NBN Co won't say how many premises got a fibre upgrade

NBN Co won’t say how many fibre lead-ins it has built in the first nine months of a multi-billon dollar network upgrade, making it hard to track the progress of the scheme.

Quarterly numbers on active services that are collected by the ACCC indicate customers are dropping fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) and fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC) services.

However, it’s not possible to ascertain how many of these customers are moving off their FTTN/C connections to take up a fully fibre-based service under NBN Co’s FTTN/C overbuild program, which is known as ‘fibre connect’.

NBN Co continues to talk about the fibre overbuild program only in terms of the number of premises it is passing, not actually building lead-ins for and activating services.

In documents filed with the ACCC this week, NBN Co said that it “has completed local fibre network builds to enable FTTP connections for approximately 535,000 premises currently served by copper access technologies.”

“Building is underway to cover more than 694,000 additional FTTN premises, with a further 732,000 premises in the design phase, and with a further 707,000 FTTC premises able to upgrade to fibre," it said.

“This excludes the 1.5 million premises announced for FTTP overbuild in October 2022, with the local fibre network build for these premises expected to be delivered by the end of 2025."

When asked by iTnews how many of these premises had placed orders and had a fibre lead-in built, NBN Co indicated that it was too early to say publicly.

“While we are making good progress on the ‘fibre connect’ local build and making premises ready for order, it is still early days on the sales and marketing side as major RSPs [retail service providers] come onboard and also develop and refine their offers to the market,” an NBN Co spokesperson told iTnews.

“We have a healthy flow of orders coming through each week and are seeing high levels of customer satisfaction throughout the connection process.  

“We expect the volume of orders to increase significantly in 2023 as marketing activity increases.   

“Once we have more retailers in-market and a steady-state volume of orders, we’ll be in a better position to comment on progress.”

While NBN Co is not forthcoming about progress, it will become partly obvious via the ACCC’s quarterly wholesale market indicators reports.

These reports should show some obvious movements - for example, a reduction of customers with 25-50/5-20Mbps FTTN services, and a corresponding rise in FTTP users on the 100/20Mbps tier, what NBN Co brands as ‘home fast’.

This is because to trigger a free upgrade of access technology from FTTN/C to fibre, customers must place an order for a higher tier than they already pay for, with the minimum being 100/20Mbps. 

Since March 2022, when NBN Co started taking its first upgrade orders, the company has seen 53,188 FTTN subscribers with 25-50/5-20Mbps services exit. 

About 11,674 FTTC users with 50/20Mbps services have also vacated them.

In the same period, NBN Co added about 61,840 fibre users on 100/20Mbps, and another 11,684 fibre users to higher tiers.

It’s not clear what proportion of these movements is attributable to the upgrade program or to other factors; the FTTN/C numbers include people leaving altogether for “substitutable” cellular fixed wireles services, for example. A not insignificant number of FTTN/C customers are expected to leave NBN Co altogether over the next two years.

Likewise, FTTP activations would include new premises in greenfields areas, which also makes it hard to determine how many new FTTP users came from the FTTN/C footprint.

Despite this, the reports indicate that the number of successful upgraders so far would be somewhere in the mid tens of thousands.

This could not be narrowed down any further by iTnews by the time of publication.