To provide a level playing field for all customers wanting to access the internet, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) introduced guidelines in 2012. These provisions are aimed at preventing the NBN and retail service providers from discriminating. The NBN, however, has continued to discriminate between city and country, making it more expensive for regional businesses to access acceptable internet speeds.

New guidelines, released in 2021, are largely aimed at the unjust practices by the NBN.

By design, the NBN provides substandard services for residential users and penalty pricing for business-grade users by way of having “city pricing” and “country pricing.”

While all businesses pay for the same service, only certain suburbs are eligible for upgrades to faster internet speeds. These upgrades go from the inferior fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) connections to the faster fibre to the premises (FTTP). The NBN decides the areas that qualify for this upgrade.

If a business is not in one of the areas, it could be looking at upgrade costs from few thousand dollars to well over 10,000 dollars. 

The ACCC telecommunications non-discrimination guidelines

The 2021 ACCC guidelines introduced provisions to protect all internet users from unfair treatment by service providers. The NBN has ignored these guidelines, continuing to provide unfair internet services to regional Australians.

The ACCC has two ways tests to determine whether these provisions are being followed.

The first way is through an explicit discrimination test. This checks to see if a provider fails to offer a customer a reasonable opportunity to get the same services, under the same terms, as anyone else.

The other checkpoint comes from an implicit discrimination test. This tests whether the services are provided in a way that might impede customers’ ability to compete in the same market.

The NBN is failing both these tests. To provide feedback on the NBN’s discriminatory practices, go to ACCC complaints website. 

As they have many times before, the NBN continues to use unjust practices, despite being a government-run company. Fast internet speed is especially important for businesses, as slow or unstable internet connections can affect both customers’ and employees’.