Jack the insider: I’m a satisfied NBN customer but...

I know it’s not popular to admit this but I am a relatively satisfied NBN customer, writes Jack the insider. Picture: Supplied

I know it’s not popular to admit this but I am a relatively satisfied NBN customer.

My shiny new NBN was perfect for around three months and my router proudly beamed without fail for three months. That’s when the drop-outs started. The net and VOIP delivered fixed line phone services would unexpectedly stop. More often than not it was for a couple of minutes, sometimes for a couple of hours although to be fair this was rare. The drop-outs were occurring a dozen times a day or more.

Then the blame game commenced. Telstra advised the dropouts were due to errors made by NBN in installation. NBN said it was Telstra. Technicians of both persuasions were dispatched to my home, to the node and God knows where else but still the drop-outs occurred.

While Telstra didn’t let on, the drop-outs almost certainly were down to it, purchasing bandwidth inadequate for its customers. Just as easily I could lay the blame at NBN’s wholesale pricing model which it says it is fixing.

After several gruelling hours on the telephone the problems were solved. Telstra initially billed me for the technician call out fees but after some abrupt instruction from me, apologies were issued and the charges withdrawn. Ultimately two month’s worth of broadband was credited from my account to boot.

I always say it pays to make a bit of noise in these situations. Speak loudly and firmly over the top of people and don’t take any guff, that’s my advice.

Some weeks later, I received a text message saying I owed north of a couple of hundred dollars and asking me to pay it post haste to avoid disruption to my services. I checked my account but no such sum was payable so I ignored it.

A week or so later I received a call from Telstra credit management urging me to make the payment immediately and asking for my credit card details. I checked my account again but could find no sign of it. What was this all about?

The call ended abruptly with my insistence that I hear from her head of department by close of business.

After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, it turned out the sum related to a technician’s call out charge during the drop out phase. It had not been billed to my account but a new business account in my name with my mobile phone number as the only other contact detail had been generated by Telstra and that was the source of all the fuss.

“How long has Telstra been creating accounts without the knowledge or consent of its customers,” I asked the supervisor. This was met with a flurry of discombobulation and rather obvious attempts at distraction.

“It’s a fairly decent question under the circumstances,” I said.

“It would seem to be an error and I am looking into it for you,” the supervisor replied.

“It’s fraud.”

More obfuscation and more promises that the amount outstanding well, not outstanding but the sum in question, no, not in question but the figure that was the subject of my complaint of which was acknowledged and fully accepted as something the supervisor was duly charged to look into, would be credited within hours.

I was assured the person responsible for this regrettable error would be hunted down and frog marched off to the dreaded counselling room. Let us never speak of it again, I was told.

I requested an email from the supervisor detailing our conversation and the steps Telstra had taken in establishing the erroneous account. Unsurprisingly it never arrived and I couldn’t be bothered chasing it up. I had a lot of fun exposing a pretty shonky practice and that was good enough.

Since then, no problems. A quick speed test this morning shows I’m getting just under 25 mbps down and four mbps up.

So there you go. With one or two caveats, I am a satisfied NBN customer. I could get faster speeds but at this stage there seems to be little point.

The trouble is that under the current NBN fibre-to-the-node, copper-from-node-to-the-premise network, 70 Mbps is about as fast as it’s ever going to get.

There is little or no future proofing with the NBN model. It is a network essentially built for and available technologies in 2017 and in the speed telecommunications technology is developing that pretty much means last year.

Those who watched the Four Corners would have seen the comparisons made between Australia’s NBN network and that found in New Zealand’s fibre-to-the-premise network which under the Okla speed test familiar to all who have had internet speed issues over the journey, showed was delivering mouth watering speeds around 1000 Mbps.

Look, I get it. Squash New Zealand into a ball and you can fit most of it into Tasmania. That makes the construction phase cheaper. Anyone who has browsed an atlas in the last two hundred years understands this.

All that aside, in terms of telecommunications’ policy New Zealand is planning for the future while we in Australia have planned for the recent past.

Let’s be honest about this, when it comes to new media, film and television production, gaming, software development and data storage -- precisely the sorts of industries Malcolm Turnbull urges us not only to excel at but also get excited about, New Zealand is going to take us to the cleaners.

Will the NBN be a political issue at the next election? Clearly for those who have faced ongoing disruptions and outrageous difficulties in having even their fixed line telephones put in working order, it will be. It’s difficult to imagine how they would be blaming anyone else but the current government and the Grand Archduke of the NBN, Malcolm Turnbull. With a one seat majority it’s probably enough to punt the Coalition from power but the PM and his minister, Mitch Fifield have and will point to Labor’s NBN roll out and what a disaster that had become.

As an election issue, the NBN will be thereabouts but of the second tier type.

The telecommunications policy should be a primary voting determinant. In the second decade of the 21st Century it defines the sort of future we can expect. It can lead to future prosperity as it almost certainly will in New Zealand or or put us in the category as Lee Kwan bleakly put it, of “the poor, white trash of Asia”.

In other words, if you build it they will come and if you don’t, welcome to economic turmoil with employment opportunities in the hospitality industry and golf caddying.