REGIONAL NBN NOTHING TO BRAG ABOUT

17 February 2017

Stephen Jones, Shadow Minister for Regional Communications has hit back at Sussan Ley MP for comments made about the quality of NBN in regional Australia.

Sussan Ley boasted in the Australian Parliament today about the quality of the Coalitions NBN rollout, and has blamed miscommunications between the NBN Co and retail service provides for complaints received about the speed of services in regional areas.

But Stephen Jones said retailers should not be blamed for the Coalitions decision to rollout a copper NBN broadband and that community complaints about speed and reliability should not be a surprise to Ms Ley.

The single biggest factor affecting broadband speed and reliability is the copper being used in the Coalitions Fibre to the Node broadband technology. Copper is out dated technology and prone to faults, said Mr Jones.

Government MPs are keen to blame everything else except for the major culprit copper because thats the factor that they alone are responsible for.

Mr Turnbulls copper NBN is a far cry from the fibre-optic NBN that Labor had originally planned for.

The Coalitions NBN is more expensive, less reliable, slower and worst of all likely to be near obsolete before the rollout is even done.

Last year complaints about the NBN to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) increased by almost 150 percent.

The vast majority of the postcodes that recorded complaints are in regional towns.

Despite what Ms Lay says, towns like Griffith, Albury, Gundagai and Young just to name a few are reporting that the NBN is a dud.