As residents of two housing estates that were developed by the Victorian Government through the government agency VicPlaces and Urban Victoria Riverwalk and Valley Lakes).

We were prescribed very specific requirements in obtaining building permits that involved a fibre to the property (FTTP) connection. Associated infrastructure costs were also borne by residents for this with the expectation that the internet services would be to a standard that would far exceed non FTTP connections.

Some segregated areas of these estates were permitted to access the NBN network whilst the remaining residents were forced to connect to private infrastructure owned and managed by Red Train Networks and connect through one of two ISP’s (iPrimus and iiNet). Connection fees are higher than NBN equivalents and service stability and performance is consistently poor.

Drop outs are frequent and as an indication of performance, during peak times performance on a 100Mbps connection is delivering speeds of between 2Mbps and 13Mbps. If we were on an NBN owned network we would be realising equivalent typical evening speeds of 83.6Mbps. Red Train have not joined the SIP so do not have to abide by any level of performance and as such we as residents are being provided with inferior network performance as a result. Red Train have accepted the performance issues but refuse to undertake any expenditure to rectify the problems.

Promises of upgrades have been made for months with no action, improvement or timelines being offered. The Victorian government failed in it’s management of these sites and we seek your involvement to rectify this by one of two means.

1- ensure Red Train conforms to the SIP and provides a network that is on equal footing to that provided by NBN; or

2- utilise your powers to enforce NBN to compulsorily acquire this network infrastructure off Red Train Networks and incorporate it into the NBN infrastructure and portfolio.

As residents of metropolitan Melbourne we deserve to have Internet that exceeds the speeds we used to achieve with dial up 20 years ago and we respectfully request your support and intervention in this matter.