MEDIA RELEASE - 160,000 MISSED NBN APPOINTMENTS IS SIMPLY NOT GOOD ENOUGH - 4 FEBRUARY 2019

04 February 2019

Senate scrutiny has revealed there were 157,268 missed NBN technician appointments in financial year 2017-2018.

Oddly, previous evidence submitted by NBNCo to the Senate indicated there were 80,000 missed appointments between July 2017 and March 2018.

It’s unclear how this figure surged to nearly 160,000 missed appointments in the space of just three months.

Australians are reasonable and do not expect perfection – but they expect better than this.

It is unacceptable that so many consumers and small business owners are losing hours out of their busy schedules, only to find technicians don’t show up.

It’s no wonder NBN dropped their Customer Experience Metric of the Morrison Government’s multi-technology mix from their latest Corporate Plan, after Senate Scrutiny revealed it had dropped from 7.2 to 6.5

Consumers deserve better. Labor calls on NBNCo to act urgently improve its processes and communication with end-users to reduce the number of missed appointments.

“If Mitch Fifield had been more focused on NBN consumers and less focused on installing Peter Dutton as Prime Minister, we would not have this situation,” Shadow Minister for Communications, Michelle Rowland said.

“A Shorten Labor Government will establish an NBN Service Guarantee to improve the incentives for NBN to improve fault rectification timeframes and reduce missed appointments.

“Less downtime, greater accountability and fewer missed appointments – that is what consumers deserve and what Labor wants to achieve.”