Communications minister Mitch Fifield has convened an emergency industry roundtable in Canberra on Monday afternoon to hammer out an action plan for resolving customer migration and consumer issues around the NBN.

Invitations for the roundtable were only issued earlier this week. Telstra CEO Andy Penn, Vocus CEO Geoff Horth, Optus CEO Allen Lew and TPG COO Craig Levy are expected to attend, along with Communications Alliance CEO John Stanton and representatives of NBN, the Australian Communications and Media Authority and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. A source said the roundtable appeared to be designed to “knock some heads together”.

The roundtable comes following weeks of damaging media publicity about issues with NBN connection hassles and low speeds as a result of under-provisioning of bandwidth by retail service providers. Members of parliament and talkback radio hosts are also anecdotally reporting record amounts of correspondence from disgruntled broadband users about the NBN.

NBN CEO Bill Morrow has admitted that the firm’s own sampling shows that 15% of NBN customers are dissatisfied, while an Essential poll of over 1,800 voters released this week showed that just 18% thought the government was doing a “good job” implementing the NBN versus 46% who thought it was doing a “poor job.” In fact, of 12 issues sampled, the NBN was ranked the second worst for the government, just above high power prices.

NBN’s connection and activation issues were exacerbated in June as record numbers were added to the network. In the 5 weeks to 29 June – one day before the financial year end – NBN made 447,064 premises ready for service and 155,345 premises activated. Since the beginning of July that rollout pace has notably fallen off in favour of activations, presumably as NBN takes stock and seeks to resolve its backlog of issues. In the six weeks since the financial year began, NBN made 331,652 premises ready for service and 253,159 activated.

The Monday meeting is scheduled to take place across two and a half hours that afternoon.

NEW CORPORATE PLAN: NBN releases its new four year corporate plan on Thursday August 31. Speaking with business commentator Alan Kohler yesterday, NBN CEO Bill Morrow said that by adding 2021 to its forecasts, observers would get a better sense of its ARPU and cost forecasts.

“I think we only right now reveal kind of a four year view, we’re going to introduce on the 31st of August the new four year plan that will add in the 2021 year that had not necessarily been public in the past,” Morrow said.