iTWire

Nathan Cochrane, a former technology journalist with The Age, who now lives in Brisbane, told iTWire on Wednesday that he was not connected to the NBN.

"Telstra made the claim the cable internet HFC I’m on is owned by NBN Co (a claim I don’t believe btw). I’m a Telstra Cable subscriber," he said.

The NBN Co is using Telstra's HFC cable network to deliver its broadband service; some areas in Australia are getting their NBN access this way. For this, the NBN Co is paying Telstra about $11 billion.

Cochrane, who suffered outages for weeks, often starting as early as 8.10am and going on for most of the day, said after some persuasion on his part, Telstra had agreed to waive a month's subscription as a goodwill gesture for the outages.

"It doesn’t make up for the thousands of dollars in lost productivity but it’s a bit better than the ~$25 they originally offered," he said.

At the time of the original report, a Telstra spokesman from Queensland told iTWire that the fault would have to be fixed by NBN Co as it was that company's responsibility.

Later, the spokesman said that since this was an NBN fault, it was likely that customers of other ISPs were affected as well.

An NBN Co spokesman told iTWire on Wednesday: "NBN Co has not yet taken control of the assets in this area to allow us to undertake construction so it is not possible that we have caused the outages in question."