NBN Co released its quarterly financial data, which revealed a surge in its earnings. In line with this, it also released a list of additional homes and businesses in FTTN areas to be passed by its GPON overlay. The number of addresses reached approximately 200,000.

Between this year and 2023, it is expected that three million premises will get to experience fibre upgrades. 1.6 million premises out of the three million is composed of the newly announced areas.

According to NBN Co, it expects that RSPs will be able to take offers for the upgrades beginning in March next year. In this case, the FTTN connection technology currently installed will be upgraded to the FTTP connection technology, which can foster the Super Fast and Ultra Fast NBN speed tiers. 

The upgrade forms part of an investment worth $3.5 billion which was announced last year. The investment is aimed at making gigabit speeds available to eight million premises by 2023. Presently, the average speed available on the FTTN network is around 70Mbps.

Kathrine Dyer, NBN Co. COO, said: “We are making great progress on our network upgrades and have so far completed the rollout of new fibre that will serve 17,000 premises in parts of metropolitan and regional New South Wales, Queensland, and South Australia. Construction of our local fibre network extensions is also well underway in areas that will serve another 325,000 homes and businesses across the country – and we are expanding our rollout further every day. So far, we have rolled out 3,100 kilometres of new fibre in neighbourhoods around the country.”

In terms of NBN Co’s Q1 FY22 financial results for the September quarter, total revenue of $1.25 billion is seen during the first quarter of FY22. This is higher by 17% compared to the corresponding period in FY21. 

Additionally, after subscriber costs, EBITDA was seen to be $714 million in the quarter. This is also up from $102 million in the same first quarter of FY21. This can be attributed to the fact that more than 110,000 new homes and businesses were connected. This meant that the total activations reached up to 8.3 million at the end of September 2021.

However, NBN customers on 100Mbps speeds or more fell one percent over the quarter to 16%. This was because NBN’s generous rebate schemes designed to promote uplift were largely withdrawn from the market. Nevertheless, the percentage of 50Mbps or higher rose 2% to 77%.