Undertaking to ACCC.
NBN Co has announced it will rebate retailers for poor connections, fault rectifications and missed appointments, as part of an undertaking to Australia’s consumer watchdog, the ACCC. NBN Co will also commence public reporting on rates of congestion on the fixed wireless network.
The ACCC and the NBN have jointly worked towards this undertaking, following the announcement of the Wholesale Service Standards inquiry in November 2017.
Minister for Communications Mitch Fifield said the announcement is a win for customers on the NBN and follows extensive work by the government to increase consumer protections and enhance user experience.
As a result of measures introduced by the government and NBN Co, congestion across the fixed line network has plummeted from an average of around five hours a week in July 2017 to 28 minutes a week. Also, 94% of homes and businesses are being connected within NBN Co timeframes and 93% of homes and businesses now have their equipment installed correctly the first time.
New NBN business facility
NBN Co has launched a new business operations centre in Melbourne’s Docklands intended to improve service offerings. The centre will be the single point of contact for phone and internet providers to support businesses connecting to the NBN access network and case manage service incidents to restore faults more quickly.
NBN Co chief customer officer for business, Paul Tyler said by working directly with phone and internet providers, identifying ‘pain points’ and opportunities in the end-to-end processes will help refine the customer experience.” Our new business service offering aims to reduce the need for multiple site visits and improve the restoration times for mission-critical services such as broadband, phone lines and EFTPOS machines in the event that there is a fault on the network,” he said.
“In the last year, we improved our ability to work with internet providers to restore faults on the network within our agreed time frames by 30% and also increased our ability to install NBN equipment in our control right the first time from 85% to consistently more than 90% of the time. We know there is more work to be done and believe today’s announcements will help us work with the industry to make further improvements,” he said.
Council of Small Business Organisations Australia CEO, Peter Strong acknowledged that small business owners are time poor and often require higher levels of assistance. “We will continue to work with NBN Co to ensure businesses are adequately supported during their transition to the NBN access network,” he said.