NSW residents and businesses made one-third of the total mobile, internet and landline service related-complaints in the country in the last financial year.
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That’s according to an annual report from the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.
Of the total 167,831 complaints made nationally to the Ombudsman in 2017-16, about 52,989 were made by NSW residents, businesses and not-for-profit organisations.
Most residents’ complaints were related to establishing a service, service delivery, payment for a service and customer services.
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Teresa Corbin, the CEO of the advocacy group Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, said regional Australians were at a disadvantage mainly because of affordability, availability and digital literacy.
“In our research and in talking with regional Australians, we have found that the affordability of telco services is still a major barrier to connectivity. We know that a lot of regional Australians fall into the low-income category,” she said.
“For low-income Australians, the percentage of income that goes towards their phone and internet bill is much larger than those on an average income.
“In regional areas, people also spend more on equipment, as they may have had a negative experience with the reliability of their service, and will purchase excess equipment to guard against the likelihood of outages.”
According to the report, almost 50 per cent of the total mobile and internet service related-complaints made in the country were against Telstra Corporation.
Telstra was asked by Fairfax Media why there were so many complaints made against the company, but it did not provide an answer.
The Ombudsman, however, noted that a complaint does not necessarily mean a provider is at fault. It simply means that a complaint will begin the Ombudsman’s complaint resolution process.
After Telstra Corporation, the next highest number of complaints were made against Optus Group, which included Virgin Mobile.
An Optus spokesperson said the company had taken several measures, including an increased adoption of digital customer service channels, reduced wait times when contacting Optus, and a thorough review of third-party content providers.
“Whilst we continue to provide the convenience of allowing some of these services to be billed to a customer’s account, Optus now requires third party content providers to present our customers a double opt-in process for acknowledgment of charges and weekly reminders to unsubscribe,” the spokesperson said.
Optus said the measures taken by the company had led to reductions in complaints in the quarter ending September 2018 and the same would be reflected in the report next year.
The biggest jump in complaints was recorded against MyRepublic Pty Ltd.
The number of complaints went up from 901 in 2016-17 to 1816 in the 2017-18 financial year - an increase of 101.6 per cent.
A spokesperson from MyRepublic said it was a newcomer in the market.
“Whilst the figure for the total number of complaints in the most recent financial year is correct, it is impossible to calculate a year-on-year shift without having been in full operation for the previous year,” the spokesperson said.
“As the fastest-growing NBN provider outside the traditional ‘big four’ incumbents, MyRepublic has signed up over 90,000 NBN customers in a short time frame.
“Due to 95 per cent of customers being set up on NBN connections, MyRepublic has had to overcome significant multi-technology mix challenges, unlike large portions of the incumbents’ traditional customer bases.”