The NBN is now available to over one third of Australian premises, with four million premises now designated ready for service (RFS).
At the end of December 2014 nbn had made 778,824 premises RFS. In the following two years, a further 3.22 million premises have been made RFS.
In the last two years nbn has launched four technologies: Fibre-to-the-building (FTTB), Fibre-to-the-node (FTTN), Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC) and Sky Muster satellite broadband.
FTTN is the driving force behind the increased pace of the build thanks to the very fast pace with which it can be designed and deployed with well over 1 million FTTN premises already RFS.
nbn Chief Network Engineering Officer, Peter Ryan, said, “Reaching four million premises RFS is a great achievement and is a testament to the hard work of our people and our delivery partners.
“We now have the flexibility and the right technologies in place to design and build the network at the speed and scale needed to reach our end goal by 2020.
“With these four million premises our halfway built milestone comes into focus – we are expecting to reach this around the middle of the year.”
By 2020 nbn aims for all Australians to have access to the NBN network, with a forecast 11.9 million premises RFS and 8 million premises activated on the network.
As of the week ending 2 February 2017 there were 1,764,661 premises active on the NBN network.
Federal Minister for Communications, Mitch Fifield, said the NBN was on track to reach the halfway mark in 2017.
Mr Fifield said a faster rollout meant more Australians would enjoy the benefits of broadband upgrades sooner and monthly internet bills would remain affordable.
Mr Fifield said the scale of the nbn network was attracting new internet providers to enter the broadband market, creating greater competition and more choice for consumers.
Mr Fifield said the accelerating speed of the rollout was thanks to a multi-technology approach.
