NBN now reaches five million homes

While the politicians bleat and moan, the NBN team are getting on with the job at full speed with the broadband network now available in five million Aussie homes.

The ramped up roll-out is thanks to the deployment of Fibre to the Node (FTTN) and Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC – the Telstra/Foxtel PayTV cable) technologies.

With FTTN and HFC whole groups of homes are enabled in one go, without the need for individual wiring and connectivity to each home making the deployment many times faster than other technologies.

On average, 250,000 premises have been made serviceable each month of this year with an even greater deployment schedule for the last part of the financial year assisting the goal of reaching 50% or 5.4 million homes in that period.

Aussies though remain slow to sign up, unaware in many cases that it’s available, or in no rush to move to the new technology.

2.2 million premises are active on the NBN network, with 130,000 signing up to a retailer each month.

Peter Ryan, Chief Network Engineering Officer at NBN, said today “NBN is very proud to reach yet another key milestone thanks to the outstanding work and pace set by the team at NBN and our delivery partners.”

“NBN continues to demonstrate its rollout momentum with 140,000 services made available to homes and businesses across the country in a single week – the equivalent of lighting up Canberra – with five million homes and businesses in total now able to connect to retail services over the NBN network.

“We are building the NBN network and activating end users faster than we have ever done before and are currently making over 60,000 premises serviceable each week.

“We 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.”

If you’re wondering if your home has the NBN – you can enter your address at the NBN website to find out!