As a resident in Outram for the last 9 years I’ve noticed reducing quality of our Broadband Internet especially in the last year or so. I’ve been monitoring the speeds and have found our peak time evening speeds can reduce to 10-15% of the highest recorded speed we can get when we are all sleeping. This makes homework take longer especially with more utilisation of the incredible School Ultranet. Videos pause and re-buffer, downloads take longer and businesses needing to upload documents, photos, drawings etc have to wait 10-20 times longer than those on the slowest UFB plans. A friend in town recently got the slowest UFB fibre plan, he gets 33 times the peak time evening speed we endure.
We had Clare Curran here a few weeks ago so I discussed this and our patchy cellular coverage. Clare sent letters to Telecom, Vodafone and Chorus with my concerns; they all came back incredibly unhelpful. As Outram is outside both the Ultra-Fast Broadband and Rural Broadband Initiative (DSL) areas our coverage is as good as it’s going to get and there are no plans to upgrade our telephone exchange.
Plan prices and data caps on the Wireless Broadband services are prohibitive for families on a budget. So what can we do…?
Clare Curran is supporting us with a petition to the House of Representatives which I have endorsed and fully support. There are petition forms at the School Office, Dairy, Cafes, Pub, Medical Centre, Petrol Station etc, I also hope to get out and knock on doors to get as many people to sign the petition as I can. Please support this petition by adding your name and signing it. If we miss out on getting UFB or our exchange upgraded, similar to more rural cabinets, we will have to suffer with a poor quality, slow, congested just when you want to use it service, but continue to pay as much as or more than our friends in town.
Thanking you for your support
Tim Gibson
