The average Australian household wastes nearly two hours per week dealing with the problems of fibre to the node (FTTN) broadband, the government has said in announcing a $3 billion equity injection that will “finish” the NBN by replacing its last 622,000 FTTN services.

Network operator NBN Co will also chip in $800 million, as it retires the last of the copper network the government acquired from Telstra in 2014 for over $11 billion despite warnings it was a white elephant.

At the time of the acquisition, the Coalition government claimed the purchase would save around $30 billion by transitioning from Labor’s original fibre to the premises (FTTP) vision to a $29 billion multi-technology mix (MTM) built around the copper network and other technologies.

Yet, subsequent years showed FTTN was expensive to maintain and inadequate to support surging broadband demands — and that the Coalition had buried $7.4 billion in expenses amidst efforts to obscure cost blowouts that ultimately reached $58 billion.

Recent years have seen NBN Co investing billions to phase out FTTN technology, replacing it with FTTP connections capable of delivering near-1Gbps and, eventually, even faster services.

“The copper network is degrading,” Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland said on Monday, noting that “it is costing more in terms of faults, in terms of maintenance”.

“… Performance is getting worse by an estimated four per cent each year and it needs to be dealt with,” she said.

An investment for the future

The new investment will be “the final piece in the puzzle around the FTTN upgrade,” NBN Co CEO Ellie Sweeney said, with upgrades across 2,400 suburbs and towns to be completed by 2030 as average broadband usage surges to over 1.1TB of data per month within a decade.

“This investment is not just in faster and more reliable internet; it’s about making our NBN network future ready,” she said.


NBN Co says the investment is expected to benefit around 622,000 homes and businesses still on FTTN. Photo: NBN Co / Supplied

Nearly 100,000 of the newly targeted premises lie within the ACT, whose residents “have been enduring the copper network for too long”, local senator and Minister for Finance Katy Gallagher said.

The NBN is “an important part of our economic infrastructure,” she added, and “an important productivity piece to drive access for households”.

New Accenture research concluded that liberating Australia’s last 622,000 households from FTTN would cut travel costs and improve productivity enough to boost GDP by $10.4 billion over the next decade, saving the average household over 100 hours and $2,580 per year.

Reigniting the privatisation debate

As the government pours yet more money into the NBN, ministers staring down this year’s federal election weren’t coy about tagging an Opposition party that last year opposed Labor legislation to ensure the network remains in public hands.

The Coalition has beat the drum of privatisation for years, laying out a plan for privatisation and declaring in 2020 that the network was complete, despite millions of households still waiting to be connected.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese bashed privatisation efforts on Monday by calling the NBN “absolutely critical to the way that a modern economy and a modern society functions”.

“When the Senate sits again next time,” he added, the Opposition “will have a choice of whether they do support the NBN staying in public hands or whether they will again vote to allow for the NBN to be flogged off to private interests.

“We know that for those people in regional communities in particular, that they would suffer if the NBN was sold off to the highest bidder.”

A privatised NBN was “a highly unlikely prospect given current sluggish market conditions”, telecommunications analyst Paul Budde said, calling it “not just impractical but also potentially harmful to the stability of Australia’s critical telecoms infrastructure”.

“Keeping NBN Co in public hands and committing further government investment is the only viable path forward [because this] inevitably also means investing in it.

“… There are few, if any, alternatives to ensure its long-term viability.”