Since Australia’s National Broadband Network has started ramping up its connection, the project has been plagued with complaints of underperformance, culminating in Telstra admitting thousands of its customers were entitled to refunds.
Today the national customer rights watchdog, the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission published a range of guidelines for advertisers, something I covered for Mumbrella.
What’s striking though – apart from the ACCC’s adding a new layer of complexity with ‘minimum typical busy period speeds’ is the regulator’s requirement for ISPs to state maximum evening speeds on the network, with the cheapest plans offering no guarantees of speeds at all.
There is no qualifying minimum speed for a plan labelled as ‘basic evening speed’ given there is no slower speed tier to which a consumer could move.
By the ACCC’s figures, a third of subscribers on the NBN to date are on the lowest speed plan with no guarantee of any speed at all.
The telephone system being replaced by the NBN at least guaranteed a dial tone and data speeds slightly better than an acoustic coupler, now a large proportion of Australians will not even get that.
Australians are spending at least $50 billion dollars on a project that will see a third of the nation going backwards, future generations are going to wonder how we managed this.