The Universal Service Guarantee (USG), which has subsumed the Universal Service Obligation (USO), is a regulated consumer protection regime managed by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).
Under their customer service obligations, NBN and other SIP carriers, and Telstra as the USO provider, must provide reasonable access to broadband and voice services to all premises in Australia. As a result, every address must have access to a broadband connection and telephone line on request, regardless of the commercial cost of connection.
The USO and USG provide for access to baseline services across Australia, and NBN coverage is now nearly ubiquitous. However, areas of end user experience such as data speed and an understanding of outages could be further improved with better communications and customer education.
The USO and USG framework has resulted in millions of homes and businesses being connected. In future, there are opportunities to further improve customer protections for regional Australia, addressing the issues identified in the 2018 Regional Telecoms Reviews.51 Protections should cover network service levels such as installation time, repair time and frequency of outages.