NBN stuck in slow lane: Online rage erupts over connection speeds

Online rage erupts as users of the $40bn-plus NBN receive speeds as low as 1/500th of what they are paying for.

Daryl Collins and his wife Jayne, from Winchester in Victoria, havean NBN tower nearby and within range but the couple say NBN is forcing them on to NBN Skymuster satellites, which is at least $260 a month. Picture: Aaron Francis

Users of the $40 billion-plus ­National Broadband Network are receiving peak-time connection speeds as low as 1/500th of the ­service they are paying for, sparking complaints the nation’s biggest infrastructure project is failing to deliver the promised digital transformation.

Government entity NBN Co, which provides wholesale internet services, and retailers such as Telstra and Optus, who sell those services to the public, each blame the other for the problems.

NBN Co says many retailers — there are more than 140 selling NBN hook-ups to the public — fail to buy enough bandwidth to provide the speeds they advertise.

Many retailers argue they are being held back by NBN’s infrastructure, particularly the federal government’s preference for less expensive fibre to the node — which uses existing copper wire systems for the last leg of the connection to the home — as opposed to fibre to the home, which ­involves high-speed optical cable all the way. The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission is examining the issue.

An investigation by The Australian has found users across the nation are fighting slow speeds.

Perth-based software designer James Ioppolo finds the arguing between the NBN and the retailers is of little help.

He moved to the inner-Perth suburb of Victoria Park because it offered fibre-to-the-home connections and bought Telstra’s top NBN package — $95 a month — which spruiks download speeds of 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 40Mbs.

However, speed tests obtained by The Australian show his download speeds during peak periods, such as weekday evenings, are as low as 0.2Mbs while his upload speeds are about 20Mbs.

“Due to (bandwidth) congestion, I assume, the download speed goes down to 0.2Mbs during peak periods, which is 1/500th of the speed that I pay for,” Mr Ioppolio said.

“As a software developer, the faster I can access the internet the faster I can do my work. It’s just madness.”

Craig Kettle, who runs a small technology business at Lisarow on the NSW central coast, which ­includes setting up internet connections for clients, said the speeds he and his clients were achieving were a fraction of those advertised by Telstra. “I should be getting 100Mbs downloads and 40Mbs uploads but I’m getting 22Mbs downloads and 6.5Mbs uploads constantly,” he said.

Mr Kettle said despite having bought a package of 100Mbs download/40Mbs upload from Telstra, the telco had told him the speeds he was experiencing were the fastest he could ever hope for because his connection was fibre to the node, and so relied on old copper wiring from his home to the local “node” distribution point.

“Telstra has said with fibre to the node, and the distance of my home to the exchange, this is the fastest I am ever going to get.”

Mr Kettle’s client, next-door neighbour Sherry Denton, bought Telstra’s top NBN package for $95 a month but receives download speeds of about 24Mbs. However, the repeated dropouts have been the biggest concern.

“We’ve had it drop out for 11 to 12 days with no internet at all, then Telstra will fob us off to NBN; it’s been difficult,” Ms Denton said.

Another client, Vicki Oven of North Wyong, also on Telstra’s top NBN package, receives download speeds as low as 2.85Mbs and upload speeds of 3.23Mbs.

“It drops out all the time and it drives you nuts. Other times, there’s not even enough speed to download a movie,” Ms Oven said.

Her husband Neil, who owns a Ford dealership, is unable to view from home the dealership’s security camera footage.

Telstra spokesman Steve Carey said NBN speeds were ­determined by factors including network capacity, the underlying network technology, the type of devices customers used and the type of content they accessed.

“Generally, we monitor the performance of Telstra services on the NBN closely to ensure network speeds meet expectations and customers receive a reliably fast connection into their premise, and as the NBN rollout scales up we are proactively adding capacity where required,” Mr Carey said.

The NBN and the ACCC have said a significant driver of consumer dissatisfaction is retailers selling packages spruiking “up to” speeds, which in many cases are either never obtainable or are unattainable during peak times. NBN Co has called for retailers instead to publicise average speeds.

Telstra chief executive Andrew Penn has said next month the telco will begin publishing data on the performance of its NBN services.

In addition, he said, “from mid-year we will introduce technology that gives customers a ­realistic estimate of the network speeds at their specific premises before they take up a service ”.

Challenges remain in fast- growing regions.

Lawrence Drayton, a customer service representative for a mobile telecommunications company, said when he moved into his new apartment in Asquith on Sydney’s upper north shore, his Telstra NBN 100Mbs package was “absolutely perfect”. “I couldn’t fault it, but I was one of the first 20 per cent of people to move into the building,” Mr Drayton said.

“We’ve had many apartment buildings also go up in the area recently. Sometimes you can’t even download a YouTube video, and the download speed has got down to 0.5Mbs instead of 100Mbs.”

NBN spokeswoman Philippa Perry said it was “important for consumers to understand speeds experienced over the NBN” were determined by a range of factors including technology used to ­deliver the network. Some factors were outside NBN control, including the quality of equipment such as modems, software, broadband plans, signal reception and “how retail service providers design their part of the network” — how much capacity or bandwidth they buy from the NBN, she said.

For someNBNusers, such as returned serviceman Peter Greenbury, the problem is getting connected at all.

Mr Greenbury, of Rochedale South in Brisbane, said his 50Mbs- download Optus NBN package had dropped out repeatedly since being installed two months ago.

The crashes have left him without a home phone, which was difficult because he suffers post- traumatic stress disorder and needs to be able to contact people when he has attacks.

He said he had been forced to buy a prepaid mobile phone to make calls to attempt to fix his service. “Every time, I have to go through the rigmarole of ringing downtown Mumbai for two hours on the mobile phone,” he said.

Self-described “corporate refugees” from Sydney, Daryl Collins and his wife Jayne, who now live near Winchelsea, west of Geelong in Victoria, say slow internet speeds are weighing on their business. They run a high-end boarding house for cats and say they cannot meet demand to provide live-streaming of the pets, a service many owners now seek.

Mr Collins said despite being within 5km of a new NBN tower, which he could see from his house, NBN Co was forcing him to access the NBN via its Sky Muster satellites which, at hundreds of dollars a month, was much more expensive. He said he would be unable to access the new tower because NBN Co was installing a “180-­degree transmitter” which did not point in the direction of his home.