NBN has announced a new milestone in the rollout of the National Broadband Network: Some 4 million premises are now able to order a service on the new network.
It may be a far cry from Malcolm Turnbull’s commitment before the 2013 election that by the end of 2016 all Australians would have access to superfast broadband, but NBN said it means that one-third of all Australian premises are potentially able to access services on the broadband network.
As of last week only some 1.77 million premises had active NBN services, however.
“Reaching 4 million premises RFS is a great achievement and is a testament to the hard work of our people and our delivery partners,” NBN’s chief network engineering officer, Peter Ryan, said in a statement.
“We now have the flexibility and the right technologies in place to design and build the network at the speed and scale needed to reach our end goal by 2020.
“With these four million premises our halfway built milestone comes into focus – we are expecting to reach this around the middle of the year.”
Figures released earlier this month by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) revealed that Telstra still has a solid grip on the NBN market, though the competition regulator said there were promising signs in regional areas where traditionally the telco has had a stranglehold on broadband.
NBN will tomorrow release its financial results for the first half of FY17.