NBN frustration prompts community to take high-speed internet into their own hands

Updated

Residents from the New South Wales community of Wamboin are planning to dig their own trenches to secure faster internet, claiming the National Broadband Network is failing them.

Wamboin is just 20 kilometres away from Parliament House, but residents say they have to use the NBN's Sky Muster satellite service, which was designed to deliver internet to rural areas.

Local Jon Gough said the service was slow and unreliable.

"It tends to drop out when there's light rain or heavy rain and strong winds," he said.

"The speeds max out at 25 Mbps, and that's the maximum you can get to. The reality is it's more like between 15 and 20 Mbps — when it's working."

The satellite packages also cost a lot more than other NBN services, with a $200-per-month plan only delivering about 120GB of data.

"We believed NBN was going to provision services to most of the population at a reasonable rate and breach a digital divide," Mr Gough said.

"What's actually happening is the digital divide is widening because of the services."

Another Wamboin resident Glenn Archer said, in the era of content streaming services, satellite options were unusable.

"I think that's one of the things people don't understand much about the Sky Muster service — it has very limited downloads, and you're constrained in terms of data," he said.

"We're seeing this massive move to Netflix and Stan and these sorts of streaming services, and that's becoming the norm for how people consume media.

"For those on Sky Muster that's completely impractical."

Mr Archer said Wamboin residents were promised that the NBN would be a superior service to ADSL connections - but the reality was very different.

"It's way more expensive, it has a 10th of the data capacity we had with ADSL, so we're actually stepping backwards instead of going forwards," he said.

More than half the community back the idea

Mr Archer and Mr Gough are part of the Wamboin Communications Action Group, which has been looking for a solution to the community's internet woes.

The group is proposing hiring a commercial company to build a private fibre network for the 4,000 residents in Wamboin, and the nearby areas of Bywong and Sutton.

That would involve installing fibre cables to each home which would cost an estimated $4 million to set up — about $1,000 per person.

They have the backing of about 60 per cent of the community, but they need 80 per cent to get on board in order to finance the plan, which would give people unlimited data for $80 a month.

"All the figures we have in our modelling shows that over the five-year time period it's considerably cheaper than the satellite service," Mr Gough said.

In a statement, a spokesman for NBN Co said it had determined a satellite service was the best technology for Wamboin based on its location, how much it would cost and how long it would take to build.

The company said it offered individuals or businesses the option to pay more for a different service with its Technology Choice program.

But Mr Archer said that was not a viable solution.

"The fees charged by NBN to apply for that to be investigated and to obtain those services are completely outrageous," he said.

The Wamboin Communications Action Group said if they secured enough support, the first trenches to lay cable could be dug this year.

Topics: internet-technology, internet-culture, information-and-communication, computers-and-technology, federal-government, government-and-politics, wamboin-2620, canberra-2600, nsw, act

First posted