Aussie Broadband managing director Phil Britt recently revealed plans to connect multi-tenant commercial buildings to its network to expand its fibre footprint.

“Further opportunities have been identified to grow the fibre network and the number of connected buildings,” Britt said. 

“This will allow us to unlock further savings by migrating existing customers [of] Aussie and Over the Wire, off other carriers and onto our network,” he added.

“We expect the project will run for the next few years as we migrate it through, and hopefully we’ll see further opportunities as we progress,” Britt said.

Currently, Aussie Broadband already migrated 105 out of 121 NBN PoIs onto its own fibre, with the remaining 16 PoIs to be migrated this quarter. “This means the majority of savings are now being realised,” Britt said. The telco expects a saving of $13.5 million from this migration.

A market update released by Aussie noted that residential broadband connections grew 28% year on year. In this case, the total broadband services were still “slightly below the previous guidance provided of 580,000 to 585,000 due largely to the reduced level of marketing investment through the federal election period during 4Q FY22.”

When it comes to OTW Synergies, Aussie realised a $2.9 million in savings by migrating its voice traffic to Over the Wire’s NetSIP platform.

“We’ve been starting to unlock a number of revenue synergies from the Over the Wire acquisition, including through cross-selling services between our wholesale and managed service provider partners,” Britt said. “This has been great to see because typically Aussies’ managed service providers and wholesale partners have been data only, whereas Over the Wire has had a skew towards voice-based providers. So there is some crossover between our two respective bases but there is a lot of opportunity for cross-selling here and we’re starting to see that flow through.”

During his presentation, Britt stated that NBN Co withdrew the proposed variation of its Special Access Undertaking it had lodged with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. This was following an intervention by communications minister Michelle Rowland.

“Minister Rowland has also opened the door to look at NBN historical costs, including the ICRA, which is the key component that’s holding NBN’s prices high,” Britt said.

“We believe that NBN will lodge the replacement SAU in the next week, possibly fortnight,” the managing director further added.

“Currently, our existing agreements with NBN expire at the end of November, hence the reason for this instruction to carry at least the current pricing arrangements forward. But we’re hoping that there’ll be some relief potentially in the new pricing arrangements.”