The "Never Never Broadband Network" - NBN complaints

Electronics & Technology NBN
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283

So many topics on the NBN it’s hard to pick where to put this.
I have business broadband (Digital Office Technology) from Telstra… great name, shocking product. When it was installed I was sold it as 20Mb up and down… impressive… but it wasn’t. The most I ever got was 1.2 up and 12 down (2 Mb less than the ADSL2 I had before). Needless to say I’ve never been confident the NBN would be able to provide the speeds they advertised so have been holding off to see what happens.
The initial sell was ultra fast speeds. Now ultra fast to me would mean, well, ultra fast but truth is something a long time lacking in advertising. So when the NBN came to town and set up their little caravan to inform the community about the “NBN” I asked them what speeds I would get. “Up to 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up” (This came with a satisfied smile). I pointed out that that seemed pretty damn slow but the inane smile didn’t budge.
Move on to today… I receive a call from Telstra (apparently) warning me that I will soon be cut off and that I need to order my NBN as there is a waiting list and I may not get connected before the cut off but that they can offer the new NBN at the same rate I’m paying now. I asked what the speeds were… “Up to 40Mbps down and 4Mbps up”. I of course asked him to repeat himself and he did (same surprising answer). I told him about being told 100/20 and he said “If you have a recording of that then you should go to the Ombudsman”.
Wow… there are so many things wrong with this picture.

  1. How can ADSL be cut off when NBN still has people on a waiting list?
  2. How can we expect to get any type of guarantee on speeds (as that is basically what we’re paying for) when the NBN keeps changing the goal posts.
  3. Are we supposed to record all our conversations now… oh wait, isn’t that illegal!?
  4. How can city folk pay the same as regional folk but they get MUCH faster NBN?
  5. How is anyone supposed to be able to use cloud backup services for business on a 4Mbps upload?

It is seriously time for a consumer built communications system joining communities rather than corporations. Australia, you’re being screwed… again.

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much faster, no satellite glitches, and much more data allowance… I hear talk of unlimited plans!

lol, try it on 1Mbps (on a good day) with 45GB data/month… I don’t bother, all backups are local.

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There are two probable answers to this:

They are talking about Telstra Customers who generally have a contract with Telstra that has the terms regarding when NBN is available they will swap you from ADSL to NBN. They will just carry out the swap and your ADSL is defunct.

or

Regardless of who has or has not swapped after the 18 months the ADSL connection is cut and you are without internet until you either connect with the NBN or you use an alternative means eg wireless data. This connection to the NBN can take months. Most people are encouraged to swap before this end date to avoid some of the time issues (doesn’t always mean a smooth transition).

This has occurred because the ACCC took RSPs to task, and made them refund customers, over their claims of speeds available which many were unable to achieve. So now you will be told the more truthful answer about possible speeds. I think they will be trying to sell you the 50/20 Mbps package from the speeds they are quoting but the upload looks terrible from that perspective and you might be better off paying for the 25/5 package instead. Not a good answer but it is the honest one :frowning:

No it isn’t illegal to record conversations, just there are rules to follow depending on location and the means of the conversation eg face to face or over a telephone and the State or Territory you are in.

From https://www.corneyandlind.com.au/resource-centre/schools/privacy-and-the-recording-of-conversations/

"In many cases it not unlawful for private conversations to be secretly recorded without the knowledge of all participants. There is no obligation to obtain the prior consent of the other parties to the conversation. The secret recording may potentially be used in subsequent legal proceedings.

As a general rule, in Queensland*:

it is illegal to record a telephone call with a device physically attached to the telephone – Telecommunications (Interception) Act 1979 (Cth);
it is legal for a telephone call to be secretly recorded by an external device (e.g. Dictaphone) by a person who is a party to the conversation – s 43, Invasion of Privacy Act 1971 (Qld);
it is legal for a face to face conversation to be secretly recorded by a person who is a party to the conversation – s 43, Invasion of Privacy Act 1971 (Qld);
it is illegal for a person who is not a party to the conversation to record a conversation (whether by telephone or face to face)."

This occurs due to a number of factors:

The fact we have the Malcolm Turnbull NBN design and not the Rudd design, so many places that would have had FTTP now have a variety of connections.

The situation that city folks pay more than they should for their connection so that other folks pay less for their’s than they otherwise would. It is called uniform cost:

Very slowly unfortunately and that isn’t a really satisfactory outcome. Want faster? Ask your Council, or your suburb or your block or your street to submit a “Technology Choice Program” application if they are willing:

It is costly but some of the costs can be shared.

As a final note if you are unable to achieve 25/5 Mbps then you may be able to attempt to request to get a different type of connection as it doesn’t meet the mandated requirements, but this can be doubled edged in that you may be put on a satellite connection which @gordon has, can and will attest to, is terrible. But if it is a larger area of people you may be able to fight for a much better connection than whatever they are currently offering/supplying.

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More news in the ongoing NBN debacle, customers to be compensated due to speed issues:

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Wow… I’m impressed :slight_smile: Will take me some time to go through this but Thank You! I especially like the Technology Choice Program… will definitely be checking that out and will give feedback.

Additionally, I was in Sydney a couple of weeks ago and one of my friends showed me the speed on his mobile… 246Mbps down! In Auckland NZ a friend of mine there gets 100/100Mbps.

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“In Auckland NZ a friend of mine there gets 100/100Mbps.” That’s because they got the Labor Party’s NBN (Fibre To The Premises) while we ended up with Abbott’s/Turnbull’s copper-based Fraudband.

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290

Yet another RSP group is called out. This will continue until all of them ‘mea culpa’ but I wonder why it is all on them when the problem is Malcolm Turnbull (originator), Mitch Fifield (current problem owner), and their sad excuse for a monopolistic network that cannot deliver on its promise.

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Because they sell plans that they know will not reach the rates they say. They have a pretty good knowledge of what a house may get but if they sell the faster package they get more money even though the user will never achieve that speed. It comes down to an element of greed on the part of the RSPs. They also face the reluctance of users who when on a plan that is a slower speed to go up speed tiers and so miss the opportunity to enjoy a better speed package and the RSP misses the income opportunity.

I also add that based on how much CVC they buy for the amount of people that are on the RSPs, RSPs can buy the CVC at discounted rates thus bringing the cost to them down. However the average CVC per user still is pretty poor at about 1.53 Mbps. This lack of CVC compounds the speed issues.

The majority of packages are sold at the 12/1 and 25/5 Mbps speeds. A decent article to read on it, amazingly it comes from a UK media provider, is:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/08/nbn_cvc_purchase_increase/

To also see the NBN reports that the article refers to see:

https://www.accc.gov.au/regulated-infrastructure/communications/national-broadband-network-nbn/nbn-wholesale-market-indicators-report/reports

And about the inquiry looking into the NBN Wholesales Services:

Yes the original blame sits squarely at the LNP’s feet but some of the RSPs have played their part in duplicitous behaviour. The “Empire” can deliver if it is given the will, means, policy, Law, and money to do so. This is not currently the LNP’s plan nor their desire so Australians will languish on a backwater network until some “miracle” occurs. The difficulty for Labor even if they get power is that to remediate this issue will cost as much if not more than it has already cost to put this current and poor excuse of a Network into place. So we face in many cases a somewhat middle of the road, desperation fix to many properties that is the FTTC connection.

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Quite right. But given government hype (ok, BS) and the supposed plans as advertised (NBN spec - including the 100/50/25/12 tiers) any RSP that did not offer the lot would have been skewered in the market and possibly by the pollies, so I give them some leeway.

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Yep there is plenty of Govy guano on the ground and it seems to be building up rather than slowing.

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When they say “1.53 Mbps per user” how is that measured?

Do they mean subscriptions or devices (some subscribers have many)?

Is it a paper figure of maximum possible users if all were on at once or a measured figure of actual concurrent users, if the latter when?

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They know how much CVC has been purchased and they know the number of subscribers. So they divide CVC by Subscribers to get the average CVC purchased per subscriber (whom the article call a user). So it is a paper figure but is probably the closest approximation they will get to actual. Obviously many households may have multiple connections and they will share the available CVC in that house, making the outcome worse in reality.

What can make this not so bad is that not everyone tends to be on at once and so the available CVC is shared mostly amongst a smaller pool. But if you are on a site that wants to use a 100 Mbps feed to you and the CVC is say 2 Mbps you will get a 2 Mbps feed. There are known times of the day when this limit on CVC is very apparent and users are advised to avoid those time slots.

ADSL had issues with speed in time slots as well, particularly if the sites visited were overseas. So in some ways this speed issue is not new but the shift has been to bring the bottleneck to our local areas rather than some fibre pipeline leaving our shores. If a site caches content here to speed up feeds such as Netflix does then if we didn’t have the CVC issue you wouldn’t really know that the overseas feed was congested.

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… try not to laugh …

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Sorry [not], but i failed. Miserably. Derisively.

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This reminds me of one Solomon Dennis Trujillo as another CEO who rides off into the sun set with little or no commitment to seeing the project out, cough cough rats leaving the sinking stinking ship?

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Did he jump, or was he pushed?

It’s best Morrow leaves before someone in Government wakes up and officially declares the NBN a failure.

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… you couldn’t make this stuff up. Studies, reports, panels of experts, completion …

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Pssstttt: Want to buy a sinking ship?? Captain heading for the life raft, but other crew still on board. Passengers have not been informed.

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Some news reports are saying Morrow has pocketed over $13m in his 5 years with NBN. Any bets on whether that is a performance based salary?

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