NBN report a waste of time

The parliamentary report was full of shocking anecdotes about the NBN rollout.

What a complete waste of time the parliamentary joint standing committee on the NBN’s first review of Australia’s largest, most important infrastructure project has been.

In fact, the committee itself is a complete waste of time and space.

There were 191 submissions and 15 days of public hearings; they all should have held their breath and stayed at home — using their mobiles.

The majority report, signed by 12 ALP and minor party MPs, concluded that the NBN was a dreadful mess and made 23 recommendations to improve it.

The minority report, signed by the chair, Sussan Ley, and four other government members, said that that was all rubbish and everything was fine.

Guess which report the government will pay attention to.

So is the NBN a mess as the majority report suggests, or hunky dory as the minority report says? It’s impossible to tell. Just because more than twice as many people signed the damning report as signed the “hunky dory” one doesn’t make it more correct … although it was full of shocking anecdotes, it must be said.

Like so much of Australian public policy over the past 10 years, the NBN has been hopelessly politicised, so that anything that comes out of any politician’s mouth on the subject can be ignored as most likely unreliable twaddle.

And having changed the NBN from Labor’s fibre to the premises (FTTP) to the cheaper and slower fibre to the node (FTTN), the government now owns it. Therefore, the opposition is against it and the government is in favour.

The only report that anyone can take any notice of, or is likely to force the government to change its thinking or behaviour, is an independent one, and even then the Finkel Report into energy security shows us that they will be ignored too in Australia’s modern bellicose political arena.

In essence the majority report of the parliamentary joint standing committee found that expectations about speed are not being met and that for some customers the experience of transitioning to the NBN has been “extremely poor” and there have been “many problems”.

The answer, it says, is that the network should be upgraded to fibre to the curb, at least, and preferably fibre to the premises as soon as possible, and the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman should get more powers and there should be more regulation in general so consumers know what their rights are when things don’t go according to plan.

The minority report, on the other hand, even goes so far as to use the word “phenomenal”, as in: “On all measures, Bill Morrow and the rest of the executive team at nbn have done a phenomenal job …”

On speed: The average speed on the FTTN is 67.7 megabits per second, 70 per cent of Australians will be able to access 100Mbps and 40 per cent will get 1 gigabit (that’s taken from the NBN Co’s quarterly report).

On consumer experience: “the Coalition government is working closely with nbn and retailers to ensure the processes for switching to the NBN are being refined and enhanced to meet consumers’ needs”.

You get the picture.

Where to from here? Absolutely nowhere of course. The minority report will prevail; the NBN will be upgraded to FTTC/FTTP when Labor gets back in.

In the meantime, spare a thought for Matthew Leggett, who operates a caravan park in Mansfield, Victoria: “I made the biggest mistake in 15 years of operating my business in September, 2016, when I decided to contact my phone/ internet provider, Dodo, to ask about going to the NBN network.

“Two weeks later on the 29th September, 2016, my land line was turned off leaving me with no phone or internet services the day before a long weekend. We were fully booked that weekend and had no access to our booking system.

“Over the next few weeks I spent hundreds of hours on the phone trying to solve the problem. NBN corporation would not talk to me saying I had to go through my phone provider. Dodo kept insisting that I had a NBN box and should plug into that. The Ombudsman took up the complaint but dropped it as ‘resolved’ when Dodo moved the matter to their NBN complaints office. …

“For the last six months we have been using the neighbour’s internet to conduct our business. For weeks I had no eftpos facility until I worked out a deal with my neighbour to use their phone line each night to process credit cards ... we could not offer any eftpos transactions through savings or cheque accounts to our customers. This continued for nearly three months until we were able to get a landline reinstalled to our office.

“I regret so much the initial phone call I made last September to inquire about this NBN thing. As a result I have had no phone line for three months, no eftpos facility for three months and no internet to my business for over six months”.

Or the Victorian family (unnamed) who ended up in an MC Escher picture, as described by Jo Shannon from Rural Councils Victoria: “Four weeks later the NBN man arrived and did something to the external connection, and they were back to having no phone and no internet. The matter was again escalated to the Telstra regional manager. Telstra advised it was an NBN issue, and NBN advised it was a Telstra issue. The customer ended up calling Telstra to be told again it is an NBN issue.

“During that call, they put NBN on hold and called Telstra and connected them up so there was a three-way conversation between all the parties to resolve the issue. There was still finger pointing about who is responsible — which party has responsibility for getting this service operational. That call was earlier this week and it is still not resolved … This is a simple connection to an NBN system, but now there is no internet and no phone.”

* Alan Kohler is publisher of The Constant Investor