NBN Co is revising the way it approaches fibre upgrade work in its FTTC footprint, cutting the amount of notice it gives customers from at least five business days down to one.
The change to the notification period comes into effect at the start of June and is currently reflected as pending in a revision to its operations manual [pdf].
The change is being made because five days is effectively too long of a lead time for notifying customers of planned work.
The work is being performed under the company’s on-demand fibre program, where customers in the fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC) footprint can be upgraded to a full-fibre connection by ordering a 250Mbps plan or above.
“NBN Co currently provides end users with at least five business days’ notice of planned outages as part of FTTC to FTTP upgrades,” an NBN Co spokesperson told iTnews.
“On occasion, this length of notice has caused challenges and duplication of work when we’ve notified end users of an upcoming outage and then work has been delayed (e.g. due to poor weather, sickness, embargoes etc), which means we then need to issue a further two notifications to postpone the work and reschedule it again.
“By reducing the notice period down to one day, we can lessen the likelihood of this scenario occurring and provide greater certainty to end users and our workforce on planned activities and deliver to schedule much more effectively.”
The spokesperson said that the actual outage duration to upgrade an FTTC user to fibre is “approximately 15 minutes in total.”
While that also affects neighbours whose homes connect into the same distribution point unit (DPU) at the street - NBN Co uses DPUs that can serve four, eight or 16 premises - the spokesperson said it would “only happen once per DPU.”
“If other users on the DPU wish to upgrade to FTTP in the future, no outage would be required provided it’s a standard upgrade,” the spokesperson added.
