Service outages and NBN connection delays cause headaches in Boroondara

A Surrey Hills mum will seek compensation after waiting more than a month for her property to be connected to the NBN. Others have fumed online about frustrating network outages.

Network outages and slow connection times have some Boroondara households crying foul over the Federal Government’s National Broadband Network (NBN).

People took to social media to vent their frustration when their internet dropped out earlier this month in parts of Camberwell, Balwyn North and Surrey Hills.

Others complained they’d been forced to wait too long to be connected to the network.

Surrey Hills homeowner Mary, who declined to have her surname published, said her family moved into their property more than a month ago but was still waiting to be connected.

In the meantime they were paying for a home internet service they weren’t receiving, while she, her husband and her children were forced to hotspot through their mobile phones to use their home computer.

Mary said her school-aged children needed the internet for homework, and she’d been chewing through the data on her mobile phone plan.

She said she expected a nasty shock when her mobile phone bill arrived.

“I know I’ve exceeded my monthly limit for the first time ever,” she said.

“We were hot spotting for five weeks and we were paying for that data.”

Her family would seek compensation from their telecommunications provider once the internet was connected, which was now planned for early August, she said.

Facebook user Namratha Jayasinghe complained online she was suffering an outage in Balwyn North on July 13, while days earlier another woman, who did not want her name published, said her family’s internet had cut out just three weeks after her home was connected.

Helena Chinnock said she was pretty happy with the service.

Vera Glock of Camberwell said the connection in her suburb was also delayed.

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NBN spokeswoman Christina Patsias said more than 72,000 homes and businesses were connected across Boroondara, and work was underway to connect the remaining 29,000.

Some properties required additional engineering work before they could be connected, Ms Patsias said, and she expected the entire municipality would be connected by April next year.

She encouraged households to use the Check Your Address tool on the NBN website to find out when their property would be eligible for a NBN retail service.

Information provided by her office noted recent service outages in Camberwell and Surrey Hills were due to third party power outages and had since been resolved.