Published on the 17/08/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
While 3 million premises might be able to order a national broadband network service – only 1.1 million have…
It is nevertheless a considerable advance on last year where, out of the 1.2 million premises which could be served by the network, 486,000 homes and business had an active connection. It’s why nbn co (sic, with its newly un-capitalised styling for the company name) was this week able to announce revenues for the year to the end of June had more than doubled from $164 million to $421 million.
The average revenue per user was $43.
Releasing its full year results this week, the company said that it had met or exceeded its targets for nine quarters in a row. CEO Bill Morrow claimed that almost two thirds of the nation’s premises were in design, construction or able to order an NBN service and that the company was on track to reach its 2020 goals, which include having 8 million premises connected.
The next 12 months will deliver more clarity on the company’s progress with its fibre to the node rollout; this crop of financial results still shows that the majority of revenues are still coming from the older fibre to the premises network that was begun under the previous Labor Government.
During the 2017 financial year, the company’s plan is to reach 5.4 million premises and achieve $900 million in revenues.
One interesting statistic in the presentation is that the percentage of fixed line NBN uses which are achieving 100 Mbps download and 25 Mbps upload has actually dropped during the year from 18 per cent to just 14 percent. Eighty one percent of users are getting no better than 25 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload which is hardly blistering performance given nbn co’s capital expense budget for the year of $4.6 billion.
The organisation is also yet to provide any clue as to where its next round of funding may come from. In the May Budget the Government revealed that the nbn co would need to find as much as $26.5 billion to complete the rollout of the network.
At the time the Government noted that “In the event that nbn is initially unable to raise the necessary debt on acceptable terms, interim funding support may be required.” Morrow this week gave no indication of progress in terms of finding the funds still needed to finish the network.
