That's a dangerous question, as evidenced by the answers I received after posing it this week.Shambolic. A disgrace. A joke. A total failure. A train wreck. A National Bloody Nuisance. And several others, not fit to print.

Take the family who lives a stone's throw away from my home.

They used to have cable internet and no problems, until they did the right thing and connected to the NBN after receiving a letter encouraging that.

Then, from 8am until 5pm, they would have no internet and no landline.

"Why does it drop out for eight hours and then come back on?'' they asked.

It's a fair question, that no one seemed able to answer. Not their retail service provider. Or the NBN technicians, who repeatedly visited them.

Just around the corner, another family is also having lengthy drop-out periods, without any real explanation.

"We don't understand it, but our anger is growing.''

It's not a problem confined to Brisbane's inner east. In another Queensland city, a single mum has had enough. "The NBN is a complete joke,'' she says. "It's not fast.''

That's a spectacular understatement, with the recent revelations that Australia had dropped two places on a global ranking of internet speeds.

We now sit safely behind Kazakhstan. With an average download speed of 25.88 Megabits per second (Mbps), we couldn't hope to catch Singapore, which boasts a download speed of 161.21 Mbps.

Let's jump to another state then, where my friend Stephen lives. His mum's installation has been "on/off/on/off". When it finally was installed, her home phone was immediately cut off.

Now just imagine, in this heat, the number of elderly people across Australia who have done the right thing, signed up for the NBN with the threat of a cut-off approaching, without a phone. His mother is 78.

At my house, we've just received a letter saying "further upgrades'' are now required, and everything has been put on hold. We are no longer able to connect, for several months.

Single pockets of problems, of themselves, are an inconvenience to those in them, whether they are spending more money for slower internet speeds, or having no landline for hours on end, or spending these school holidays without technology.

But few crises erupt; and this is one that is slowly growing into a real threat to Malcolm Turnbull, who made millions with a stake in internet service provider Ozemail, who served as Communications Minister, and who once promised we'd all have it by the end of 2016, at a cost that's not a pittance of what it will end up.

Yes, this is a huge infrastructure build. And yes, the challenges are enormous. So is the variance in technology that underpins it - from FTTP (fibre-to-the-premises) to FTTN (running fibre NBN cables to nodes that sit in a nearby public area), Fibre to the Curb (FTTC) to Fibre to the Building (FTTB) to Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC), which uses the existing pay television or cable network, and in some areas Sky Muster. Customers' expectations of what they will receive, and how, also needs to be addressed.

The NBN, in many instances, points the finger at the retail providers (there are 180 of them) doing the deal with customers, and that's an important differentiation that many buyers are struggling to understand.

But elections are won and lost over the back fence, or in the school pick up line, or on local radio. And that's what's happening with the NBN now.

Politicians have to be able to sell a vision and deliver what they promise. They haven't been able to do either of those.

And fast internet should no longer even be defined as a vision; it's a necessity for business, communication and education.

A prime minister, who spruiks innovation, looks mightily thin when many of those who have it don't understand what they've bought, or can't get it to work.