Committee hears of Peninsula NBN experience

Stories from Peninsula residents were passed on to members of the Joint Standing Committee on the National Broadband Network when they were on the Central Coast for a public hearing on Tuesday, August 1.

The Committee, comprising federal parliamentarians from a range of political parties, was formed last year to enquire in to issues surrounding the rollout of the NBN rollout.

Both the Member for Robertson Ms Lucy Wicks and the former Member now Senator Deborah O'Neill are members of the committee.

Senator O'Neill said the many stories from local residents clearly showed that the Central Coast NBN experience was a failure.

"This has been a billion dollar bungle from a Prime Minister who prides himself on being innovative and agile," Senator O'Neill said.

"I hear from people every day who are dreading being switched over to the new network because they know that it has caused headaches for so many other people in or community," she said.

One case study was Mr Pat Cox of Woy Woy, who signed up to switch to the NBN in February 2016 but struggled with extensive issues that were not resolved until September.

Things started to go wrong when the technician arrived on March 31 to install the modem but couldn't complete the job because there was no exterior box connected to Mr Cox's cottage.

His neighbours all had fibre to the premises.

Once the installation was completed, Mr Cox said he experienced outages around twice a week.

After 45 years as a Telstra customer, his internet was completely disconnected on June 16, 2016.

"Someone from Telstra called and said I had not been properly connected to the NBN and shortly after that call I lost my internet connection which also meant I lost my phone line too."

He spoke to Telstra who said they would send out a technician on June 21 between 10am and 2pm but no-one showed up.

At that point Mr Cox called Senator O'Neill's office who intervened on his behalf and managed to get him a fibre-to-the-node connection.

Even after intervention from a Senator, Telstra continued to not return Mr Cox calls or turn up when they said they would.

Mr Cox said he was without phone and internet for two weeks.

He finally received his fibre-to-node connection but said he has still experienced, on average, at least one "drop out" per month that lasts anywhere from 10 minutes to three-to-four hours.

Mr Cox is paying around $120 per month for his plan and entered a two-year contract when he moved across to the NBN.

He has not received any compensation for the time he spent without a connection and said he had given up on speaking with Telstra.

"I'd like to see fibre to the home for everyone and none of this going through nodes and copper wires and on top of that I'd like to see the 100 Mb per second because now I am lucky if I get 30mbps," he said.

"Before the NBN I had ADSL and it worked a damn sight faster than the NBN does sometimes," he said.

Senator O'Neill said Mr Cox was just one of many residents her office had been assisting with their NBN issues.

"The Central Coast deserves world class broadband and is sick of having to play along with Turnbull's failed experiment," she said.

SOURCES:

Media release, 1 Aug 2017

Rhys Zorro, office of Deborah O'Neill

Interview, 3 Aug 2017

Pat Cox, Woy Woy

Reporter: Jackie Pearson