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More than a quarter of a million Australians have demanded the federal government scrap its NBN plan and revert to the original fibre-to-the-home network.
A small group of Illawarra residents gathered outside Cunningham MP Sharon Bird’s Crown Street office on Tuesday last week to hand over a copy of a petition containing 270,640 signatures, the largest petition ever hosted in Australia by website change.org. The petition was also delivered to MPs in dozens of marginal seats around the country.
The federal government is reviewing the former Labor government’s fibre-to-the-home NBN rollout plan and intends to replace it with a cheaper, fibre-to-the-node model. It has stopped some NBN work and hundreds of thousands of Australian households have been taken off the rollout map, including 29,000 in the Illawarra’s Cunningham and Throsby electorates.
Student Nick Paine started the petition shortly after the federal election and said he was delighted at the response: ‘‘I thought I might get a few thousand signatures.’’
Keiraville graphic designer Marina Varda, who delivered the petition to Ms Bird, said it sent a strong message to Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
‘‘The 270,000 signatures shows there is overwhelming support for the fibre-to-the-premises model,’’ Ms Varda said.
She and other friends working in digital media had difficulty uploading large files due to slow internet speeds and rain affecting the copper wires, which made it hard to compete with their overseas counterparts.
‘‘The internet might crash or go down if we have rain and I’ll have to resend the files.’’
Ms Varda said most of problems with phone and internet connections were due to the old copper wires and she believed Telstra was doing only patch-up jobs.
Ms Varda said it was not just young people who wanted fibre to the home. Her mum, 80-year-old Mariana Varda, who helped deliver the petition, had an iPad and used the internet.
NBN Co documents recently obtained by Fairfax Media show that the government’s fibre-to-the-node network will be inadequate for many businesses, is poorly planned and unlikely to be completed on time.
Ms Bird, the former Regional Communications Minister, plans to table the petition in Parliament and was not surprised at the support for fibre to the home.
She chaired the standing committee on the NBN five years ago and Mr Jones was also a member.
‘‘It was clear then it was going to be such a transformer for regions like ours, for people who were isolated, or had disabilities,’’ Ms Bird said.
‘‘People are devastated that one of the government’s first actions was to take all these suburbs off the map and to walk away from the contracts...people feel they’ve been cheated.’’