NBN Co announces suburbs and towns where additional 300,000 homes and businesses will become eligible for full fibre upgrades

NBN Co today revealed the latest list of suburbs and towns where an additional 300,000 homes and businesses currently served by Fibre to the Node (FTTN) will be able to benefit from the extension of fibre deeper into communities.¹

In total, NBN Co has now identified the areas where customers living and working in 2 million premises currently served by FTTN will become eligible to upgrade to Fibre to the Premises (FTTP). Eligible customers that would like to upgrade to FTTP will need to order a plan based on nbn^® Home Fast or higher².

It is the latest in a series of announcements the company has made since September 2020 when it first announced plans to progressively upgrade parts of the FTTN network to FTTP eligibility.

Following the identification of upgrade areas, the company then undertakes detailed design and construction of the local fibre network extensions, which can generally take around 12 to 18 months to complete.

To trigger a full fibre upgrade, eligible customers will need to place an order with a participating retailer for a plan based on an eligible wholesale speed tier. These include nbn’s three highest residential speed tiers: nbn^® Home Fast, which offers wholesale download speeds of up to 100 Mbps; nbn^® Home Superfast, which offers wholesale download speeds of up to 250 Mbps, or nbn^® Home Ultrafast (FTTP)^1,2, which offers wholesale download speeds of close to 1 Gbps.³

Customers living and working in eligible premises within the suburbs and towns announced today are expected to be able to order a higher speed service by the end of 2023.

In March 2022, NBN Co announced that the first 50,000 customers served by FTTN had become eligible to upgrade to Fibre to the Premises (FTTP). The company has subsequently made around 50,000 FTTN premises ready to order higher speed services per month, on average. It is on target to make around 550,000 FTTN premises eligible to upgrade to FTTP by 31 December 2022, and up to 2 million FTTN premises will become eligible to upgrade to FTTP by 31 December 2023.

The company is on track to enable up to 8 million premises across Australia to access nbn^® Home Ultrafast, offering wholesale download speeds of 500 Mbps to close to 1 Gbps, by the end of next year.^2,3

To find out if their premises may be eligible to upgrade from FTTN to FTTP, customers are invited to register for updates at nbn.com.au/fttpupgrade