Late last year, we made a decision to ask phone and internet providers to put a temporary pause on selling nbn™ services over the HFC, or pay TV network.

While not an easy call to make, we did this so that we could do a lot more work on the HFC network to help to further improve its reliability.

This decision reflects a renewed commitment from NBN Co to the Australian public that while our construction and operational objectives remain critical to our success, we will not pursue them at the expense of your experience on the nbn™ broadband access network.

This is an acknowledgement that as important as it is to meet our commitment of completing the network build and connecting eight million homes and businesses by 2020, it is vitally important those connections meet the needs and expectations of Australians.

We want you to know we’re taking action and, from today, we will also report publicly about how we’re tracking so you can see for yourself.

Our first priority is to help deliver you the broadband speed you need.

We have been optimising our network to help reduce congestion and have completely restructured our pricing so phone and internet providers are encouraged to offer you the speeds we know the nbn™ access network is capable of when you need it most.

Retailers have responded well to our new wholesale product offers.

In November, sales of our high speed services were nearly too low to measure – today, they represent more than one in three of all new connections and we expect this to grow as more retailers take up our new pricing offers. 

We have seen a reduction in bandwidth congestion across our network go from an average of around four hours to 12 minutes per week*.

Our second priority is to improve our performance when it comes to installing nbn™ equipment and fixing faults on the network.

We know we need to deliver our service to phone and internet providers when we say we will and aim to do it right on the first go.

While we are currently delivering nearly 9 out of 10 installations* requested by service providers right the first time, we know we can do better and we intend to.

Similarly, we are focused on improving how we fix a service when something goes wrong.

We are currently running our repairs with 85 per cent of nbn faults* within our agreed service levels with phone and internet providers and we are determined to improve. 

We have well-established agreements with your phone and internet providers on how long it should take us to complete a job and are working with them to reduce the to-and-fro.

Our third priority is to build the network as fast as we can so everyone in the nation can access fast internet over the nbn™ access network.

Today more than half the nation are able to access nbn™ services. We are committed to providing access to fast broadband to all Australians by 2020 and we are currently adding an average of 100,000 additional homes and businesses to our footprint each month. We have shown we are able to reach double this amount and fully expect to do so in the near future.

I have asked Brad Whitcomb, NBN Co’s Chief Customer Officer, to spearhead our continued commitment to customer experience, and have allocated resources to ensure this filters through everything we do.

Rolling out fast broadband across this vast continent is a task that more than 30,000 men and women, including myself, are extremely proud to be part of.

This nationwide rewiring of telecommunications is one of the most significant infrastructure initiatives in Australia’s history. We know we need to work closely with our industry partners to ensure this is a success and will work tirelessly to be sure this happens.

*These metrics relate to nbn’s physical infrastructure connections and services to phone and internet providers and are indicative only averages. See nbn’s website for details