Kentucky residents call for digital boost after suffering terrible internet speeds for years

Ironically, the town is just 35 kilometres from Armidale, the first mainland town in the country to get NBN.

Matthew McKean, who uses the internet for work, reported his speeds have spiked as low as 1 or 2 megabits per second in recent years.

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Their ADSL-1 connection is so slow his daughters can't even do homework and watch Bluey at the same time, let alone watch Netflix, or talk over Zoom.

"We're the town the NBN forgot," he said.

It's the same story across the whole town of about 150 people, with nearly 100 residents signing a petition sponsored by Mr McKean, to boost Kentucky's connectivity.

The NBN fibre-optic cable runs along the highway about 5 kilometres away from town, and runs to the front steps of every home in Armidale, and to nodes in Tamworth and Uralla - but not Kentucky.

Mr McKean said he'd spent years trying to resolve the problem through internet providers, to no avail.

The COVID-19 pandemic was the final straw.

"The internet affects everything these days," he said.

"My wife's English, and the way she communicates with her family is online. If we can't do that, it's impacting her family as much as it is ours."

Dobson distillery co-owner, Lyn Dobson, said their business was being held back by "the non-existent" internet despite spending thousands on towers, an antennae, and a booster.

The online business struggles to do accounts, fill national orders - and the internet is so bad, their restaurant eftpos machine occasionally fails, leaving customers unable to pay.

"It's never consistent," she said.

"Any time there's a storm or anything, we just lose internet and we can lose it for like a week. Or it's that slow that you're watching the spinning wheel of death all the time, it's ridiculous."

She said the town's exchange has been full since 2013 and there are no plans for an upgrade, which also prevents people from getting landline phone numbers.

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NBN Local General Manager, Chris Cusack said that 46 customers in Kentucky were on the NBN and there had been no reported outages, or speed-related issues in the last year.

He urged locals to contact their phone and internet provider to switch to the NBN via the Sky Muster satellite.

Sky Muster Plus is capable of achieving a typical wholesale download speed of up to 25 megabits per second, with bursts of up to 50 megabits per second.

"If you are experiencing issues with speed or congestion, your internet retailer should be able to run tests to determine the cause of the problem," he said.

"If your internet retailer believes it to be an nbn issue, they will contact us and we will investigate for them to get to the source of the problem."

Mr McKean said the satellite didn't have the download capacity to suit his household.

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