Benerembah, less than 15 kilometres from Griffith Post Office, is hardly a remote location. But while some residents are struggling with patchy internet connections, others are enjoying the faster (and much cheaper) National Broadband Network (NBN).

For some, it means visiting relatives in Griffith just to pay the bills while others send their kids to town to do their homework. 

On Lockhart Road, residents can access the National Broadband Network via satellite, but at a much higher cost than fixed-line and wireless customers. One woman, who didn’t want to be named, said the lack of information about NBN options was “dismal”.

“We’ve always had issues,” she said. “Last year we bought a $1200 booster box and aerial and signed up for a mobile broadband plan because they said we couldn’t connect to the NBN. “A neighbour just got it and if I knew it was only a few months off we would have just persevered with what we had before.”

While fixed-line customers can get hundreds of GBs for $60 or $70 per month, some NBN “sky muster” plans offer less than 100GB for the same price. Even then, the data allowance is split between “peak” and “off-peak”, with the bulk of the data on offer only available between 1am and 7am. Mum-of-three Cassandra Irvin lives on Drew Road and for years struggled with “astronomical” costs for an internet service that only worked one or two days each month before connecting to the NBN. “We had wireless 3G and 4G modems with only 8GB of data every month,” Mrs Irvin said.

“We’d usually go over that in a day and then it would slow right down so you could barely use it.” Mrs Irvin is studying nutrition medicine by correspondence while her husband runs their farming business. Their internet connection would be almost unusable after 4pm and if they ran over their data limit then even sending an assignment became too difficult.

“One time I had to call and say I’d tried to submit an assignment and asked if I could have an extension just to submit it,” Mrs Irvin said.