‘They stole six months of internet from me’: Aussies left behind by rollout

IF YOU wish you had better internet, spare a thought for this guy. He is one of the Australians utterly failed by the NBN.

THE NBN blame game is well and truly alive.

Despite the rollout being nearly half complete and the debate over technology being past the-point-of-no-return, the knives are out again.

The trials and tribulations of the national broadband rollout were brought to the forefront on Monday night in the ABC’s Four Corners program, which highlighted how Australians are getting left behind — both figuratively and literally.

Our internet speeds pale in comparison to many of our regional neighbours and some Australians are even being left with nothing because their home is deemed too difficult to connect at the time NBN comes to town. As to not slow the pace of the rollout, these properties will be connected at a later date.

Victoria man Henry Laverty, 31, is one of those people who have been left behind by the rollout.

“I have had no internet for six months whatsoever,” Laverty told news.com.au.

He moved to his place in Elsternwick in March and was told the property was NBN ready. But after four separate technicians visited his apartment, the NBN eventually said the infrastructure wasn’t there to connect him. His property has since been changed to non-serviceable, leaving him in the dark as to when he will have internet access.

“They stole six months of internet from me because of bureaucratic nonsense that wasn’t even true and think that it is OK just to send an email that says that they recognise the delays were inconvenient,” he said.

Henry Laverty says he has sent ‘hundreds of emails’ trying to resolve the issue.

“The amount of money, time, mental and emotional stress this has caused me is incredibly upsetting to me.”

He is now waiting to hear whether he is able to be connected with ADSL but he’s not holding his breath. In the meantime he stays late at work to use the internet and goes to his friend’s house to watch his favourite shows.

For its part, the NBN has recently said it will put special focus on connecting those like Mr Laverty who have been left in limbo.

But for those on the network already, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

On Monday, news.com.au ran a poll on its Facebook page asking people if they were happy with their NBN connection. More than 2400 said they were not happy with the service while just over 600 said they were happy with their NBN connection.

The comments section quickly became filled with disgruntled end-users.

“We’ve had it 2 months. It’s not faster and our internet drops out at night time in peak periods,” wrote one Brisbane woman.

“I was never told I’d have to pay a huge amount $$ just to have the same speed I had with the old ADSL. NBN blames Telstra and Telstra blames NBN ... no win for me,” said another commenter.

The news.com.au poll tells a similar story to new research released today by consumer website finder.com.au, which shows 71 per cent of Aussies have a bone to pick about the NBN.

MALCOLM’S SELECTIVE MEMORY

Monday night’s episode of Four Corners focused heavily on New Zealand’s experience. One of the country’s major incumbent telcos is building its network, providing full fibre to a majority of homes meaning much of the country has far superior speeds than most Australians.

On Monday, Mr Turnbull said Australia should have followed New Zealand’s model.

“They basically ensured the incumbent telco, the Telstra equivalent, split its network operations away from its retail operations. And then that network company in effect became the NBN,” he said.

“The virtue of that was you actually had a business that knew what it was doing, that was up and running, that had 100 years of experience getting on with the job.”

But telecommunications consultant Paul Budde says such revisionist history from the Prime Minister is “absolutely” disingenuous. “It leaves the history out,” he said.

The debate about how to build our broadband network was taking place in the period around 2005 to 2007 — the same time it was happening across the ditch.

“At that point in time (then Telstra boss) Sol Trujillo wasn’t willing to do anything along those lines,” Mr Budde said.

Former Telstra chief executive Sol Trujillo speaks at a company results media briefing in Sydney.

When Telstra was privatised by the government in the late 1990s and early 2000s under the Howard government, it opted not to separate the company’s retail and wholesale business.

“Under Howard’s reign, Telstra was privatised without any conditions,” he said. “Despite lobbying from people including myself asking for conditions in the privatising legislation, none of that happened.”

As a result, Sol Trujulio was directly opposed to the government dictating its terms.

In the end, the government created its own company to build out the wholesale broadband network leading to the structural separation of Telstra and in 2010 the telco agreed to migrate its copper and cable broadband networks to the government-owned NBN Co in a deal worth $11 billion.

“It was only when Sol Trujillo was kicked out and David Thodey took over that a deal between Telstra and the government could be finalised,” Mr Budde said.

In the early days of the NBN project, Labor put forth legislation which said if Telstra didn’t produce a voluntary structural separation, then the Government would break them up. Malcolm Turnbull and the Coalition opposed it.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COST AND VALUE

Theoretically, NBN Co. is designed to be a profitable company that can be sold off.

The mandate for the NBN to become financially viable and pay back the money spent on the rollout to government coffers is at the heart of the controversial pricing structure that the broadband wholesaler charges to retailers — seen by many as responsible for the issues experienced by end users.

It has helped cause a blame game between the wholesaler and retail service providers over slow speeds.

NBN Co. says internet service providers aren’t buying enough bandwidth on the network for their customers, leading to congestion and slow speeds. Meanwhile ISPs like Telstra, Optus and TPG have been highly critical of the high costs levied against them.

According to Mr Budde, placing the business imperative on the NBN was the wrong move.

He believes there is a social value to the project that should be absorbed by the government, reducing the need for complex and expensive pricing models which he sees as “the core of the problems” faced by end users.

“I’m not saying it’s an easy to solve issue but my argument from the very beginning — back in 2005 — has always been this is not just about internet access. This is also national infrastructure that can be used for education, healthcare, smart cities, smart buildings, you name it,” he told news.com.au in August.

“So there is also a national interest value, a social value to the whole thing that doesn’t show up on the balance sheets of the NBN or the ISPs,” he said.

“This is a benefit that goes directly to the country ... And the government should actually calculate that into the business model.”

Yesterday, NBN chief executive Bill Morrow said the company may never make a profit. Speaking to the ABC he said what consumers were paying for at the moment was not enough to even recover the $49 billion cost of rolling out the network.

“If the RSPs cannot get the consumers to pay more, then we have a problem,” he said.