Everyone knows someone with an NBN Co horror story – missed appointments, technicians that show up late (or don’t know what their doing), or those that install NBN equipment in ridiculous locations.
All of that pales in significance alongside this one disturbing statistic from 2018-19 which has just come to light now, as reported by IT News.
In 2018-19, the National Broadband Network builder missed a staggering 127,746 appointments completely, which amounts to a total of some 350 appointments per day. There’s a bit of a breakdown of how these figures were reached, too.
In April 2019, the metric was split into two categories – those appointments missed entirely, and needing to be rescheduled for another day, and those able to be fulfilled the same day, but outside the scheduled window (e.g. technician arrived late).
This allowed NBN Co to report that it missed an average of 320 appointments per day between 1 July 2018 and 20 February 2019. However, that definition has been revised – presumably to more accurately measure the impact on consumers who are put out missing work etc. for missed appointments – and the figure jumps from 320 to 350.
Of course, not all cases are entirely the fault of NBN Co. – outright misses could occur due to weather, access, or other conditions which could not be reasonably foreseen.
Why do these huge figures matter? Well, NBN Co now has to rebate RSPs (and thus consumers) for missed appointments to the tune of some $75, up from the much smaller $25 figure previously.
With the NBN build rapidly approaching practical completion, there’s every incentive for NBN Co to show up to the appointments it makes, and equally, to minimise those that it can’t make. Perhaps better to under promise and over deliver here.
