NBN hooks up 6 million homes and businesses

Some 6 million households and businesses are able to connect to the National Broadband Network, NBN announced this morning.

On average 100,000 premises were made ready for service each week of the last three months, NBN said.

 “The pace and scale of this project is unparalleled anywhere in the world and this latest milestone – 6 million ready for service – is testament to this fact,” NBN CEO Bill Morrow said in a statement.

“Very few operators have built a network as fast as we are building the NBN with more than 1.1 million premises made serviceable over the last three months. We are extremely proud of everyone who has helped us to this point.”

Some 2.7 million end users have active NBN services, the company said, with about 40,000 more signing up every week. Morrow said earlier this month that the company is seeing better-than-forecast take-up of services in areas where the copper network has been switched off.

End user experience on the NBN, including problems relating to performance and the activation process for new services, have recently been in the spotlight, with the Australian Communications and Media Authority tasked by the government with scrutinising the issue and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission pushing retail service providers (RSPs) to change their approach to marketing NBN services.

The government yesterday announced that participants in an industry roundtable had agreed to work together to improve the experience of migrating to the new network.

The roundtable was attended by representatives from industry group Communications Alliance, NBN, Optus, Telstra, TPG and Vocus, as well as the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, the ACMA and the ACCC.

“The industry has committed to tackling the key migration issues for consumers including confusing information, handballing customer complaints, lead times for connections and rescheduled appointments,” said a statement released by the government’s communications minister, Senator Mitch Fifield.

Industry will back NBN’s process improvement initiatives and help produce information to help consumers understand the migration process and how to deal with sub-par services.

The government said the participants had also committed to contractual changes to support appointment-keeping, installation completions and complaint handling.