Joshua Marshall is one of the Illawarra's residents living on the National Broadband Network borderline.
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Mr Marshall, an IT professional, lives in Figtree where work on the NBN is not due to begin before July 2016. Yet 20 metres over his back fence is a house in Koloona Avenue where the NBN rollout is under way.
Separating the two homes is a creek, which also serves as a border for the Mount Keira rollout area.
"It's the border between Figtree and Mount Keira suburbs as well so that's the border they've decided on," Mr Marshall said.
"Obviously they've got to decide on a border somewhere. The annoying thing was that just before the last election, I was on the three-year plan.
"Now I'm not on any plan at the moment."
When the Liberal government was elected, it revised the NBN rollout maps so they only indicated those areas where work was under way. Previously, the map also included areas where work was planned but not yet begun.
Mr Marshall said he didn't like the lack of any long-term rollout schedule.
His suburb does not appear on the recently announced 18-month construction plan, which means he won't see any work done before July 2016.
"It is pretty annoying," he said.
"It was OK when I was on the three-year plan, I could see it was coming. But now there's no visibility of what's happening, it's a bit annoying.
"It could be five or 10 years before it happens if it's not on a firm plan."
Mr Marshall uses ADSL to connect to the internet and, working in IT, the faster speeds offered by the NBN would be of huge benefit.
"The ability to do things quicker and more reliably is what I was looking forward to," Mr Marshall said.
"ADSL is OK for most stuff but once you start wanting to do things like video-conferencing or uploading films to YouTube or working from home, the extra upload bandwidth becomes very important.
"Being a fair way from the exchange - it's about4 kilometres [of] cable from my place to the exchange - I don't get anywhere near the top speeds that ADSL is capable of," Mr Marshall said.
He said he had been considering talking to his neighbour over the creek about "sharing" the NBN.
"I haven't actually approached it with the neighbour, not before there's something concrete to talk about," he said.
"I've definitely thought about it - whether I can run a cable through the creek or put some Wi-Fi in to join our houses together."
