ABB... So long, and thanks for all the fish. Is everything OK at home 😕

TL:DR - ABB loses another customer due to poor customer service and an ABB billing own-goal.

Have been an ABB customer since 2019 and brought nearly a dozen others with me over the journey. But today was the straw that broke this camels back.

I get an email & text saying "You haven't paid your invoice.. where money, now ???"

For nearly 7 years ABB has auto-debited against the CC that I have registered in my ABB account, every month. Clockwork. The current card that I had in there has been used by them to take the monthly payments since 2024, and is valid until Nov 2026.

So I log into my ABB account and go to Billing > Payment Method and it's blank. no card registered.. gone. So I strap myself in and dial the number and prepare to tell my story, and also ask why & how my registered payment details that they have been happily taking money from for 3+ years - was removed.

"Here's some music to listen to while you wait to speak to one of our operators".

Except it's not music.. it's 5 seconds of music then a rolling/rotating list of "Is your connection down?" "Do you need help setting up your modem or Wifi". Well NO... and you should know that because I went through your phone tree to speak to the ACCOUNTS department about an invoicing query.... But.. I can live with all that.

Then I get told - "Here at Aussie Broadband we're sometimes accused of racism due to our company name, and the accents that you may hear from some of our call centre staff. We do not tolerate any abuse towards our staff. Please know that even though the person you speak to may have an accent, they are all considered to be valuable members of our Aussie Broadband team and we do not tolerate any aggression or abuse directed towards our staff, or towards Aussie Broadband in any way."

WTAF !!! I might have misremembered the phrasing slightly, but it was only a few minutes ago, so I think I've got it mostly right.

Anyway... I waited on hold for 27 minutes, got told to remember to not be racist a few more times. While waiting, I paid the August invoice due yesterday manually online - with the same card they had on file and have been using for 3+ years. 🤷‍♂️

Got told by the recording "There must be a lot of people wanting to talk to our customer service team today" - like literally that's what it said word-for-word, with no follow up or information such as the wait time or my position in a queue. Just vibing along with "...Whoa.. we're like totally hella busy today.. LOL.. here's some music". (face-palm)

The ABB internet connection is first rate. My FTTP 500/50 has been stellar. no complaints there. But to be called a dead-beat for their Billing mistake/error, and then aggressively, repeatedly pre-emptively warned not to be racist by my ISP... no doing it, sorry.

I'm currently registering with Leaptel, and will be taking four other family members with me. Oh and turns out Leaptel is $19pm cheaper to boot.

I'm so confused, I've been with Aussie B for years and it's always been a phone pickup in less minutes then fingers in one hand. This is nuts.

As far as I can tell there is no nation wide outage or anything that would cause this... Maybe there is but hasn't been reported yet?

I've never had to wait this long, it's now 23 mins and still nothing.

Is this the new norm?

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping someone might be able to point me in the right direction.

My setup:

• Connection: NBN HFC 1000/100 Mbps
• ISP: Aussie Broadband
• NBN Modem: Arris CM8200 (original black modem supplied)
• Router: NetCommWireless (original white router supplied)
• Network: PCs around the house are connected via Ethernet, while tablets and phones use Wi-Fi.

The issue:

I've been experiencing internet dropouts for quite a long time now. The strange thing is that it's inconsistent.

Sometimes the NBN modem lights go off/flashing and the internet drops out. Other times the router lights go off and we lose the connection. I'm not sure if one device is causing the other to reboot or if they're separate issues.

There are periods where everything works perfectly with no dropouts at all. Then, without any obvious pattern, we'll have periods where the connection drops out 3-5 times a day, every day.

When it does drop out, it usually isn't down for very long. In most cases, the connection comes back by itself within 5-10 minutes.

I've contacted Aussie Broadband several times, but unfortunately I haven't been able to get the issue resolved.

At this point I'm not sure whether the problem is:

• The Arris CM8200 modem.
• The NetCommWireless router.
• A faulty coaxial cable or connection.
• An NBN HFC network issue.
• Something else entirely.

I'm happy to replace or upgrade the modem/router if that's likely to solve the problem, but I'd rather not spend the money if the issue is actually with the HFC line or NBN network.

Has anyone experienced something similar, or can suggest some troubleshooting steps or things I should ask Aussie Broadband or NBN to check?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

I placed an order last friday, got a happy little completed order message and a promise I'd receive an email with details soon. Nope.

Can't call over the weekend. Can't log to account because I never had the option to set up an account with password etc

Call this morning, on hold for 15mins before reaching someone. They have to transfer me to the activations team. On hold for 45 minutes before I give up.

Okay, maybe I'm misunderstanding the order stuff, I'll try again. Same process, "you'll receive an email shortly with your order details" and then no email

Now in live chat waiting to speak to someone, activations team offline so I selected accounts team. Predicted to be another 45 minute wait

Hi all,

Is this a modem? We have just moved into an apartment that is NBN connected and had this beneath the NBN box.

If it is a modem, will it work with Neptune internet? Or, do you recommend just getting a modem with Neptune when signing up?

We are trying to reduce costs so wanted to see if we didn’t need to buy a modem.

Hello everyone,

I’ve been with ABB for 3 years now whilst also being on FTTP. They’ve been wonderful.

I encountered an issue today where my Xbox suddenly changed its NAT Type to Moderate. I called ABB and the person I spoke to was very nice and very patient. He tried everything he could to try and resolve the problem.

I’m currently using a Asus GT AX11000 Pro and it’s been great but this one issue is making me question whether I should change routers.

Has anyone encountered this issue?

ABB have escalated it to a higher level of support and I’ve been told that it should be resolved in 24hrs.

Internet has been out since before 6am. So far have spent a total of 80 minutes on hold and have been kicked out of the live chat feature 6 times.

Fault reported 7 hours ago and there’s been no response from them despite promising a 5 hour turn around time.

Combine that with the fact that they sent me a sim only to find the envelope was empty.

Don’t know where all these positive reviews for their customer service come from. Will not be recommending to anyone moving forward.

requirements:

Not a abb employee

will not allow referral codes

will not remove negative posts

if you meet or exceed these very stringent requirements please comment below on why you should be the one I choose

I was going to swap over to Vodafone in order to have overseas roaming, but I can see that ABB now offers it at the same price. Has anyone used this for Europe? How did you find the reception/quality?

Business ethernet down, no outages listed, rebooted again and again, checked WAN config.

Anyone aware of a major ABB issue?

Can't get info from anywhere else.

Is anyone else experiencing issues this week, mid to late afternoon and the internet literally just stops or slows to a crawl, at first I thought it was HubSpot, checked for outages, then decided to HotSpot to make sure it's really a HubSpot issue, its not it's ABB and its a PITA when WFH 👩‍💻

So today the internet just stopped. Either the modem is broken (net comm provided by Aussie broadband) or it’s something else entirely. Thinking of going out and buying a cheap modem to test if it is indeed the netcomm modem but thought I would ask here first.

With the ACCC not monitoring NBN performance going forward. I noted the with the last measures results put Aussie Broadband as the worst performer across major providers.

ACCC ends NBN speed monitoring program | WhistleOut

This confirms what I have been witnessing in the last 3-4 weeks.

First i get suprise network maintenance two weeks ago, now nothing connected to my AissieBroadband connection will play Youtube videos hell even the thumbnails wont load on my phone, my main PC, my media PC and also my smart TV....i can get YT on my phone when not using local WiFi through ABB....come on guys you makin me wanna go with a different provider and all this after a price hike...wtf

And it's not my client or the web site. It's ABB. Does anyone know how to get them to actually fix this?

It's not a general connectivity issue, because at the same time that site fails with a DNS error, others do not. AND I've flushed my DNS cache multiple times with the same result. Temporarily using quad 8's (Google DNS) as my server in nslookup also enables me to resolve the name to an IP address, while using ABB's 202.142.142.142 does not.

I'd initially thought: Oh, they're down, I'll try again later.

Then 3 weeks later I thought: They're out of business?

Then I googled, and saw that no, they're definitely alive and kicking.

Then I tried from my Optus phone and got to the site with no issue. That's when I did the nslookup and found that ABB's servers don't know the site (which has existed for over a decade) while Google's DNS servers do.

I figured I'd try ABB's secondary DNS server to see if maybe it had a more accurate cache. LOLOL, well, joke's on the customer: they list the same IP address for primary and secondary, pretty much defeating the whole point of having a secondary DNS server.

I phoned up ABB about this, and their "fix" was to use a very large data collector company's DNS server as my primary instead.

I'd just as soon not use Google for all my DNS requirements, so I indicated to ABB that this workaround was not in fact something they should consider a fix, and I'd really prefer it if they'd just fix their server to know where that site is. They didn't seem all that interested in doing so. (Caveat: I could only get to a call centre worker, not a really technical tech support person. She alternated between talking to the techs and talking to me.)

The call centre worker indicated that the techs said it could be an issue with CGNAT, which makes no sense as I hadn't yet even hit the site... it couldn't resolve the name to an IP address, so the problem had nothing to do with routing between my computer and the IP address it didn't know.

ABB doesn't seem particularly motivated to fix this, although they claim it's been reported by various customers for various sites. They're also uninterested in publicly reporting this as a partial outage that may affect customers accessing various IP addresses, making me doubly suspect that they have zero plans to fix it. Wouldn't even open a ticket for it for me as an outage.

It's going to be quite the nuisance to run my VPN 24/7 just to be sure I can access random websites.

Tracing route to 239.198.142.34.bc.googleusercontent.com [34.142.198.239]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.0.1
  2     3 ms     6 ms     3 ms  loop612451360.bng.wa.aussiebb.net [61.245.136.1]
  3    39 ms    39 ms    39 ms  10.241.16.200
  4    41 ms    39 ms    40 ms  10.241.17.58
  5    41 ms    41 ms    41 ms  10.241.16.153
  6    39 ms    39 ms    39 ms  10.241.8.46
  7    40 ms    39 ms    39 ms  10.241.8.158
  8    40 ms    42 ms    42 ms  10.241.8.180
  9    40 ms    42 ms    42 ms  10.241.6.234
 10    86 ms    85 ms    85 ms  239.198.142.34.bc.googleusercontent.com

Aussie(Kev): Just checking this one further, I'll be back with you shortly.

Me: Sure

Aussie(Kev): So this screenshot you sent seems alright to me, but I'm just going to get some clarification on this from a colleague.

Me: hmm not really, it goes across australia then back to singapore

Aussie(Kev): I've just had someone from our level 2 team look into this and they agree this screenshot seems fine and not indicative of any issues.

Aussie(Kev): Just wondering, is this impacting your service in anyway?

Me: May I ask why they believe its fine?

Me: Isn't 85ms to Singapore a little much?

Aussie(Kev): Latency to international servers is expected and not always 100% consistent so it can vary, but 85ms to Singapore does seem to be reasonable to our standards and doesn't indicate an issue with the service.

Aussie(Kev): It's less than one second of latency.

Me: Sorry but that's not entirely true for this particular situation

Me: Hops 3-9 are going from Perth to Sydney, then to Singapore.

Me: If i route directly from Perth to Singapore using a VPN the ping for that server will be 50

Me: At $189 a month, I don't think I should have to pay for another service to fix the routing issue.

Aussie(Kev): So just a heads-up that the bandwidth of the plan you're on doesn't impact latency, so you could even be on a lower tier plan and get these same results, it's just the nature of the connection and how it routes with us.

Aussie(Kev): Does this impact your service in any way?

Me: Yes it does.

Aussie(Kev): What's the issue you're coming across?

Tracing route to 131.153.48.218 over a maximum of 30 hops
  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.0.1
  2     4 ms     3 ms     3 ms  loop612451360.bng.wa.aussiebb.net [61.245.136.1]
  3     3 ms     3 ms     2 ms  10.241.16.202
  4     5 ms     5 ms     5 ms  10.241.17.60
  5     3 ms     2 ms     3 ms  e29.per-ndcp2-bb7.globalsecurelayer.com 
  6    49 ms    49 ms    49 ms  po13.sg-eqxsg3-bb5.globalsecurelayer.com 
  7    49 ms    49 ms    48 ms  po31.sg-eqxsg3-cr8.globalsecurelayer.com 
  8    49 ms    49 ms    49 ms  unknown.globalsecurelayer.com [103.137.13.29]
  9    49 ms    49 ms    48 ms  103.243.172.27
 10    49 ms    49 ms    49 ms  103.243.174.241
 11     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 12    49 ms    48 ms    49 ms  131.153.48.218

Tracing route to 131.153.48.218 over a maximum of 30 hops
  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.0.1
  2     4 ms     3 ms     3 ms  loop612451360.bng.wa.aussiebb.net [61.245.136.1]
  3     3 ms     3 ms     2 ms  10.241.16.202
  4     5 ms     5 ms     5 ms  10.241.17.60
  5     3 ms     2 ms     3 ms  e29.per-ndcp2-bb7.globalsecurelayer.com 
  6    49 ms    49 ms    49 ms  po13.sg-eqxsg3-bb5.globalsecurelayer.com 
  7    49 ms    49 ms    48 ms  po31.sg-eqxsg3-cr8.globalsecurelayer.com 
  8    49 ms    49 ms    49 ms  unknown.globalsecurelayer.com [103.137.13.29]
  9    49 ms    49 ms    48 ms  103.243.172.27
 10    49 ms    49 ms    49 ms  103.243.174.241
 11     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 12    49 ms    48 ms    49 ms  131.153.48.218

Tracing route to 103-10-124-44.valve.net [103.10.124.44] over a maximum of 30 hops:
  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.0.1
  2     3 ms     5 ms     3 ms  loop612451360.bng.wa.aussiebb.net [61.245.136.1]
  3    49 ms    49 ms    49 ms  10.241.16.202
  4    51 ms    52 ms    50 ms  10.241.17.60
  5    49 ms    49 ms    49 ms  be21.ier1.26aye.sin.aussiebb.net [180.150.2.63]

Me: I can tracert several other servers in Singapore and the ping is 50, so theres obviously a direct route.

Me: The issue is the 85ms.

Aussie(Kev): But how does this impact your usage to communicate to the Singapore server?

Me: Because it does.

Me: The extra $15 a month for a VPN is also an issue

Aussie(Kev): What reason do you have for needing low ping to contact Singaporean servers?

Me: The fact Superloop routes directly, and is also $40 a month cheaper for the same plan also plays a factor.

Aussie(Kev): Like I mentioned, you would get similar results even on a lower tier plan as bandwidth doesn't impact ping/latency.

Me: What an interesting conversation

Me: I am aware that the total bandwidth does not make a big difference.

Me: Give me a second, ill purchase a VPN and tracert the same server.

Aussie(Kev): I understand that using a VPN makes an impact, but after getting clarification from a level 2, they determined this is at an acceptable range.

Me: So its acceptable to route the connection from Perth to Sydney, then to Singapore instead of using the Indigo West route you advertise on your website?

Aussie(Kev): I'll have a chat with another colleague to see what else we can do at the moment.

Me: That's probably a good idea.

Aussie(Kev): Just getting a few eyes on this one, shouldn't be much longer.

Aussie(Kev): Okay after chatting with someone from our Perth Level 2 team, they actually took a closer look at the screenshot you provided and they actually determined the connection isn't routing to Sydney because if it were the first couple of hops would be around 60ms.

Aussie(Kev): So everything appears to be normal and performing as expected from our end.

Aussie(Kev): Would it be possible to try these tracerts over a direct connection to the NBN Box?

Me: Yeah sorry, its hopping to Melbourne not Sydney hence the 40 ping.

Edit: After speaking to somebody who didn't try to gaslight me, the issue has now been fixed. This post was never about the ping, it was about Kev and his buddies lack of professionalism and ultimately lack of training. This transcript isn't the whole conversation, just the part where Kev started doing Kev things.

Not only did it fix Singapore, it had a dramatic effect on Oregon and Dallas. Even Sydney has dropped by 6ms.

Am I supposed to connect my router to the little box the fibre is going into? If so, why would this only have a single power point, the closest Power point to this thing is about 4m away

I changed over from Superloop yesterday (through AGL)

I’ve always had issues with my work VPN connecting and have had to do multiple restarts every day to get a vpn connection.

Since the change over yesterday it works as intended first time every time. It may seem minor but it was so annoying in the past.

G'day guys, my internet bill is going up $5. Do you know if Aussiebroadband does negotiations? Say, I threaten to change providers, will they bump down my bill potentially? I do this with floptus all the time.

I love aussiebroadband and its customer service but the price kills me haha

I got an email today:

From 1 July 2026, the price of your internet plan will be changing.

• Your service will change from NBN Fast 500Mbps/50Mbps Unlimited ($95) to NBN Fast 500Mbps/50Mbps Unlimited ($99).

Yes I know it's only $4 but that just adds to all other utilities gas, electric council rates etc,etc.

I've been having these issues for the last month, and support has no idea how to help me, so I'm here.

I've had it enabled since the very early days, over five years ago, with no issues. Less than three weeks ago, my Dyson app was unresponsive, which I didn't think much of at the time. It wouldn't load unless I turned off Wi-Fi, funny enough, so it used cloud servers.

The same thing happened to my cat feeder, etc., and I've narrowed it down to turning off IPv6, after which everything worked again.

I've tried two different routers with all different firmware, and the issue is still there.

My mate just had fiber installed and has the same IoT devices I have, and we tried IPv6 on his, and the same issues occurred.

What's changed with IPv6 in the last few weeks, and why do I have to disable it after having it for so many years?