The company has recruited a PR firm, Fuel Communications, to line up people across the country "who have had a positive and successful experience with the NBN".

These individuals would have to be available for media interviews – but they would have to work for no payment.

They could be people who utilise the Internet either for personal use or business, says the pitch, which has the headline "Good experience with the NBN?".

It is rare to find a good news story about the NBN with a flood of complaints and negative press haunting the network and the company behind it. Indeed, there are so many complaints that the Australian Communications and Media Authority has drafted a whole set of new rules to handle them.

The pitch, posted on Source Bottle, which claims to be a free site that connects journalists with sources, says: "Ideally we would like to hear from people who have increased their Internet speed, may have changed their telco or have changed their Internet plan since December." (The original version of the pitch has been removed after this story was published; here is a cached version.)

Lest anyone who has had this good NBN experience expects some reward for their labour in detailing it, Fuel Communications puts paid to any such hopes with a line at the end of its pitch which reads: "Successful sources will not be paid."

A wag, who got wind of the plan, quipped: "Ah. I had just imagined it would be such a pointless exercise that the only possible result could be a series of 15-second, 30-second, 45-second and 60-second ads for various forms of the media, all containing nothing. Maybe just an NBN logo with elevator muzak."