I did a new PC for a family friend the other week, and unfortunately we found out the hard way that dialup isn't supported on Windows 7 64bit anymore, he had a dialup connection, but he wanted to upgrade anyway and it gave him the perfect excuse.
So we rushed off to the local Telstra store and he signed up for one of their homeline ultimate bundles, which has their best home phone plan with their best internet connections, it was $128 a month without the Tbox, with 200GB of downloads and a choice of cable or ADSL2+, we opted for cable knowing it can be slightly faster than ADSL2+.
1 week later, they come and do the install at his place, no problems. I do a speed test on his internet connection:
My god, certain areas in Melbourne get close to 100mbps connections on Telstra's HFC network, which they rolled out in the late 90s?
Obviously it lacks compared to the NBN in upload speed, but thats not bad, going from downloading at about 5KB/s to now 12MB/s from local servers.
I wonder how much a big rollout of HFC would be compared to fibre? The only bad part there is the upload is fairly crappy compared to the download speed, but I'd be happy with that if I could get that at my place.
I don't think wireless is a good solution for anyone who would be getting fibre, laws of physics win for fibre, no interferrance, etc. Might make a good solution for people in remote areas, by remote, I mean like my friend who lives in Cherokee, its within the Macedon Ranges, close to other towns with access to Telstra Next G network, ADSL2+ etc, but theres probably 30 or 40 people living in the town, on big acerage, theres no mobile phone networks that cover the area at all, theres no internet connections other than dialup, and the phonelines run underneath the middle of the dirt road up to my mates place, when it rains, there is no home phone, no dialup internet connection and no mobile phone reception (because nothing covers the area).
Wireless would be a good solution for them, not worth running Fibre to 30 or so people, but they wouldn't miss out on a decent connection via wireless.
None of this satellite BS, costs way too much, barely any downloads and latency of 800ms+, plus when its a stormy/cloudy day, no internet.