Over forty thousand Telstra customers are being offered refunds after an investigation by the Australian watchdog found some of its National Broadband Network speeds were too slow. The ACCC says that between September 2015 and November 2017 Telstra offered the NBN through two brands with a number of different speeds that were not actually delivered to customers.
According to Nine, the ACCC chairman Rod Sims says customers using the NBN fibre to the node (FTTN) and fibre to the building (FTTB) connections were affected.
“Our investigation revealed many of Telstra’s FTTN and FTTB customers could not receive the maximum speed of their plan. Even worse, many of these customers could not receive the maximum speed of a lower-speed plan.”
“In essence, people were paying more to get higher speeds that they just weren’t able to get.”
According to the publication, the issue affected customers across a number of different speed plans which included:
“26,497 (56 per cent) of FTTN customers on the 100/40 Mbps plan could not receive 100/40 Mbps. Of those customers, 9,606 could not receive 50/20 Mbps, which was the next speed tier plan down.
“6,352 (45 per cent) of FTTN customers on a 50/20 Mbps plan could not receive 50/20 Mbps.
“9,342 (2 per cent) of FTTN customers on a 25/5 Mbps plan could not receive 25/5 Mbps.”
Telstra’s Group Executive of Consumer and Small Business Vicki Brady said the company was being proactive about giving customers the correct solution:
“The majority of our customers have a service that can deliver the speeds of the plan they’ve chosen, but there’s a small group whose NBN connection isn’t capable of delivering the top speeds and that is who we’ll be in touch with.”
“We have changed our advertising, marketing and sales processes. We now use the standard ACCC naming convention to describe our speed plans and quote the typical speeds a customer can expect, including for the period when most people tend to use the internet.
“Providing a great customer experience is our number one priority and that includes giving customers as much choice as possible as they connect to an NBN service.”
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