two reasons. First, the other adult in the house is a wireless telecommunications engineer and wanted a wired solution as she saw wireless as unsecure. Second, we wanted to use it for an in-house phone system. I’ll admit that it was complete overkill but since we were installing, it made sense to go all out. I was ‘future-proofing’ the house.
So what did the cables and installation cost back in 2002? $2,000. That’s not cheap but compare it to the SMH’s 2010 quote. We got that for $71 per point. I’m thinking that today, those costs on the cabling side at least would be a fraction of that. So you could probably get it down to $50 per connection if that was the way you wanted to go.
That said, we have had the fastest residential internet connection in the country. And you know what, a couple of years ago we went wireless and haven’t skipped a beat. That said, if we ever sell our house you can bet we will be putting in the point ‘NBN-ready’ on the sale doc. Maybe our agent can quote the SMH that such things add $11,200 in value to the house. And, on that score, maybe I shouldn’t be blogging on this!
So you can thank me for performing the ridiculously expensive experiment that at the same time tells you what you need to do.
Labor costs would have gone up though. I had a quote of $1000 for 4 rooms recently
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Why are they discussing wiring each room, as opposed to wiring one connection to a wireless router? Even if wireless isn’t up to speed now, it surely will be in a year or three. Anyway, I just can’t imagine going back to wired now…
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We recently retro-fitted our apartment with Cat6 cabling to three different rooms and the total cost was $300, or $100 a point. The walls are solid concrete, we are on the third floor and the roof is hard to access, so I can’t imagine that there is any worse setup for a technician to have to tackle. The $400 per-point sounds ridiculous to me.
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Demand and supply – 90% fibre coverage to 11 million (or so) households is a lot of demand for rewiring. Technicians will be able to charge whatever they want!
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I did something similar in 2000 for a similar cost. Unfortunately there was no ADSL in our (new) neighbourhood, so I had to put in ISDN to get reasonable speeds (128kbps). Eventually I got ADSL at which point I put in a fast secure wireless router. The wiring was never used.
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This must be you, right?
http://www.economist.com/user/J.G./comments
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@frank Nope.
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