nbn expands full-fibre eligibility to further million Australian premises

Australia’s broadband network operator nbn and the Australian Government have announced that additional properties across towns in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Northern Territory, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania will become eligible to get fibre connected to their house or business.

The enhancements to the network are designed to deliver faster speeds and more data reflect and support business and societal changes over the last two years. According to Venture research commissioned by nbn, online health consultations have increased by 147%, online secondary educational engagement has grown by 114% and a third of people who can work from home now expect to continue working from home at least one day a week, so the company aims to also support growing demands from Australian businesses for faster speeds and more data.

Nbn says that it is on track to enable up to 10 million premises, or up to 90% of homes and businesses across Australia to access nbn Home Ultrafast, offering wholesale download speeds of 500Mb/s to close to 1Gb/s, by the end of 2025.

Kathrine Dyer, Chief Operating Officer at nbn, says: “We are unlocking social and economic benefits across Australia by pushing fibre deeper into communities. Fibre is inherently more capable of delivering faster upload and download speeds, is generally more reliable than copper connections and reduces our ongoing maintenance and operating costs. So far, we have identified the suburbs and towns across Australia where customers living and working in around 3 million premises currently served by nbn fibre to the node will be able to access full fibre upgrades by the end of 2025. In just six years data use has tripled on the nbn network – and that exponential growth is expected to continue as customer demands increase to meet new technology.”