Joint with Shadow Minister for Regional Communications, Stephen Jones MP.

The ACCC has today singled Fibre to the Node as a key source of underperformance on the NBN, with as many as one in four customers on the FTTN copper network in 50/100 Mbps speed tiers not currently getting the speed they have signed up for.

In a press release the ACCC stated:

“Some consumers continue to experience underperforming services that never achieve close to their maximum advertised plan speed. This situation impacted 13 per cent of volunteers in the MBA program, including one in four fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) services on plans with a maximum speed of 50 and 100 Mbps.
 
These underperforming services continued to significantly impact the overall download speed results. In addition, this latest report finds that these services have a relatively higher latency, meaning the users may have a less reliable experience for uses like video calls and online gaming, even where there are adequate speeds to support such applications.”
 
According to the December ACCC market indicators report, 58 per cent of FTTN households were taking up 50 or 100 Mbps plans. This indicates there were currently 374,000 underperforming Fibre to the Node services in those speed tiers alone, as of 31 March 2019.
 
Worse still, the majority of FTTN services are concentrated in regional and rural electorates which have been utterly neglected by Coalition NBN policy.
 
Scott Morrison needs to explain why hundreds of thousands of consumers on the Liberals’ copper NBN, the majority of whom are in the regions, are paying for underperforming speeds.
 
Only Labor has a credible plan to steadily improve speed and reliability for up to 750,000 Australian households and business connected to Fibre to the Node.
 
We need real change – because more of the same isn’t good enough.
 
If you want better NBN, not more chaos – vote Labor.