NBN Co’s technicians are now ‘missing’ 469 appointments a day, though in about one-third of cases the technician is early or late but still completes the work.
The network builder said that between 1 July 2018 and 20 February this year, the total number of missed technician appointments was 114,093 - a shade under 470 a day.
The last time NBN Co reported these numbers, for the financial year ended June 30 last year, it missed 157,268 appointments or 430 a day.
NBN Co classifies as a missed appointment a situation where the technician doesn’t attend the premises within an agreed window of time.
These windows are broad - between 4.5 hours and 5 hours - and retail service providers say installation could take up to eight hours.
NBN Co said that while most appointments are simply missed outright, it said that in one in three cases, “the technician turns up earlier or later than the stipulated time and still completes the job on the day.”
In the current financial year, this occurred on 35,546 occasions, NBN Co said. Taking that into account, the actual number of missed appointments is closer to around 320 a day, with about 150 appointments being fulfilled outside the contracted window.
The company has not previously broken out the number of appointments its technicians were early or late to.
NBN Co also said there were “some cases where the end user was not in attendance or where bad weather restricted the ability to complete the job.”
It did not provide a breakdown for the number of installation jobs where either of those occurred.
Though the actual number of missed appointments rose, the ratio of kept to missed appointments remains the same - essentially “91 percent of appointments were not missed”.
That would suggest the company is now dealing with a higher number of activations a day. The impact of appointments it still fulfils - albeit outside of contractual definitions - would mean it is likely completing at above 91 percent in terms of supplying a usable service after the visit.
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