Nearly half of the consumers who connected to the NBN during the last 12 months experienced dropouts while a little more than a quarter experienced service outages, according to data on the NBN consumer experience released by the Australian Communication and Media Authority on Thursday.
Twenty-seven percent reported no issue or fault, the survey found. Among all users, 33% reported slow data speeds in general while 36% reported slow speeds in the evening with varying frequency.
Thirty-four percent of households reported that they were left without either a phone connection or an Internet connection during the connection process. This data is represented in the chart below:
The ACMA said figures were based on data collected about households and small to medium-sized businesses before, during and after their move to the NBN.
{loadposition sam08}A total of 1811 NBN residential households were interviewed between 13 November and 20 December 2017 to collect the data which was then weighted to represent dwellings which were connected in the last 12 months.
During that period, the technologies used for migration were fibre to the premises, fibre to the node/building, HFC, fixed wireless and satellite.
Eighty-five percent of those survyed knew their monthly data allowance while 7%% were aware that there were different speed plans available. WHile 55% could recall the speed plan they had signed up to, the remainder were unaware.
Thirty-one percent of those who connected to the NBN during the last 12 months made a complaint to their existing or previous NBN supplier; of these complaints, 20% were resolved the same day, 15% took longer than a week and 49% were still unresolved.
Among those who encountered problems, 21% were "very satisfied" with the way they were resolved, while a further 39% were satisfied. Sixteen percent were neutral, 14% were dissatisfied and 10% were extremely dissatisfied.
Those who were dissatisfied offered more than one reason each for their lack of satisfaction: 58% said it was because it took too long to fix the problem or to take action; 48% cited poor communication or a lack thereof; 39% said nobody offered to take responsibility for fixing the problem, and 32% said they were unhappy because the problem was ongoing or kept recurring.
During the connection process, households often found it necessary to contact either their retail service provider or the NBN Co for various reasons: 42% contacted their RSP and 12% contacted NBN Co.
The full numbers who did so and their reasons for doing so are given in the chart below:
Graphics: courtesy ACMA