Customers on NBN Co’s highest speed broadband plans will see their download speeds boosted by up to five times next year, the company announced as it shuffles its ‘hyperfast’ broadband plans amidst plans to push Internet downloads to 2 gigabits per second (Gbps) a year from now.
Once internet service providers (ISPs) embrace the new plans – which the wholesale network provider promised in March to deliver by year’s end if ISPs were onboard – broadband users currently running on 100/20Mbps Home Fast services will automatically be upgraded to 500/50Mbps speeds from next September.
Customers currently on 250/25 Home Superfast plans will be boosted to 750/50Mbps, while those on 500-1000/50Mbps Home Ultrafast plans are now set to get online at around 1Gbps/100Mbps.
The changes come as the wholesale broadband provider boosts download speeds to accommodate average monthly data consumption that is increasing ahead of expectations, and the number of connected devices in homes surging from seven a decade ago, to a projected 33 by 2026.
NBN Co’s new ‘Home Hyperfast’ 2Gbps service will also be available from 14 September 2025, capping off a roster of changes that chief customer officer Anna Perrin said emerged from six months of consultations with its ISP partners – who, she said, provided “invaluable feedback” about the types of broadband services they wanted to see.
Boosting fast broadband services is intended “to make Australia ‘future-ready’ for the myriad applications that are on the horizon” including AI, augmented reality and virtual reality, Perrin said in announcing the new speeds.
“Australians are consuming more data than ever before and faster, higher capacity broadband supports more high- and super-high-definition video streaming and video conferencing,” she said, as well as improving gaming with “smoother and lower-latency” services.
AI “will require real time data in both upload and download,” NBN Co interim CEO Philip Knox – who will soon pass the torch to newly appointed CEO Ellie Sweeney, a former Vocus executive – said during the company’s recent full-year earnings announcement.
“As consumers and businesses alike begin to leverage the possibilities of productivity efficiencies enabled by AI,” he added, “these emerging technologies rely heavily on high speed, low latency broadband connections.”
As well as catering to speed-hungry home customers, the 2Gbps tier will be packaged for business customers along with its Business Service Pro, which includes a guarantee to resolve any unplanned network outages or faults within four hours.
Once that service is available next year, NBN Co will also reduce the cost of its 250/100Mbps, 500/200Mbps, and 1Gbps/400Mbps Pro packages – which include similar service and support – and reduce the price of its symmetrical Enterprise Ethernet services by around 20 per cent.
NBN Co’s fibre bet is paying off
NBN Co’s investment in fibre to the premises (FTTP) technologies underpinned the company’s recent announcement of 4 per cent annual revenue growth, to $5.5 billion, and 9 per cent EBITDA growth, to $3.93 billion.
NBN Co has seen “really strong demand overall for fibre with all retailers now in market,” chief operating officer John Parkin said in revealing that nearly half of all new service orders are for the company’s higher speed tiers – with the company installing an average of 7,000 new fibre services per week, with peaks of up to 10,000 services in a week.
That’s still far short of the 77,000 installations per week that was previously mooted as necessary for NBN Co to meet its fibre rollout targets after its 2020 “monumental policy backflip”, when the company abandoned a decade of Coalition policy to fast-track its transition to FTTP.
Four years later, Parkin said, “we can see that demand is growing, and that customers on fibre report a higher customer satisfaction because of the reliability of fibre overall.”
Recent complaints data from the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) reflect these improvements, with the number of escalated complaints about service dropouts, inadequate fault testing, and slow data speeds down quarter-on-quarter and complaints about network outages dropping from 850 in the second quarter to just 352 in the third quarter.
In regional areas where FTTP is scarce, by contrast, recent TIO figures showed residents struggling with poor services that break often and can take months to fix.
