NBN needs to treat end users better, says Senator Anne Urquhart

Last week, Jindera’s NBN tower went offline for planned upgrades, affecting hundreds of customers across the area. But while NBN Co said they had notified their “retail service providers”, it appeared nobody had passed the message on.

Jindera businessman Brad Hore said service providers were telling people to reset their modems until word got out that the tower was down. The NBN connections were online again within 48 hours, but Mr Hore said the “upgrade” was barely noticeable.

“It’s always the same: I call up, spend more than an hour on the phone, then they want to send out another technician to get the same answer as the last guy,” Mr Hore said. “It’s like they’re batting a ball back and forth while we’re stuck in the middle with a poor connection.”

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Senator Anne Urquhart argued with NBN Co boss Bill Morrow about customer service during an estimates hearing last week and said she was deeply concerned by the attitude to regular users.

“NBN say it's not their fault because the retail service provider is meant to be the contact for the customer and the government only seems to care about the number of connections made,” Senator Urquhart said. “Many people in rural and regional Australia are receiving poor customer service… why can’t they just broadcast a message via social media when there are outages?”

An NBN Co spokeswoman said information about performance and network outages was given to its customers, the service providers.

“The retail service provider, in turn, has the direct relationship with consumers (so) we notify them when issues may impact the experience of their customers,” she said.

“Having said that, NBN Co supports any initiative that promotes transparency or enhances the consumer experience and we are constantly looking at ways to improve how information is received by the public.

“We are working in collaboration with retail service providers to better educate consumers and business owners about how to get the best experience possible.”