Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This government has created a disaster with the NBN in Kent Street, Bullaburra. For one resident, Angelo, the NBN node is 300 metres from his home, but that isn't the node that he or his neighbours are connected to. In a saga of trying to end the dropouts of his fibre-to-the-node service—a technology that should never have been rolled out in the Blue Mountains or Hawkesbury—Angelo has had five contractors sent out by NBN to try and fix it. Two different technicians have told him he's connected not to a node 300 metres away but to one 2,000 metres away. That's two kilometres! What he needs now is to change to the nearest node and put in a mini-node, but NBN won't approve it. And now Angelo is being told the approval could take up to six months. In the meantime, he and his wife have no internet. They're using mobile data. He can send and receive some emails, but he can't do zoom or videoconferencing. And that is a deal-breaker when you're trying to run a small business from home.

This community shouldn't be on fibre to the node, and they should be a priority for a fibre upgrade. From North Richmond to Kurrajong Hills, from Freemans Reach and Wilberforce across to Pitt Town and McGraths Hill, from Lawson to Mount Victoria in the Blue Mountains, they have a second-rate NBN, thanks to the Morrison government. My electorate shouldn't have satellite in areas 65 kilometres from the city. And wireless was never going to work. This is a Morrison mess!