Complaints up about dud NBN services

There's been an increase in the number of Australians complaining that their NBN landlines and internet services are unusable.

More and more Australians are complaining about what a dud the NBN is.

The latest report from the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman shows complaints in the final quarter of last year were the lowest in nine years.

But there was a jump in the number of complaints about useless NBN services.

In the final quarter of last year, the ombudsman received 210 reports of unusable NBN landlines, and 184 reports of unusable NBN internet services.

That's an increase of 48 and 42 per cent respectively on the previous quarter.

"The majority of complaints about unusable NBN services happened during the first few weeks of consumers transferring their services from copper to the NBN," Acting Ombudsman Diane Carmody said on Friday.

However, NBN says complaints as a proportion of connections are actually on the decline.

"The number of complaints per 100 connections is going down if you consider the rapid rise in connections over the past year," a spokesman for the company said, while also conceding "we don't always get it right."

At the end of 2015, more than 736,000 homes and businesses were connected to the NBN network.

Nine out of 10 NBN-related complaints were resolved after the TIO referred them back to their telcos.

Overall, the TIO received 23,572 new complaints in the three months to December - the lowest level since the September quarter of 2006.

Far fewer complaints were received about coverage problems and excess data charges.

But consumers reported enduring problems with slow data speeds and internet service drop-outs.


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Source: AAP


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