SARAH FERGUSON: WELCOME TO FOUR CORNERS.

When it was first announced a decade ago the National Broadband Network promised to "jump Australia into the 21st century".

Our biggest-ever infrastructure project was likened to building the 19th century's national railway - a critical piece of nation-building to secure Australia's long-term economic future.

But half-way through the NBN rollout, a growing number of consumers are bitterly frustrated by their experience of getting connected to the network and by the service it delivers.

Complaints to the telecommunications ombudsman about the NBN have risen dramatically.

There are also serious concerns that by the time it's completed in 2020, much of the technology will already need upgrading ... while the NBN's detractors say that Australia will be a decade behind our near neighbour, New Zealand... where Geoff Thompson begins his report.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Near the bottom of the world the historic city of Dunedin on New Zealand's South Island, is kicking some unexpected goals.

The 130,000 people who live here have access to internet speeds most Australians can only dream of.

Tonight, there's a more familiar trans-Tasman clash - as Dunedin hosts the deciding game of the Bledisloe Cup.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Who do you think's going to win tonight?

VOX POP 1: All Blacks, why do you think the All Blacks will win? Just because I am a Kiwi and they're better than Australia.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Is Australia going to win tonight?

VOX POP 2: Of course, they are, it's half-time, we're up.

Oh yeah, we've been there before.

We're going to call it off now.

Of course we're going to win...

GEOFF THOMPSON: Sadly, rugby fans have gotten used to watching Australia snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - particularly when up against New Zealand.

VOX POP 3: It's always good beating Australia - look they're lovely people - but we're better.

GEOFF THOMSON: As usual the Kiwis have played their rugby with a unified determination to get the result they want and it's that sort of single-minded focus which is also driving the rollout of NZ's broadband network.

And it means New Zealand's beating Australia in the race to get world-class internet speeds too.

GEOFF THOMPSON: You live here, do you use the ultra-fast broadband.

VOX POP 4: Oh yeah - oh it's way faster than Australia, about ten times the speed, yeah.

VOX POP 5: Oh! Australia's buggered when it comes to broadband - the NBN network, forget it - here's much better, faster, everything.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Do you think it gives NZ an advantage competitively in the world?

VOX POP 5: Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely it does.

GEOFF THOMPSON: In Dunedin - and across New Zealand - the rollout of optical fibre directly to the vast majority of homes and businesses is well under way.

Fibre to the premises as it is known - is globally acknowledged as the gold-standard of fast and reliable internet.

MARTIN SHARROCK, HEAD OF NETWORK TECHNOLOGY, CHORUS: We're going to see 85% of New Zealanders getting fibre to their home, one gigabit per second to every home in New Zealand.

We're giving New Zealanders choice, obviously they can take 100 megabits per second, or 200, or they can take a gig.

A one gigabit per second will be available to every house that connects to fibre.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Martin Sharrock is the Head of Networks at Chorus - the private telecommunications company working with New Zealand's government to build a world-class broadband network.

MARTIN SHARROCK: We travelled around the world to try and understand what other countries have done.

Countries like Japan, Singapore, South Korea, have been doing fibre to the home for many, many years.

Even in the US in pockets they've been doing fibre to the home.

We learned from them and we've caught up pretty quickly.

I think more countries will be starting to catch up with New Zealand over the next decade.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Dunedin won a nationwide competition to be New Zealand's first Gigatown -- giving people here who want it - early access to gigabit internet speeds - that's 1000 megabits per second.

That enables huge amounts of data to be moved across the internet faster than you could save it to a memory stick.

DAVE CULL, DUNEDIN MAYOR: It's given us a bit of a lead, I mean ultimately all communities are going to have ultrafast broadband at some point but it's given us a lead and it's enabled us to attract some IT businesses to this city that perhaps might not have looked at the place.

GEOFF THOMPSON: In downtown Dunedin there's free ultra-fast broadband available to everybody via Wifi - and it's really good, but the casual visitor to this city would not otherwise notice that this is a place on the cutting edge of fast broadband technology.

But hidden behind the doors and windows here are people and businesses taking full advantage of it.

Dean Hall started his video-game studio Rocketwerkz with some of the 10 million dollars he made developing his first super-successful game.

That was DayZ - a zombie-killing survival game Dean started developing while in the New Zealand military.

DEAN HALL, GAME DEVELOPER: Multiple times a day we're able to sync the entire company, the work of 40 people, terabits of work, constantly.

We're getting really high downloads as well as basically averaging 400 to 800 upload as well.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Dunedin's fibre-connected homes help Rocketwerkz attract talent from around the world.

DEAN HALL: We actually find that it's a huge recruitment bonus, people having fibre in their homes.



They come over and visit us from America, and we've had a few Australians return over from Europe, and work here, from big huge studios making the biggest games, they're loving the fact that they can get fibre cheaply and at their home.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Dean Hall can't believe Australia's new NBN is connecting millions of people with old technology like copper wire.

DEAN HALL: I get a shudder when I think about it.

I think it's gone from the point of being a competitive advantage to use fibre, to just being a basic requirement.

I think it would be a tremendously scary situation if I was in Australia, to be in that situation.

There's just so many other things to worry about.

You don't want to be worrying about your lack of fibre network.

I couldn't imagine building a new place and not having fibre into every home.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Back across the ditch the digital divide is stark.

Australian video game developers Joel Styles and Cheryl Vance can only imagine having the internet their competitors in New Zealand have come to expect.

Their new game was made here in their suburban Brisbane home.

"Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles" - is a fantasy adventure game for kids which just won a prestigious international prize.

CHERYL VANCE, GAME DEVELOPER: There are some people who can run businesses with small amounts of data, but for anybody that's future proofing, they need the dat- You know, they need to be pushing that data through very quickly and we're already at our maximum right now.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Cheryl and Joel are on the NBN.

The NBN has laid optical fibre to this green box - called a node - down the street from their home.

Here the fibre connects to old copper phone wire which runs into their house underground.

Known as "fibre to the node", this is the way the NBN is connecting the largest number of Australian homes and businesses.

JOEL STYLES, GAME DEVELOPER: So, we pay for a premium business account.

It's highly variable on a day to day basis, though.

GEOFF THOMPSON: The longer the length of copper running to a house the slower the internet speeds.

Cheryl and Joel pay $130 a month to get up to 100 megabits per second download, and an upload speed of 40 megabits per second.

A quick online check of their internet speeds shows that like many Australians, they rarely get what they're paying for.

GEOFF THOMPSON: You've been to New Zealand recently.

When you see gaming companies over there, and what they're working with, how does that make you feel?

CHERYL VANCE: (laughs) Sorry.

GEOFF THOMPSON: No, it's alright.

CHERYL VANCE: I think I laughed because that's probably the answer, really.

It's, it's enviable, really, it truly is.

It would be nice to take one more pressure, one more, um ... One more risk off the company and be able to just get on with it and know that that's, like I said, one less thing that we have to worry about.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Cheryl and Joel's business partner Jon Cartwright is here to get a copy of the game to take overseas.

They reckon it's faster for him to pick up a copy and drive it across the city than it is to send over the NBN ... so they put it the test.

The NBN upload takes almost an hour.

JON CARTWRIGHT, BUSINESS PARTNER: Hey Joel, 35 minutes door to door, how you doing with the upload ... right thanks ... yeah, we beat it.

GEOFF THOMPSON: To understand why, we need to go back to 2009 when Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd stunned the nation by committing to build a broadband network connecting 90 per cent of Australians with fibre to the premises.

NBN ANNOUNCEMENT, 7 April, 2009. PM Kevin Rudd: "Like the building of Snowy Hydro, like the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge this is an historic act of nation building.'

GEOFF THOMPSON: The government enterprise would cost around $43 billion dollars and was required to make a commercial return so it would be ready to be sold 5 years after the completion date of 2018.

It promised to catapult Australia to the front of the global broadband race.

NBN ANNOUNCEMENT: 7 April, 2009. Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy: Investing in fibre to the premises broadband puts Australia among the world leaders, such as Japan, Singapore, New Zealand, Korea and Malaysia, all driving the rollout of fibre-based high-speed services.

It will provide a platform for innovative, health and education applications, and connect our regional areas to the digital economy.

GEOFF THOMPSON: A year later the NBN plan helped deliver Julia Gillard government.

INDEPENDENT MP TONY WINDSOR, 7 Sept 2010: "You do it once, you do it right, and you do it fibre."



GEOFF THOMPSON: The project - led by a former international telco chief Mike Quigley, immediately became the target of sustained political attack.

MALCOLM TURNBULL, SHADOW MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS, 14th Sept 2010: They've provided no evidence, no financial analysis, no business case to persuade any of us, convince any of us that this will be anything more than a massive destruction of taxpayer's money.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Prioritising regional areas in the roll out stretched NBNco's resources as far-flung places had low demand and few economies of scale.

As costs increased, pressure mounted...

NEWSREADER, LIBRARY FOOTAGE, 8 August 2012: Capital costs are up 1.4 billion dollars to $37.4 billion.

Operating costs for the next 9 years are forecast to rise $3.2 billion dollars to 26.4 billion.

MALCOLM TURNBULL, 8 August 2012: This is an admission of colossal failure.

The NBN is falling behind every single benchmark the government has set for it.

MIKE QUIGLEY, FORMER CEO NBN: As we know, Mr Turnbull is very intelligent, and a very energetic individual, so he made sure that there wasn't an opportunity that went past, to criticise the company.

And he did it unrelentingly.



GEOFF THOMPSON: There were delays - tense negotiations with Telstra over access to its infrastructure took 9 months.

Malcolm Turnbull claimed the cost of Labor's NBN would blow out dramatically.

MALCOLM TURNBULL, 8 August 2013: We estimate that to complete the NBN according to the Labor Party's plans will cost $94 billion dollars.

GEOFF THOMPSON: As a federal election loomed, the Coalition under Tony Abbott released its own NBN plan.

COALITION NBN POLICY LAUNCH, 9th April 2013.

Tony Abbott, Leader of Opposition: We will deliver a better National Broadband Network, faster and more affordably than this government possibly can.



MITCH FIFIELD, MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS: Our predecessors effectively had, I guess, what I'd call a theological vision for the NBN.

They had fantasy targets. We wanted to be realistic.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Under the Coalition's plan around one fifth of homes and businesses get fibre to the premises, with the majority connected through existing technologies like copper phone wires and pay-tv cables.

It was meant to cost less than $30 billion and be done by 2016.

COALITION NBN POLICY LAUNCH, 9th April 2013:

MALCOLM TURNBULL: "We will be taking fibre out into the field but not all the way into the customer's premise.

That saves about three-quarters, at least, of the cost.

Now, what this will deliver is speeds that are more than capable of delivering all of the services and applications households need, because that's really the issue.

It's not a question of your headline speed, it's a question of what you can do with it.

GEOFF THOMPSON: But after winning Government the Coalition's promise couldn't be kept with the cost of its plan also blowing out - to about 50 billion dollars and taking until 2020.

MIKE QUIGLEY: The fundamental assumptions on which that decision was made in 2013 have absolutely proven to be wrong.

It isn't 29.5 billion, it's now 49 to 56 and it isn't the end of 2016, it's the end of 2020, if it gets finished by then.

So, the cheaper, faster, better were wrong on every count.

GEOFF THOMPSON: It's still a good deal says the government.

MITCH FIFIELD: The NBN network will be one that's fit for purpose.

Our objective as a government is to see the NBN rolled out as soon as possible and at the least cost.

Through what's done as the multi-technology mixed approach that we're taking.

I think it's important to recognise that the guts of the NBN is fibre.

The NBN is a fibre based network.

We are for the last component in the street, in some cases using copper, we are for the last component in the street in some cases using the existing HFC pay TV cable.

The reason we're doing that is because that really speeds up the rollout of the NBN, it really reduces the costs of the rollout of the NBN, so the guts of this is fibre and Australians will get fast speeds.

GEOFF THOMPSON: The legacy of the policy change can be seen in communities across Australia.

Dubbo in Western NSW is a city divided.

MATHEW DICKERSON, FORMER DUBBO MAYOR: On the left-hand side as we're driving down this street, those houses can have access to fibre to the node.

On right hand side, they're fibre to the premise, so this is the digital divide in Dubbo that we're driving along.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Mathew Dickerson runs a telecommunications business in Dubbo.

He was the city's independent mayor when the planned roll-out of fibre to the premises suddenly stopped.

MATHEW DICKERSON, FORMER DUBBO MAYOR: This entire area was meant to be all Fibre to the Premise as all of Dubbo was actually announced as Fibre to the Premise but then there was a change made and the seven areas that Dubbo was broken up into, rather than all 7 being fibre to the premise, three of those were decided to be fibre to the node.

Of course, the people on the left-hand side would prefer to have fibre to the premise, it's a more reliable connection, it's a faster connection and certainly the experience of people using fibre to the premise is much better.

But they don't have a choice - if you're on that side of the street fibre to the node - if you're on the right-hand side, happy days - fibre to the premise.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Real estate agent Richard Tegart confirms that buyers are already making decisions about where to live based on the type of connection they can get to the NBN.

RICHARD TEGART, DUBBO REAL ESTATE AGENT: It's now a circumstance where people will come to an open home, they'll have a look around the home and the other services, what's the heating, what's the cooling, is the gas connected etc, a very common question now is, is NBN connected and the next question they ask: is it connected 'fibre to the premises' or is it 'fibre to the node'.

It's interesting that most consumers or home buyers are certainly aware of what they want with internet connections.

GEOFF THOMPSON: David Hayward and his family moved in to this house believing it was getting Fibre to the Premises.

KYAL HAYWARD: Yeah to the premise.

A lot more consistent, and speed wise it's so much better.

It means as a family whenever we're streaming stuff, and I'm playing games and doing all sorts of stuff it just makes it so much better.

GEOFF THOMPSON: But the Hayward's house ended up getting fibre to the node.

Even though they pay the top price for the top speed, they find it impossible to get it.

KYAL HAYWARD: So, as you can see, um, we've got, um, 46 megabits per second down, and, um, 14, um, up, which is, we're paying for 100 and, you know, 100 down and 40 up, so it's, it's only about half, if a little bit less than that.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Fibre to the node physically cannot deliver some of the speeds that people are paying for.

The NBN told a Senate inquiry 67.7 megabits per second is the top average download speed on Fibre to the Node.

The NBN and service providers know the speeds each individual premises can get, but their customers mostly aren't told.

After 4 Corners contacted Telstra, the Haywards were told that 46 megabits per second is the best download speed they could ever get - less than half what they've been paying for - for 15 months.

GEOFF THOMPSON: So, you're just not getting what you're paying for?

KYAL HAYWARD: No, definitely not.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Do you feel like you're being ripped off?

KYAL HAYWARD: Yeah, definitely.

Definitely feel like we're being ripped off.

GEOFF THOMPSON: The NBN boss says if people want a faster connection they can pay for it themselves.

BILL MORROW, CEO NBN: If a home owner really feels it's important to have these higher speed capabilities going into their house, we have something called Tech Choice Programme to where they can pay the incremental costs to bring fibre all the way up inside the home, and that's been a programme that's been in place now for a few years.

GEOFF THOMPSON: That can be thousands of dollars.

Sometimes tens of thousands of dollars.

BILL MORROW: That's right, yes, but if it's that important for the consumer, about them paying for that, rather than passing the load on to every other user, that's the concept behind it.

GEOFF THOMPSON: But their neighbour might have got it for free.

BILL MORROW: They may have, and the neighbour should consider themselves fortunate that they got in at that particular time, and this is just the way it works.

Some motorways are closer access to your home than others, and it's no different when it comes to the broadband network that's being built across Australia.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Data consumption in Australia is exploding - almost doubling in the last two years.

What most users want from their internet is speed, reliability, and capacity ... at a reasonable price.

The NBN gets criticised for being slow and unpredictable - especially at peak hour in the evenings.

One of the key reasons for this is because the retail service providers you sign up with to get on the NBN often don't buy enough capacity - known as bandwidth - to give customers the speeds they're paying for.

BILL MORROW: A retailer today can offer a congestion free network.

They just have to provision enough bandwidth from NBN to be able to get it, so it changes the retailer's economics, but they can offer it.

Our network, again, is not what's slowing people down.

With a few exceptions.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Service providers say the NBN's charging too much.

PHIL BRITT, MD AUSSIE BROADBAND: Ultimately, people aren't getting what they're paying for because service providers aren't provisioning enough bandwidth into the NBN network.

Those providers generally aren't doing that because they need to keep cost at a particular price point, and NBN's bandwidth is extremely expensive by bandwidth comparisons elsewhere in the world.

PAUL BUDDE, COMMUNICATIONS CONSULTANT: People have a budget, people want to spend 50 dollars or 70 dollars or whatever on their broadband connection.

They're not going to pay 200 dollars for a broadband connection.

Yes, you can say you can have a higher speed network, but if that's going to cost $150 or $200, then the majority of Australian people can't afford that.

GEOFF THOMPSON: In New Zealand, the country's smaller size and population make the rollout easier.

Because Chorus inherited the old phone infrastructure the company's costs are also lower.

Service providers aren't charged for bandwidth and that means the speeds customers pay for is pretty much the speeds they get.

MARTIN SHARROCK, HEAD OF NETWORKS, CHORUS: Chorus has a very, very clear policy that any data that comes into our network will be, one, unlimited, and number two completely congestion free.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Chorus in New Zealand guarantees a congestion free network.

Why can't Australia?

BILL MORROW: Well, because they're doing so with a type of fibre that they've built, and their economics are fundamentally different than what we have in Australia.

Again, you think about the fact that Chorus was a company that had its own ducts, and its own offices and exchanges, that they really didn't have to pay anything for, because they've been cost recovered over many of decades in the past.

NBN on the other hand, has to pay Telstra for the use of these ducts and facilities that aren't ours, and so, that drives up the cost of us building this network out to every home, and hence, the region we don't have the luxuries that some other country, or like New Zealand, in the case of Chorus has.

GEOFF THOMPSON: So far 35 percent of New Zealanders have chosen full fibre connections once they become available and 90 percent of them are choosing speeds of 100 mbps or more.

MARTIN SHARROCK: We're really happy with the direction that New Zealand has taken.

We built a really, really good fibre to the node network, it's VDSL, it's getting some fantastic speeds.

We've now built a fibre to the home network and making sure that people can migrate from one to the other over time.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Ian Taylor runs a sports animation business in Dunedin.

He believes fibre is transformative.

IAN TAYLOR, CEO ANIMATION RESEARCH: It changes the way you think about things.

It opens the horizons.

You always expect from here to be connected to the world, to each other, to opportunities, and it's the norm.

And I think it actually goes to the thinking of a country.

GEOFF THOMPSON: The NBN is under pressure to complete the roll out by 2020 - with an obligation to give everybody minimum download speeds of 25 megabits per second.

Technology choices at each site are being driven by what's quickest and cheapest.

GEOFF THOMPSON: NBN spokesman Tony Brown took us to Redland Bay south-east of Brisbane to explain how much time and money can be saved by connecting hundreds of homes to just one node.

TONY BROWN, CORPORATE MEDIA, NBN: So rather than a fibre to the premises connection, where we'd have to go into this estate, go down every single driveway, possibly dig up the driveway to deliver a fibre connection into the premise, on this technology here through connecting fibre into copper at the pillar at the end of the street there, every single premise from this cabinet can be served immediately, so that's nearly 400 premises can be served instantaneously once the cabinet is powered and turned on - that makes this a much more cost effective and time efficient way of serving people broadband.

GEOFF THOMPSON: When the rollout peaks next year, 70,000 homes will be connected to the NBN every week.

TONY BROWN: Of course, if we had unlimited time and money we'd give everybody fibre, but we don't so the best thing to do to get people connected quickly to the NBN is to put these cabinets in place, get the power, plug the fibre into the copper and people are connected very, very quickly.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Hundreds of thousands of people around Australia aren't even getting connected because their premises are classed as "unserviceable".

Sydney software developer David Banham has been waiting months for the NBN since signing up in May.

DAVID BANHAM, RESIDENT: This has been my experience of the NBN so far.

This should be a piece of coaxial cable running from the street down to my house.

What I've got instead for some reason, is a trench running halfway up the driveway and a piece of PVC pipe with a rope running through it - and that's all.

GEOFF THOMPSON: And how long have you been waiting for the NBN?

DAVID BANHAM: This has taken six months - we've got to this stage in six months with three crews coming out and one no-show.

GEOFF THOMPSON: So, at the moment you're not a happy NBN customer?

DAVID BANHAM: No, I am not. I am a very, very frustrated NBN customer.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Problem properties like David's are passed over for now so the rollout isn't delayed.

Most of them are in areas being connected with old pay-tv cables.

DAVID BANHAM: So all that they need to do is unplug that cable from the Optus tap and plug it in to the old Telstra tap and as far as I'm aware job done! That would work, but we haven't been able to manage that.

GEOFF THOMPSON: It'd just be matter of shifting a foot or so that connection and then stringing it your house and then you'd have the NBN -

DAVID BANHAM: - Job done! -

GEOFF THOMPSON: - but six months and you haven't got it?

DAVID BANHAM: Nothing.

GEOFF THOMPSON: David's had multiple site visits but no clear answers.

DAVID BANHAM: I mean it's infuriating, you know.

You know, when one contractor shows up and doesn't know what the last person did, what they were trying to achieve, what they were hoping to do, and then they just go away again with still no connection made.

It's infuriating.

GEOFF THOMPSON: David works from home, and has been told his existing internet connection could be cut off any day as he's meant to be migrated to the NBN.

DAVID BANHAM: Nobody knows what anybody else is doing.

The RSP don't know what NBN Co's doing.

I don't know what either of them are doing, and NBN Co don't seem to know what they themselves are doing.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Do you think you're alone in this frustration?

DAVE HAYWARD: No.

I mean, you, you hear it a lot, that you know, people having massive problems trying to get connected

GEOFF THOMPSON: People are tearing their hair out with this stuff.

They seem to have nowhere to go.

BILL MORROW: It turns my stomach.

This is, again, I think part of the problem with the confusion we've left with the consumer out there who is responsible for this.

And quite frankly, we've decided and we work with the retailers now to say we don't care.

We'll just get it sorted for that end user.

I know some people are having to wait longer than what they want to out there.

This is a complex undertaking.

We want everybody to have it smooth.

We'll get everybody connected by the year 2020, in terms of access to their home or to their business.

We'll work out some of these bugs that we have of this finger pointing going back and forth, but it is just not acceptable.

GEOFF THOMPSON: The rollout is being done by an army of subcontractors and the quality of their work is variable.

Brisbane based subcontractor Pete Menzies is taking us to see how shoddy work can cause connection problems.

GEOFF THOMPSON: When did you first discover this?

PETER MENZIES, COMMUNICATIONS SUBCONTRACTOR: In December.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Why did you come to look in the first place?

PETER MENZIES: We got a complaint from house down on the corner, their NBN wasn't working.

I just worked my way back, found out... came and had a look here... and just grabbed the green cable and pulled it out of the ground!

GEOFF THOMPSON: In this driveway NBN fibre-optic cables have been buried shallow and unprotected in the ground.

GEOFF THOMPSON: So, what are we looking at?

PETER MENZIES: So, this here is supposed to be in a pipe... There's 12 houses that belong to this-

GEOFF THOMPSON: - and it's just buried? -

PETER MENZIES: Yeah, just direct buried in the ground.

It's now been 10 months, still hasn't been fixed- still in the dirt.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Sub-contractors get paid per job completed - so there's plenty of incentive to do jobs quickly and move on to the next one.

Pete Menzies says a lot of his jobs are fixing the mistakes of others.

Slightly thicker than a human hair, optical fibre can be hard to see, but Pete Menzies - who did a 4-year apprenticeship - can easily spot evidence of inadequate training.

He's got the photos to prove it.

PETER MENZIES, SUB-CONTRACTOR: You see these, how all the ends of these are open, they were all full of mud.

That's a multiport and on the end of those are supposed to be little caps.

So, all three, all four of those out of one multiport were faulty, because the dirt's gotten right down inside that and couldn't clean it, so NBN had to come out and replace that multiport.

I wasn't actually a witness to this but ...

GEOFF THOMPSON: In this photo which became a viral email between sub-contractors, a copper connector appears to have been used to connect fibre.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Would that work?

PETER MENZIES: No, not at all.

GEOFF THOMPSON: What does that suggest to you?

PETER MENZIES: People going out and doing jobs who aren't qualified, who aren't trained properly to do the job.

I have no idea what was going through their mind really.

If you're not paid the right amount of money to fix it properly you're just going to fix it as quickly as you can and get out of there.

I can't explain why people would do it. And it's obviously gone down to inexperience and not being paid enough money to do the job.

So you get paid per job, and you want to roll out 10 jobs in a day, well, you're going to cut as many corners as you can, and just get the job done.

Get the service done.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Bill Morrow accepts that the rush to get the NBN built means that corners are being cut.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Do you think this is just a natural effect of the rush to get this done at the moment that a lot of contractors are getting hired very quickly often with little training?

BILL MORROW: I don't think there's any doubt, the fact that we are setting a new precedent in terms of how fast a network can be built, how quickly we are 'gonna transition everybody over to this.

We have to remember, this is an industry wide transformation, and it's unprecedented in terms of the magnitude of what this is.

It brings to it complexity.

It brings to it challenges that no one was able to ever predict, so we're seeing these issues emerge.

GEOFF THOMPSON: On the ground, it leads to compromises.

BILL MORROW: It does, and it shouldn't though.

PAUL BUDDE, COMMUNICATIONS CONSULTANT: It's an absolute shocker.

We had a great plan. We had a great vision, and we actually missed that opportunity.

We went down from a first-grade network, from a progressive country to one who's again, lagging behind.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Did the politics that led to the multi technology mix leave the NBN in an ultimately unwinnable position?

BILL MORROW: I would say the multi technology mix does allow us to achieve the objectives, but it does introduce more complexity, and its complexity that we understand is a trade-off of getting broadband to the Australian public faster, and doing so in a more economically prudent way.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Technological advances are getting faster speeds out of copper but as the rollout progresses the NBN is moving fibre closer to some homes.

One of these distribution boxes can connect four houses with what's known as Fibre to the Curb - a new technology that connecting about 10 percent of premises.

It reduces the length of copper running into homes and that means better speeds.

BILL MORROW: As a recovering engineer, fibre medium is better than copper medium.

You can't argue any other way, but do we need that fibre today? We know it costs more.

Is it worth it to us to spend that money when we don't really need it, and copper would suffice? I think this is the policy that we're operating under today.

MITCH FIFIELD: It's interesting to look at the speed packages that people are purchasing.

About 83% of the people are purchasing speed products of 25 megabits per second or less, and that doesn't really vary much whether you're talking fibre to the node or fibre to the premise.

GEOFF THOMPSON: So it's enough for today but not necessarily for the future?

MITCH FIFIELD: Well, the NBN will be fit for purpose.

It will support the needs that Australian's have, but no network, no technology, is ever set in stone.

There are always upgrades.

NBN is looking to those and, indeed, NBN has already identified a number of upgrade paths.

GEOFF THOMPSON: There is no budget or commitment to upgrade most Australians to fibre to the premises.

MIKE QUIGLEY: Sometimes people say, "Do you feel angry about it?" No, I just feel incredibly disappointed and sad that an opportunity to build a first-class network that would set Australia up for the future was squandered, and squandered for the wrong reasons, and demonstrably the wrong reasons, now, today.

But we've got what we've got, and there's no point crying over it.

The NBN will be built, but it will have to be ultimately upgraded at a cost of tens of billions.

GEOFF THOMPSON: In the end, won't Australia have to bite the bullet, and go full fibre anyway?

BILL MORROW: I think that is really a matter of what the future actually brings.

What we need to upgrade more fibre into the future? I think the probability's pretty high.

When? That's pretty hard to predict.

How much? That's pretty hard to predict, and it comes down to the question is do you pay the money now or do you pay for it as you need it, and that is the model the current government has chosen, that is the model to which NBN are building out by.

GEOFF THOMPSON: The rollout pace is increasing - but not as quickly as the number of complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.

This year the number of complaints about the NBN jumped by almost 160% percent.

David Banham is still waiting for his connection.

DAVID BANHAM: Well NBN Co were supposed to show up today.

We've had yet another 'no show'.

It's the end of the day, nobody's shown up, and we still have no internet connection.

No wonder so many people are upset about it.