Contractor shortage stalls NBN rollout

Reports of a three-month wait for connection to the National Broadband Network (NBN) are circulating, with nbn co and service providers acknowledging that “recently escalated” demand has resulted in “unexpected delays”.

Customers in regional centres, such as Newcastle in New South Wales, say that ADSL services have been switched off with no ready replacement service offered, meaning slow internet speeds or complete service blackouts in the interim.

Telstra has announced that additional resources have been enlisted in an effort to manage the increased demand, but this does little to explain why it has happened in the first place, given the amount of time that project has been in development.

NBN Co has admitted that it is working from “flawed and unpredictable” data for housing and core telecommunications networks, which may go some way to accounting for the issues. According to chief executive Bill Morrow, the two sources of data being used for planning often vary wildly from what is found during on-site inspection and statistical surveys.

Back in 2012, nbn co signed a deal for access to geospatial data with Public Sector Mapping Agencies (PSMA) Australia. PSMA maintains the geocoded national address file (G-NAF) database, which is national housing information drawn from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Several months after the contract was signed, nbn complained about the accuracy of the information and said it would invest in new systems to manually double-check the data.

As to whether this additional burden is likely to cause budget blowouts, nbn co remains confident that it can remain with construction budget constraints, but is committed to making “more effective use of our existing data sets as well as adding new data sets to our information base”. Time will tell.