A Senate hearing has been told that one in every seven NBN connections on the Central Coast had failed due to rotten copper wiring.
Senator for NSW, Ms Deborah O’Neill asked NBNCo CEO, Mr Bill Morrow whether he was aware that 14 per cent of residents in Gorokan had not been able to connect to the NBN due to the poor condition of copper wiring leading from the box in the street to their homes.
Mr Morrow said he was unaware of such a failure rate but admitted: “There is more propensity for failure on a copper network than fibre.” The NBN boss told a Senate Estimates hearing on communications in Canberra that he believed it was wrong to paint the copper network as bad and evil, because it’s not. Ms O’Neill said that despite Mr Morrow’s attempts to sell copper to the hearing, the people on the Central Coast were not buying it, especially informed businesses that have access to the original NBN Fibre to the home initiative.
Sen O’Neill sought a guarantee from Mr Morrow that the fibre-to-the-node network would deliver the people on the Coast 25 megabits per second download and 5mbps upload speeds. “You are not going to pin me down on something as silly as this on a committed information rate [bit speed], we wouldn’t do that anywhere, nobody does around the world, anywhere,” Mr Morrow said. In response Ms O’Neill said that however silly it may seem to Mr Morrow, families and businesses on the Coast did not think it was a silly request.
Ms O’Neill said her office had been inundated with complaints about the pace and quality of the roll-out to residences on the Coast and noted that while a business in the Gosford CBD had access to the fibre network another building five doors away had nothing. “Central Coast residents that are speaking to me are very concerned about having a digitally divided community where Gosford and regions around it have the real NBN and the rest of the Central Coast is a live experiment,” Ms O’Neill told the hearing.
Media release, Oct 20, 2015 Scott Coomber, Offi ce of Deborah O’Neill