NBN Ready? Yeah right.

I visited a potential customers house yesterday to have a chat about our internet services and the situation they have found themselves in beggars belief.

They have just completed the Australian dream. Bought a block of land in a great location that is just a slight stroll to the beach in Bargara (extremely affordable in this beautiful part of the world), built their dream home and have moved in. They did all the right things before moving by calling all their service providers to switch over to the new property so that they had minimum disruption during the move. They even researched the area to ensure it was nbn ready because they were moving from an nbn ready area and didn't want to suffer the switch back to ADSL broadband.

Much to their surprise however once they moved in and a technician came out to connect their new nbn broadband service they were informed by the shocked technician that there was nothing to connect the cable to. That can't be right they thought, I'm in an brand new nbn ready estate?

Unfortunately I was aware this problem was going to happen for a number of months and had been trying to make contact with the developers of this very estate and several others in the area to warn them of this very thing and to offer a solution. None of them would believe me and most wouldn't even return my calls.

"We've got it sorted with nbn mate" was a common response I would here. "Nah that doesn't sound right", "There's no way nbn would do that" and "What would you know? I've been talking to nbn and they haven't mentioned anything."

So now the titles have been registered and people are building in these estates and moving into properties that have no connection to broadband services despite being in an "nbn ready" new estate! This customer has been instructed that they won't be able to connect to the nbn in their "nbn ready" estate for at least 18 months. Just like I had been trying to tell the developers for months that nbn will not build the network in that area until they do the rollout in the area leaving all of these new housing developments without the ability to connect to a broadband service for at least 18 months.

That is of course, until we switch on our network in around 5 weeks. Having a completely wireless network we don't need to wait for the people sitting in an ivory tower in Melbourne to pull their fingers out and see how badly they are messing with the lives of everyday Australians in the real world. These new estates provide a perfect market for us but I'm more disappointed that these people have to go through this at all.

How is it that the biggest infrastructure project in this nations history is being stuffed up so badly in so many different ways?