Our billing error and ACMA fine explained

You may have read today that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has found us in breach of the Telecommunications Consumer Protection (TCP) Code and fined us $3 million for incorrectly charging customers for inactive ADSL services. Here’s what you need to know about it.
Dean Salter · 06 December 2023 · 3 minute read

First things first: this has affected around 6500 customers, not our whole customer base. We’re in the process of contacting customers directly to rectify this issue.

Getting something as important as billing wrong isn’t acceptable, and we know our customers rely on us to manage the cost of their services accurately.  

What went wrong?

These ADSL billing errors occurred because we didn’t follow the proper deactivation process, including when some customers migrated to the NBN, which resulted in some customers being charged for inactive services. We have been working to identify and fix issues like this one as a we move from old, legacy technologies and processes to simpler, digital systems.

How are we fixing it?

Once we understood the nature and scale of the issue, we self-reported it to the ACMA and took immediate steps to make things right, including stopping bills and refunding customers for the incorrect charges.  

In total, we will have issued more than $21 million worth of refunds and interest to customers affected by this error. 

Most of these customers have already received their repayments, with the remainder to be completed before the end of the year

What happens next?

We have accepted the ACMA’s findings, paid the infringement notice and put new controls in place across our provisioning, network and billing systems to help prevent this issue from happening again.

This includes monthly monitoring and confirming that the ADSL service is being actively used by customers before billing takes place. 

We have let these customers down and we apologise for this.

We never want to see anyone charged for a service they don’t want or can’t use, and it’s clear that we need to do better. We’re committed to learning from this issue and have conducted a thorough investigation to identify the root cause and taken corrective action to prevent it from recurring in the future.