Fibre to the property needs to be done. Either that or a decent 5G network everywhere and get rid of the NBN. I suggest the latter may be a good idea. It will give the speeds we need so why invest in anything else? Only give FTTP to businesses that need it.
Nope.
Mobile coverage is a major problem in a lot of the Blue Mountains. For a start, if you go over the edge of the escarpment, mobile coverage cuts out - total black spots all along. And that was with 3G/4G. 5G barely makes it to us from the local towers, and cuts out if you walk behind a decent sized tree. All that means locals too far from a tower or in a small valley all have zero mobile coverage. Non-locals who go bushwalking unwisely and fall off rocks or break their legs while abseiling, etc. (and they do, with monotonous regularity) can't call for help. We have been begging for clifftop repeaters for years...nothing from either political party.
Just use the existing copper wires? Sure...no. Run over poles and underground through iron-rich sandstone, they get flooded and are prone to deterioration over time. Bad quality copper voice lines were not good for ADSL 20 years ago, let alone streaming now. We also get lightning storms, which take out our ancient exchanges and induce spikes through the aerial cables and wet, ferrous ground that blow up connected modems, routers, etc. Everyone here has about half a dozen old modems that have been zapped this way. With long copper cables to the furthest houses, signal quality is noticeably poorer for them. Also, some dwellings are kilometers from the nearest phone pole in mobile black spots (truly off-grid), and it is prohibitively expensive for them to have one crappy copper line run to their house (Telstra will do it, but it runs to tens of thousands of dollars).
So the solution for here is fibre-optic. It is cheaper than copper, very high performance, is immune to water and lightning spikes, and can be run dozens of kilometers with no signal loss. It can be literally buried in a dirt trench if needs be. All it takes is THE POLITICIANS GETTING OFF THEIR ARSE AND MAKING NBN INSTALL IT! Which they have promised for a decade now. It was going along OK, until it all came to a grinding halt when Malcolm Turnbull decided that it would be cheaper to integrate with the existing copper lines than take fibre to the premises. That was a decade ago... So we wait.
They convert some of the available liquid terrestrial water to steam, water vapour, in the atmosphere. This isn't controversial.
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