The poor condition of the exchange has been revealed as the reason why Inverell was not listed get fibre to the houses in the original rollout of the NBN.

That is what NBN representatives told Inverell Shire Council during its early presentations to council, Mayor Paul Harmon has revealed.

“Also, our underground infrastructure right through Inverell is a very poor quality and has been for a number of years,” Cr Harmon said. 

Cr Harmon said outside his role on council, he has some personal experiences where he has had to advocate very hard to get things changed.

“I’ve had some experiences where we’ve had infrastructure that hasn’t been able to meet modern day communication standards,” he said.

“I think they’re dragging their feet and not spending much on infrastructure.”

“I know they’ve replaced some cables with optic fibre, but I know there is still some very old cable running around town, for sure.”

Cr David Jones highlighted another problem.

“We all know what happens when it rains; water gets into the joints, and nothing is going to change there,” he said. 

“All right, they can spend a bit of money trying to upgrade some of the services, but that’s going to cost a fair bit to do.”

Cr Harmon said he thought it made sense to replace all the copper wire with fibre optical cable.

“It’s quite evident that Telstra is looking at that bottom dollar figure, and they chase the areas that are the most profitable. Unfortunately there’s some of those areas that leave people wanting and lacking.”

A Telstra spokesman said copper lines throughout the network were constantly being installed, repaired and upgraded. “The age of the copper network varies greatly as it has been rolled out incrementally over time, but with the rolling remediation program we have in place to restore and replace copper, it would rarely be older than 30 years and it provides a high quality service that is proven over time,” he said.

“In the past 12 months Telstra has performed a number of backhaul relief projects in the Inverell area, resulting in more ports at the exchange in November, and more ports at three street-side cabinets. 

“We have two further plans in progress, scheduled for completion at the end of January and April. The January work will result in an increase to the number of ADSL2+ ports available at the Inverell exchange, and the April exchange will benefit customers on our street cabinet network.”

Senator John Williams said he would bring the matter of infrastructure quality up with the district manager of Telstra.

“Look if it is shoddy, if its use-by date is up, then clearly it needs to be replaced,” Senator Williams said. “You can’t have a decent fibre to the node system (NBN) if the wiring is no good.

“I think one of the problems we have in this area is we have a lot of thunderstorms, and that does a tremendous damage to the wiring system.”

Senator Williams said he would initiate talks with Cr Harmon and set up a meeting with Telstra to find out what could be done about the situation.