The milestones are coming thick and fast for the National Broadband Network (NBN), with the rollout hitting five million premises ready for connection.
The company behind the NBN rollout, nbn, revealed its latest deployment figures on 31 May, talking up the pace with which it is hooking up premises for service.
According to nbn, the fibre-to-the-node (FttN) and hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) deployments are driving the increased rollout pace, with the two technologies now serving half of the five million premises able to connect to retail services on the network.
Altogether, nbn said it had seen 250,000 premises made serviceable each month this year so far.
Further, the company expects the rollout pace to increase further over the three months, from April to June, with nbn expecting to make another one million premises serviceable in the period, as it moves towards a 2017 financial year target of 5.4 million premises ready for service (RFS).
Meanwhile, activations are increasing, with 2.2 million premises now accessing retail services over the network, and around 130,000 new premises signing up with retail service providers (RSPs) each month.
As it currently stands, nbn expects the network to be three quarters built by mid-next year, and complete by 2020.
“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,” nbn chief network engineering officer, Peter Ryan, said.
"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,” he said.
While the pace of the network continues to pick up pace, with its 2020 rollout completion still in sight, nbn chief, Bill Morrow, flagged earlier this year that the company needed more of its end customers to take up its higher-speed products if it is to meet its 2020 revenue target.
During nbn’s half-yearly financial results presentation in Sydney on 9 February, Morrow indicated that the company was seeing more growth in its 25Mbps tier and lower-speed product segments than its higher-speed offerings.
Morrow suggested at the time that nbn would need to a greater uptake of higher-speed products to reach the $5 billion annual revenue target it has set itself for 2020.
