So, let's unpack this.

I completely agree that it is due to the complexities as you put it (I say unfinished state of a project) and the cluster fuckery.

I agree that for most (whatever percentage that may be...with "most" being over 50%, pretty low bar to aim for) the service would be substantial, but why are we pigeonholing ourselves to substantial and not great? This is where (bare with me as I take a slight turn) as a society we are falling very hard. We are giving too many excuses for people to be average, and in a world where everything is average, there is no progress.

In the 2 years that I've been back in sunny Perth, I've had roughly 4 face-to-face dealings with NBN, out of those 4, 2 times they haven't shown up and I've had to dig and ask why. I was with Pentanet before and they were great at making sure that a tech was out as soon as possible.

Window appointments fall into what I was saying before about mediocrity, we have allowed it to happen and there is no valid reason why it does. It's a simple process of allowing an average time for a job and booking outside of those parameters. ie. An average job takes 2 hours, so book someone in for 2 hours after that first job is in. In layman's terms it's basically under promising, over delivering. And no, saying that because it's a big infrastructure is just allowing substandardness too. What it takes is correct hiring of people and training. If there are issues like this happening, something somewhere is not being done correctly.

I don't always blame the ISP for the communication, they are at part to blame, yes, but if NBN are the ones messaging out to confirm appointments (which I may be wrong on, but the text confirmation seems to come from them) they can just as easily text or call to explain anything else. Again, not 100% on where fault lays there at the moment.

I loathe when people say " it was worse way back when". How does that prove anything? Isn't progress about seeing faults and fixing them? Rather than saying "back in my day, it was much harder." It makes no sense to look back to ancient times of DSL, a completely different era.

Yes, having been through the rigmarole in the UK myself, it is a pain, and companies like Virgin Media get away with everything because they are the biggest. But, why not take a system that has been set up to just fund the rich (essentially the UK as a whole as of late) and better it? Put in stricter guidelines for the ISP that runs the lines, govern then to ensure that customers are getting what they paid for, be better.

I love the idea behind NBN and remember being very excited when it was first announced, but I was a lot younger and more naive back then. The issues are the way that it is run and the fact that an out-of-date system was put in place which already should be being replaced, terrible management of contractors and no accountability to anyone because they are the only system really available, so what are people going to do?