NBN reveals plans to make your home broadband five times faster

The NBN has revealed plans to offers speeds five times faster on its NBN Home Fast products taking it from 100/20 Mbps to 500/50 Mbps at no additional cost to wholesale retailers.

NBN says it will accelerate the speeds for customers connected to the NBN via Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) and HFC (Hybrid Fibre Coaxial) technologies.

It is also planning on tripling the download speed of its popular NBN Home Superfast product from 250/25 Mbps to 750/50 Mbps and the NBN Home Ultrafast from 500-1000/50Mbps to 750-1000/50-100 Mbps at no additional charge.

These accelerated speeds are expected to be introduced within the next 12 months but NBN Co will be talking to retailers with the possibility of introducing the speed upgrades even sooner.

These speed changes will be available to customers already on the three highest speed plans and to those who choose to upgrade to either of those three fastest plans.

Customers on FTTN (Fibre to the Node) and FTTC (Fibre to the Curb) can access these faster speeds by upgrading to FTTP in eligible areas.

The NBN also plans to make it easier and cheaper for customers to upgrade to fibre by lowering the minimum speed plan to the 100/20 Mbps.

Aussie Broadband Group Managing Director Phillip Britt says the company is still understanding the detail of NBN Co’s speed proposal.

“It could represent one of the most exciting steps in technology adoption for Australian households and businesses,” he said.

“At Aussie we’re incredibly proud of the great investments in our retail network to improve the experience for customers adopting FTTP, and NBN Co’s announcement has made that early investment all the more essential as Australians take the next step into a high speed future.

“It’s essential, however, that these announcements are paired with more investment in fixed broadband for regional Australians so the digital inclusion gap isn’t widened further.

“While Aussie has a very strong share of the Fibre Connect market, we still need to understand what impacts this will have for competition.

“By switching customers over at the wholesale level, smaller RSPs may miss out on the opportunity to compete for those customers which could harm retail-side innovation in the Australian broadband market.”

NBN Co says these speed increases are designed to meet the growing need for reliable, high speed, high capacity and low latency broadband as we see more connected smart devices deployed in our homes.

Demand for data in Australia has doubled in the last five years with an average household consuming 443GB per month with an average of 22 connected devices.

This is a significant increase from the 40GB of monthly data in households with seven Internet connected products from ten years ago.

It’s expected the number of connected devices will grow to 33 per household by 2026 and up to 40 devices on average by the end of the decade.
This growth will be driven by the increase of 4K streaming, increased gaming and cloud computing along with generative AI, virtual and augmented reality plus video conferencing while working from home.