NEW figures have revealed a rapid growth of complaints about the National Broadband Network (NBN), as the new internet infrastructure is rolled out.
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The report released by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) said new complaints about the NBN had almost doubled in 12 months.
Issues recorded by the Ombudsman were largely around faults with data speed and drop outs, as well as connection delays.
While there was a significant growth in complaints, the Ombudsman noted the “rate of growth in the number of active services on the NBN was greater than the growth in complaints about services delivered over the NBN”, which the industry watchdog said was positive.
In the 2014-15 financial year, there were 6715 customer gripes, while the next year brought in 13,406 issues.
A spokesperson for the NBN noted how rapidly infrastructure had expanded for network in the last 12 months.
“The NBN network is rapidly growing in size; in the last financial year we more than doubled the number of serviceable premises to almost 1.2 million premises from 485,000 in the previous financial year,” the spokesperson said.
“We have been scaling up rapidly and we are now activating close to 29,000 end users per week; this grows every month.”
The NBN said the sharp rise in complaints was expected.
“With this rapid increase in end users and construction activity, an increase in the number of issues reported to the TIO is to be expected,” the spokesperson said.
“From an NBN perspective, one fault or complaint is one too many, and we will continue to enhance our construction and activation processes.”
The Leader’s Facebook followers reported a mixed-bag when it came to their NBN experience.
“We have NBN on satellite here… no lines in rural areas. Absolutely awesome. Speed, functionality, reliability. Only issue is if power goes out, no net or phone. So much better than broadband by dongle,” Helen Pollock said.
“Was faultless for the first year. Now nothing but constant drop outs and buck passing between Telstra and NBN technicians as to who’s at fault. I’ve all but given up on trying to have it resolved,” Scott Taylor said.
“No surprise there. Look at Armidale. All fibre and nobody ever really complains. Anywhere else is full of problems,” Mason Allcox said.