A Review of Superloop’s (Terrible) Customer Service

This is a post (or diatribe) about my personal experience with Superloop’s customer service — the over three-month process of getting an internet connection I ordered.

If you’re looking for a general review of Superloop, then a brief summary is that Superloop’s technical service — the internet speed — is fine.

But my experience in actually getting that service was very time-consuming and frustrating. While my experience in signing up may not mirror yours, the things I learned about Superloop’s customer service mean that if you ever have to use it, you’ll have similar experiences. If your time is valuable to you (e.g. you can’t spend a long time on the phone or on chats because of work), you may want to consider a provider with a better reputation for customer service.

This is a catalogue of all the problems I’ve had while signing up for their FTTP (Fibre To The Premise, i.e. fibre to your house) promotion. It’d be easy to disingenuously just recommend Superloop on the basis of its speeds and (slightly lower) prices and earn some affiliate referral points. But that referral would be based on a lie, because Superloop has the worst customer service from an internet service provider I’ve ever experienced.

When looking for an affordable but high-quality NBN provider in Australia, I came across a number of options recommended by many other users (looking mostly on Reddit on /nbn). Among these was Superloop.

Unfortunately, service speed is only relevant if there’s actually service. And there frequently wasn’t, and getting service from Superloop was like pulling teeth.

Background — Why Consider Superloop?

Far and away the most highly recommended NBN provider is Aussie Broadband, informally known as ABB. They sell broadband they have and they have good customer service (I’ve also used their customer service).

For context, many internet service providers advertise speeds that they can’t actually provide. For example, they might advertise 100 Mbps for a certain plan. But they sell that plan to so many customers that it becomes impossible to fulfil it at peak times — so basically, they’re selling a lie.

There are a few operators that sell bandwidth they actually have. Among these are Aussie Broadband and Superloop. Aussie Broadband is the “premium” option — you pay more, but also get great customer service with local operators.

Superloop is a cheaper service provider that does sell real bandwidth. But that lower price comes at a terrible cost — customer service. “That’s ok,” you might think. “I don’t need customer service. I’m smart and solve my own problems.” Maybe so, but I’m no dummy. I’m an electronics/computer systems engineer who actually did my thesis in telecommunications protocols. I know my way around modems! But I still needed customer support when the bloody thing didn’t work.

If you look on Reddit under the /nbn thread and look at the number of people who have problems with Superloop, you’d be surprised that anyone recommends it. Some admit the service is terrible, some say they’ve never had to use it, and some say it’s fine and solves the problems. But nobody says its great. And a few people have experiences that mirror my own.

Here’s a chronicle of my connection with Superloop. It’s appalling. I’ve never had such bad customer service (other than from Telstra).

First contact with Superloop — March 9, 2024

My first contact with Superloop was on March 9, 2024. I was getting the keys to my new place on April 4, and I wanted an active service by the date I could fully move in, on April 15. I thought March 9 would be enough time to get a new FTTP connection set up.

I was intrigued by the FTTP promotion that Superloop was running. Sign up to their non-cheapest plan and they’d do a free FTTP installation. Great! I wanted FTTP anyway. From what I saw, I had FTTC (Fiber To The Curb, already pretty good) already at my premises.

In my sign-up form, I said I wanted an installation by April 4, more than three weeks after my sign-up date. Should be enough time, right? Of course, I had no way of knowing whether they’d be able to honour that… I expected an email or a phone call or something.

I expected wrong. After not hearing from Superloop until around April 2 (several weeks after sign-up), I decided to call them. I waited on hold for a while (more of this below… a lot more) and said “Hey guys, I’m expecting to move in tomorrow. I haven’t received the modem. What’s going on?”

This first contact centre staffer had an accent so thick that I couldn’t understand it. Now, I’m no stranger to foreign accents. My parents have non-native English-speaking accents. I’ve lived abroad most of my life and am usually the one with a foreign accent while speaking another language. So I have a lot of sympathy for non-English speakers and make an effort to understand.

But I kid you not — it was impossible to understand much of what this person was saying. Their accent was thick, the words were in a strange order, and generally, what they said had no meaning in English.

From my time in outsourcing (I’ve left that soulless life) I’ve learned that there are tiers of outsourcing centres with a scale of costs. Superloop evidently uses one of the cheapest ones.

The person I spoke to said something about my order being flagged as a “non-urgent” order so no action had been taken. They said they’d send out my modem soon.

A few days later, I received the modem. Great! As far as I knew, all I had to do was go plug it into the NBN box at the property.

But when I got to the property, there was no NBN box. In fact, there was no NBN service at all — on the NBNCo web page, there was no indication of there having been a service.

I called Superloop again. Now, Superloop is one of those places where regardless of when you call, they say “We’re currently experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment”. Yes, “currently” AND “at the moment”. Despite redundantly saying twice that it’s the present situation to which they’re referring, it appears to be the case all the time.

So, I waited on the line. I finally got someone intelligible and competent this time and gave them all my personal information (for what seemed the millionth time) to authenticate myself.

“It’ll be a few more weeks without Internet”

I explained the situation. They told me that my FTTP order would still be a few more weeks. That’s right — I was moved in now and despite this, I would be a few weeks without internet. For most people who work remotely, this is anathema.

The reason for the delay, it seemed, was that my call on April 2 was the time my order (placed on March 9) was kicked into motion. An FTTP order normally takes three to four weeks (not Superloop’s fault — this one’s on NBN Co), and so there’d be a few weeks during which I’d be without service.

I had assumed I’d be given some kind of default service in the meantime before FTTP. All the marketing on Superloop’s page touted the service as including a fibre “upgrade”. See the screenshot below.

Again, shame on me for not figuring out what “Fibre Upgrade” meant from them directly. It was unclear from the web page, so I should have called them or emailed them and been patient with the terrible service. Unfortunately, I’m not that patient, and doubly unfortunately, I did assume someone would email or call me with more information. Assume nothing!

The helpful person calling me told me that the FTTP installation would take a while longer (with no estimates — NBN Co isn’t that good at estimating times) and so I’d need an internet service in the meantime. So he set up a new order for me for an FTTC connection. Fine, I thought — 100 Mbps is really all I need, anyway.

The guy set up the order, noted I needed an NBN box, and arranged for one to be sent out to me.

It arrived a few days later. I plugged it in and hooked up the router. I had internet! Superloop had sent me an email with activation instructions, which involved plugging everything in and trying to use the internet. The customer support person told me I should “try” to use the internet, which will trigger activation.

I plugged it in, and it all started working. Hooray! No activation seemed to be required!

This should have been a red flag, of course. Other red flags were that speed was 50 Mbps (I was paying for 100), but I was used to telcos lying about speeds. And I never received a welcome email — but I was also used to Superloop not contacting me.

Nonetheless, I had internet, and I assumed everything was fine. Which it kind of was. For a few days, anyway.

No Internet For You

After a few days, my internet service stopped. The lights went off on the NBN modem and also went red on my router, showing no signal on both.

I thought “Oh, I’ll check Superloop’s network status page.” Unfortunately — and inexplicably — Superloop does not have a status page indicating current network problems!

Frustrated, I went on live chat on my phone.

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A Brief Diatribe about Superloop’s Awful, Awful Chat Feature

A word on Superloop’s live chat. Words fail me to describe how bad the Superloop support chat experience is. Or at least they would fail me, were I not a writer. Here’s my review of Superloop’s chat support feature: It’s stupid.

Firstly, you have to give Superloop’s live chat bot lots of personal identifying information just to start a session. This is before you’re even in a queue for anything. And you have to provide all this info even if you’ve logged in to their account management site! Every single time!

The live chat tells you there’s an ETA with surprising precision — e.g. of 12 minutes and 16 seconds — but then it pings you every 2-3 minutes to make sure you’re still there. That’s right. They tell you when you can come back, but make sure you never leave your phone or computer.

This is one of the hallmarks of bad customer service — when they value their time and money more than yours. This means that rather than with money, you’re paying with a much more precious resource — time. Always pick money.

It’s unclear whether the wait time is “12 minutes, 16 seconds” from the beginning or from that point, as it keeps mentioning it. Not that it matters — the wait time is frequently double or triple what it claims. It’s just a highly specific lie.

Once you’re at an agent, the bad service continues — just in human form. Even though the chat will have sent you a text message saying you’ll need the code to authenticate later, the support agent will send you another one.

After that, you’ll experience service from the human agent that combines the intelligence and cookie-cutter approach of Microsoft Office Paperclip assistant with the response time of an octogenarian. Response times are so slow — in the 5-10 minute range between messages — and there’s frequent re-authentication. It’s very obvious that they’re doing many support tickets at once. Again, Superloop values its time and money more than yours.

The chat feature itself sometimes crashes and messages can’t be sent, which means you’re kicked out of it and sent to the back of the queue. It’s so bad that it shouldn’t be offered and the programmers who cobbled it together should be blacklisted from ever working in developer jobs again.

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Resolving the FTTC Issue

I finally gave up on the chat feature and just called them. At least on hold on the phone I don’t have to constantly tell them I’m there. And they don’t tell you how long wait times are, so at least they never lie!

The agent told me that I was facing problems with the NBN port and that they couldn’t remotely activate my connection. They asked if I had done everything in the sign-up email (which is essentially “plug in the router and modem and connect them”). I had, of course, as I had a working service for several days.

They explained that I wasn’t activated on their end and — get this — they did not know why I had any internet service during the time I had it.

I tried to cancel my service. But I realised that if there was a problem with NBN, then I’d have the same problem with any other provider.

They said an NBN person would call me “within 3 business days”. Alas, I spoke to them on a Wednesday — so of course I only heard from them at the end of 3 business days after that point, which was the next Monday afternoon.

That NBN person couldn’t fix it (obviously, the “diagnostic call” was essentially to make sure that my modem was plugged in and to ask what lights were on).

They said they’d organise for a technician to come out and fix it within a couple of days.

The good news — temporarily — was that a technician came out, did some stuff, and service was restored. Or rather, my service with Superloop *started*. The first date I had service was 24 April, around six weeks after the initial order.

I tested it and the speeds were close to the maximum advertised. So far, so good…?

Outage #2 Within a Week — More Service Frustration

Within a week of signing up with Superloop, I had another outage of several hours. I did the basics of rebooting the router and the modem.

Worried there was something else fundamentally wrong with my service, I got on the chat line.

Again, I toughed it through Superloop’s chat feature, authenticating myself several times.

I then waited for an agent for so long (over an hour, and several hours since the connection was first lost) that my service came back while I was waiting. Clever, Superloop.

The Cancelled FTTP Order

Remember how I had signed up for an FTTP service, but then when I told them I needed a service more immediately, they gave me FTTC?

Well, after a couple more weeks of using the FTTC service (which was fine, though with occasional outages of a few minutes plus the major one mentioned above), I thought I’d call them to see what happened to the initial FTTP order.

I was unsurprised to learn that my order for FTTP had been cancelled. Of course. The order for the service I had signed up for — the very reason I had chosen Superloop in the first place — had been cancelled.

From other companies, I might have thought of this as a deliberate bait-and-switch. It happens with cheaper providers of various things. You order something cheap, then they call you and say “Oh we’re out of stock of that, would you accept this [random worse product]”.

But in Superloop’s case, I knew it was just incompetence. There’s so much disconnection between Superloop’s various departments of sales, customer support, and even retention (how I loathe “retention” teams), that one hand just forgets to inform the other what it’s doing.

One example of Superloop’s organisational incompetence is that for the agent to see my old order and see that it had been cancelled, I had to re-authenticate to the old, cancelled account number. I had to give them the exact same personal information for a different account. When I asked why, they said “One account can’t have two services”. Fine, your system sucks. I guess I’ve learned that by now. Maybe you should just go back to using Google Sheets to manage your company.

So I spoke to the retention agent and tried to figure out if I could cancel my service with Superloop. I had my beady little eye on Aussie Broadband.

A brief word on Superloop’s “retention” team. Old-school customer support had dedicated teams for retention. The goal of a retention team is to offer you things to entice you to stay — discounts, for example.

The thing is, you’re not supposed to say it’s a retention team. You say “I’ll put you through to my manager” or something. But when I told Superloop I wanted to cancel (twice), they said they’d put me through to their retention team. They told me they were going to connect me with some other person who deals with angry customers all day and whose job it is to placate them at the lowest cost possible.

I don’t want to talk to a retention team. I know they’re trained to be tough and to not give me anything. I know they’re just going to bully me into staying. And worst of all, I don’t want to re-authenticate and re-explain my situation to a new person (I had to do this).

A good telco or bank does what’s called “warm hand-offs”. This involves your current agent explaining to the second agent the whole case so you don’t have to repeat yourself. And in best-case scenarios, it’s done with you on the phone, so the phone call is briefly three-way. Superloop, obviously, doesn’t do any of this. You have to explain yourself from the start.

Anyway, Superloop’s angry and only partly intelligible agent (I understood her words, but I had to get her to repeat and clarify a few times) said if I cancelled my order I’d have to pay $144 for the modem (which is actually tolerable), but said if I stayed, they could offer me five free days of 1000 Mbps internet a month. To use that, I’d have to log into the portal and select the higher speed, which I’d get for 24 hours. (I had to get her to repeat this a few times.)

Why I’d ever need a temporary speed boost that I’d have to use the portal to access is beyond me. This sounded like the stupidest retention offer I could imagine. It’s just advertising their high-speed service. What’s worse, it wasn’t even a unique retention offer. Every customer gets it anyway! See below.

In fact, when I logged into my portal, I saw that the same offer was there waiting for me by default. It wasn’t a retention offer at all. Basically, they just gave me no apology for the terrible service.

Placing the FTTP Order Again

Seeing it there in the portal, I placed it myself. At least this way, the “retention agent” wouldn’t get any bonus!

A guy came out within a week and installed some stuff on the inside. At the same time, he told me someone would have to come and lay cable — but he didn’t know when.

I then got a notice from Superloop that someone would come in a month just to lay the cable, after which another technician would come at an unspecified date.

Check out this notice email. It’s terrible. It has multiple typos and even for a copy-paste template it’s incomplete. Also, it is super vague.

Wow, great email, Superloop. What’re you having for Please take note of dinner? A [Select option] pizza with extra {null}?

And I didn’t even agree to that date! I was planning on being away. Not that it mattered, because someone showed up on 30 May (rather than 20 June) to do some work. Unclear if was the same — he said “We’ll just do some outside work”.

On Monday 3 June, I got an SMS from NBN saying my fibre installation is “almost complete” and that they need to do a test. I was promised a call within 24 hours from a number in Sydney. Which, unsurprisingly, never came.

On June 5, I got an email from Superloop telling me that “we have been advised by NBN Co that an appointment is required” and to specify a date I’d be available. I said “Any day is fine.” On June 7, I was told someone (not specifying whether from Superloop or from NBN) would visit on Thursday 13 June from 8 AM to 12 PM. I didn’t hold my breath — hadn’t they said in the email above that someone would come on 20 June?

On June 13, someone from NBN showed up on that day and said “So, what’s wrong?” I thought it was an odd question and said so — I hadn’t ever said something was wrong. “Oh, well, it says in our system that this is for a complaint,” he said. I had never complained… well, aside from in this blog post!

He noted that there was no signal to the FTTP box, even though someone had come set up the interior connection as well as the exterior one. (This is marked by a red light on the box.) He found that someone had terminated the fibre outside incorrectly, and so he resolved it. He was also a nice guy, so I gave him a slice of the cake I had made that morning.

Side note — the NBN poor handoffs are an NBN Co problem. Why aren’t the guys who do the interior work the same as the ones who do the exterior work? Why don’t they come together, at least, and spare multiple trips over many days? If I didn’t work from home in the mornings, this would have been much more inconvenient.

Finally, the connection came alive, on 13 June — slightly over three months from the original order date of March 9.

Superloop’s speed is good, as I expected, and as it has been at the speeds I’ve had. But the connection process? Appalling. I got a follow-up survey question from them. I don’t want to help them directly (I don’t answer surveys). But if they find this article, I’m sure they’ll get the hint.

Aftermath

So, for now, I’m sticking with Superloop. At this point, all the time above is a sunk cost, and NBN Co has its share of the blame.

I’ll take the discount over Aussie Broadband and then whenever it’s convenient, switch to another service.

But four things I’d say about Superloop are:

1. Don’t sign up to Superloop unless you’re willing to deal with the service.
2. If you absolutely must sign up to Superloop and save $15 or so a month, don’t get the free modem. Go buy your own. Give yourself the freedom to leave.
3. Expect the worst customer service presently available. There’s a slim chance you won’t have to use it. But I have — so many times — that it seems inevitable.
4. Seriously, don’t sign up to Superloop, unless you really can stand the pain.

Hopefully, that’s helpful to someone out there. If you have a vastly different experience, I’d like to hear it.