No one said building a fast, nation-wide broadband network would be easy. But imagine if the NBN skipped your house or business because it wasn’t easy enough? A report by the ABC’s Emily Laurence has revealed that if a property is “categorised as Service Class 0”, NBN Co will almost certainly give it a miss, even if you’re in a rollout area.
According to the ABC story, the NBN is currently prioritising volume over thoroughness, with the plan being to double-back at some point to fix up properties that were too difficult or time-consuming to connect the first time around:
“If we can do 100 homes in a day versus that same amount of resource doing three or four, we are going to wait on the three or four, get the hundred in and eventually come back after we have these big swathes of homes that are connected,” chief executive Bill Morrow told a recent Senate committee meeting.
These trickier installs would likely be those without any sort of phone line, or “Service Class 0” in telco nomenclature.
It’s all about “[getting] the volumes though”, says NBN CEO Bill Morrow, with the company preferring to connect more people faster, at the expense of more complicated outliers.
How long might you be waiting if the NBN gives you a miss? The news ain’t great:
The head of the NBN has confirmed Service Class 0 connections may have to wait years while mass rollouts are fast tracked.
Hope you brought something to read.
[ABC]
Comments
5 responses to “NBN Rollout Will Skip Difficult Connections, Could Take Years To Circle Back”
When I was working for an ISP the service class 0 is what NBN use for FTTH. So basically what they are saying is they will focus on FTTN (which is service class 10) before they look at finishing the FTTH rollout.
So pondering this logic for a moment, what happens when the area’s copper is switched off? If they are on service class 0, and no chance of getting NBN within the 18 months switchover period, then what? Phone line gets turned off? No ADSL? It’s not particularly good given that there is no timeframe to loop back.
Nice… Power to the people!
So Mr Morrow has openly declared he is more interested in his bonus that getting the job done right the first time.
So, the people that are most likely to need the NBN are the ones most likely to miss out?!? A reasonable commercial decision, but not a decision that is good for the economy or society as a whole. What a disaster, Malcolm!