Why the NBN is not fit for purpose and not what we agreed to buy

A class action against the NBN? Yeah, funny. Or maybe not.One thing we know for sure is the NBN is not fit for purpose, writes Karina Barrymore.

The NBN is slowly coming to fruition, but is it what we’ve been promised?

AT least it made me laugh. Well, not really. A class action against the National Broadband Network? Yeah, funny.

Or maybe not.

One thing we know for certain is that the NBN is not fit for purpose. It is not what we agreed to purchase.

And, yes, we agreed to purchase it through our tax, our votes, and the backing we gave the government.

So we should get a refund, right?

But then they kept saying it’s only a minor problem and under consumer law they’re allowed to do that.

Minor problems mean no refund because they can fix it. So then they offer an alternative rollout timetable (a later delivery date) and alternative connection types (a different product).

Hardly minor, but okay, we’ll go with it.

An NBN Co logo seen on ground where underground fibre optic cabling has been laid.

But hey, here we are, now, years down the track and there’s no doubt even for the optimists that we have been double scammed with all that “minor problem” talk.

The new rollout timetable was a lie and the alternative connection types are worse, not better — so much worse in fact, that even the government’s own consumer watchdog has had to step in and demand we get a partial refund.

But even that’s not fair.

The whole NBN thing is a total balls-up. Every hand that touched it messed it up even more.

As soon as it became a political tool to con votes out of people by promising poor, remote and desperate communities, households and businesses a reliable internet, the death notice was signed.

So where are we now?

The best internet connection, fibre to the premises, is being installed for an elite 20 per cent or so of properties. The second best — fibre to the kerb or fibre to the building (apartment towers, office buildings) — will be delivered to another 10 per cent. That leaves almost 70 per cent of us without the product we were promised.

But it’s even worse than that. Not only have we done our dough but we are allowing the government to get away with it.

And doubly worse, even if we offer to pay again (from our after-tax wages) we still can’t get what we all need. We can’t even upgrade, at our own cost, to the promised super-fast internet.

After this rollout of inferior connections eventually finishes, there’s no way another government is going to get voted in by saying it will spend billions more dollars on different infrastructure to get us the good stuff. And once this rollout is finished they’re going to take away the old service, which in many cases is better than the new rubbish they’re forcing us to connect to.

So while the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission says we can get a refund for misleading internet plans that have internet speeds which can’t be achieved, the reality is there’s no alternative.

We can’t get a refund and then buy a better service because there is no better service. We don’t want to pay for a cheaper slow service. We want what was promised and what we agreed to pay for.

According to consumer law, a major problem is anything that would have stopped people buying it, if they had known the truth about the product. Sounds like the NBN to me.