However, the telco has issued 42 extensions on those 46 notices, equal to 91 per cent. This means it has taken longer than first expected to repair damage. And with some extensions lasting months, customers with broken phone lines have been denied thousands of dollars of compensation. Ryde Joinery in Punchbowl has bad Telstra copper cables - the same cables the NBN plans to use. Credit:Wolter Peeters In one extreme example, a small business called Ryde Joinery, in the western Sydney suburb of Punchbowl, has been without a functioning telephone line since April. A separate internet connection provides patchy email and web connection, but 16 weeks without a reliable phone line has cost the business about $16,000 of work, owner Justin Patane estimates. Theoretically, Ryde Joinery should be entitled to nearly $4000 compensation under the Customer Service Guarantee, a program designed to compensate customers and motivate network owners to fix problems as quickly as possible. However, the business gets only $315 compensation because Mr Patane's provider, M2, reissued Telstra's notices about weather damaging the network. The notices exempt them from compensation, and also reveal it took 16 weeks to restore services to 80,000 services after thunderstorms hit Sydney in autumn.

A Telstra spokesman said the "initial natural events" were "followed by further weather events that added to the impact on the Telstra network necessitating the extensions of MSDs in many areas". Steve Ryan, head estimator at Ryde Joinery in Punchbowl. The business can claim only a 10th of the compensation it should get, because of mass service disruption notices. Credit:Wolter Peeters "There is no way to completely secure our network from water damage, particularly when flash flooding occurs. Similarly, aerial cables are susceptible to rain and strong winds just as power lines are," he added. Within Telstra, MSDs are not regarded as an indicator of the copper network's condition. But for the public they the only way to know how often weather-related outages occur and how long it takes to fix them. NBN Co technicians will have to remediate the copper network where it is needed for the FTTN upgrade. Credit:Rob Homer

But this is not just another story about a bad customer experience. What many people do not realise is that if NBN Co were to announce this week it was rolling out fibre-to-the-node [FTTN] internet in Punchbowl, it would become responsible for making sure Mr Patane's mud-soaked copper wires were good enough for a 50 megabit per second service. NBN Co's fibre-optic cables. Credit:Glenn Hunt "If it's an area designated to receive FTTN, and the copper in the street needs to be remediated and can be remediated, then we will remediate it," an NBN Co spokesman said. "If the copper cannot be remediated, then we will use one of the other technologies we have at our disposal to provide them with a service."

NBN Co becomes responsible for maintaining the copper lines between nodes and premises. Its latest corporate plan was full of warnings that degraded copper connections could delay the roll out and increase overall costs. "The quality of this [copper] network is not fully known as there has been limited opportunity to evaluate the physical infrastructure at significant scale," it states. NBN chief executive Bill Morrow also revealed Telstra did not release any information about the copper network until after the $11 billion deal was renegotiated. "If there is a case to where the copper is just in such poor condition that we can't offer the speeds that the government has made us commit to, then we won't use copper in that area. If it means pulling in fibre or fixed wireless towers, that's what we'll do," he said on August 24. Unlike the NBN started under Labor, which planned to replace the copper connections with end-to-end fibre at 93 per cent of premises, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has asked NBN Co to redesign the network to include the copper connection at millions of premises. About 4 million households and businesses would now get a boosted copper connection, while the remainder getting fibre, cable, satellite or fixed wireless.

NBN Co now plans to super-charge copper wires by rolling fibre to thousands of new cabinets (called nodes), which speed up services on the copper phone lines running between the cabinet and homes. The first FTTN connections are due to launch within a few weeks. Boosting copper rather than laying new fibre is cheaper and quicker to install. However, government-funded NBN Co must in coming years decide whether to keep fixing the copper or pay to replace it with newer technology - a question that has until now dogged the publicly listed Telstra. Meanwhile, Mr Patane's phone line was finally working properly on Friday. On Monday Telstra trucks and workmen were out the front of his business replacing the lines completely. Know more? Email us