Australia's nbn, which is building a national broadband network, announced that subscribers are being signed up to its network at an accelerated rate, with two million homes and businesses now connected and more than 4.5 million premises able to order a retail service on the nbn network.
The company stated that retailers are connecting more than 28,000 end users to high speed Internet services on the nbn each week, compared with 12,000 per week a year ago. As a result, with two million premises activated on the network, nbn is now one quarter of the way towards its goal of connecting eight million homes and businesses to broadband services over the nbn by 2020.
nbn noted that the speed of implementing connections enabled by the use of FTTN technology as a part of its multi-technology mix strategy has helped increase activation rates, with more than 670,000 premises connected to services over its FTTN and fibre-to-the-basement network within 18 months of launch.
In addition, the deployment of the nbn network is continuing to increase, with retailers currently able to offer services to more than 4.5 million premises, up by 1.3 million premises compared with March 2016.
nbn currently expects to reach the halfway point of the network roll-out around the middle of this year, and by mid-2018 expects to have the network deployment three quarters completed towards the 2020 goal of having 8 million premises connected.
As part of its multi-technology mix model, nbn recently announced plans to launch fixed wireless broadband services offering 100/40 Mbit/s wholesale speed tiers, primarily for customers in rural areas. The service is scheduled to be available from in early 2018. It noted that the fixed wireless network offers wholesale speeds of up to 50/20Mbit/s to nearly 500,000 premises across regional Australia, with around 170,000 premises are already connected.
For the six-month period ended December 31, 2016, nbn reported it had reached 3.8 million premises passed by the nbn, with 1.6 million premises connected to services. The company stated that as of December 2016 the weekly run rate for customer connections had reached approximately 20,000.
