Approximately 806,000 homes and businesses have taken advantage of NBN Co’s free upgrades to Fibre to the Premise (FTTP) as of the end of July, the network builder revealed in its Annual Service Improvement Plan.
These upgrades are now available to over 4.6 million premises that currently connect to the NBN via Fibre to the Node (FTTN) or Fibre to the Curb (FTTC). This means around 17.5% of eligible Australians have taken advantage of the upgrade program so far.
That represents modest progress from figures NBN Co revealed earlier this year, with around 600,000 premises having upgraded as of the end of December last year. At the time, that represented 15% of eligible Australians upgrading.
Notably, upgrading from FTTN or FTTC to FTTP is free. To qualify for an upgrade, a customer simply needs to order an NBN 100 plan or faster from a participating NBN provider. Read more about the process of requesting a free FTTP upgrade here. Here’s a look at the most popular NBN 100 plans right now:
FTTN is widely considered to be the worst NBN technology type, due to the amount of copper used. Conversely, FTTP is regarded as the best thanks to its higher speed potential and increased reliability. FTTP is one of the two technology types that can access faster NBN 250 and NBN 1000 plans, while some FTTN connections may not be able to exceed NBN 50 speeds.
Upgrading to FTTP will also help households take advantage of NBN Co’s September speed upgrades. For households on FTTP and HFC, NBN 100 plans will be upgraded to maximum download speeds of 500Mbps, and in many cases, we’re expecting to see providers pass on these upgrades for free.
We’ve already started seeing some providers start selling NBN 500 plans. These are only a few dollars per month than NBN 50 plans, but offer ten times the download speed and 2.5 times the upload speed.
Here are the NBN 500 plans currently available:
NBN Co expects that over five million premises will be able to upgrade to FTTP by the end of the year. A further 622,000 FTTN premises will become eligible for an upgrade by 2030. 5% of these remaining premises may be upgraded to a different technology type, rather than FTTP.
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Looking for a new NBN plan?
These are the most popular NBN 50 plans with WhistleOut users this week: