NBN Co adds 2.6m premises into construction schedule

NBN Co has added over 2.6 million premises to its rollout schedule between now and mid-2019 - its first major project update since the original three-year construction plan was launched in late 2015.

The majority of these premises are in the Telstra HFC footprint and until last week had been parked on NBN Co’s rollout maps with a promise only to include them in the NBN footprint ‘by 2020’.

“We are still finalising the plan for this area and expect to have more information about availability soon,” the site stated.

“NBN Co has made the commitment to provide fast broadband access to everyone in Australia by 2020.”

However, almost all of these premises have now been given ready-for-service (RFS) - or “availability” - dates, courtesy of a large data update published in the early hours of February 26.

This data underpins NBN Co’s online maps and address checker tools. iTnews manually extracted the data as part of its project to completely reconstruct NBN Co’s three-year construction plan, which was not updated for over a year before being canned in the lead-up to Christmas.

The reconstructed three-year plan, launched today, reinstates a public, project-wide view of the NBN.

The 2.6 million premises added to the construction schedule last week come from two distinct groups.

Analysis by iTnews shows that 1-1.5 million premises that had been lopped off the construction schedule at Christmas and given the ‘2020’ placeholder have now been reinstated, and will receive connections sometime over the next 18 months.

In addition, another million premises have been put onto the rollout schedule for the first time.

On a state-by state basis, NSW led with 950,000 premises given ‘availability’ dates, followed by Victoria with 833,100.

Of the other states, Queensland had 543,700 premises added, South Australia 204,500 and Western Australia had 73,600.

Other states and territories - for example, the ACT - also registered a number of suburbs being added to the NBN build. In the ACT, most are in the fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC) rather than the HFC footprint, and it is difficult to estimate how many premises are covered in these updates, as NBN Co has not previously published details about these locations.

Most premises in the existing Telstra HFC footprint will be converted over to NBN HFC. The exception is for residents of large multi-dwelling unit (MDU) blocks that lie within a Telstra-cabled area; these will instead be served by fibre-to-the-basement (FTTB) technology.