In the following three years, NBN Co hopes to roughly treble the number of customers on its 100Mbps-plus plans.
This shift is mostly dependent on reducing the price differential between its 50Mbps plans, which are now the most popular, and 100Mbps offerings.
The suggested strategy is to increase the cost of 50 Mbps services while simultaneously lowering the cost of plans with speeds of 100 Mbps and more. However, this will require ACCC approval, which is not a given.
An analysis by TPG Telecom found that the planned pricing revisions will ultimately result in the convergence of 50Mbps and 100Mbps costs, maybe within a year.
The current 50Mbps user base, which NBN Co predicts would decline from 60% of all non-satellite customers in FY23 to 46% of users in FY26, is expected to account for the majority of the increase.
Technically, NBN Co. will have a greater footprint by FY26, thanks to a partial overbuild of its copper network with fibre, albeit the status of this build work is still uncertain and difficult to trace.
The draught statement also essentially reiterates NBN Co’s worries about its near future, particularly its persistent difficulty persuading low-income and low-usage users of the advantages of an NBN connection over competing offerings like cellular services.
The government’s new statement of expectations for NBN Co. includes affordability as a key requirement.
The average cost of an NBN service, according to NBN Co, “represents [about] 1.1 percent of the average Australian household income as of July 2022, with more than 90 percent of households reporting that they are not concerned about the affordability of NBN Co’s services,” the company claimed in response to this claim.
The business might consider developing a “wholesale data capped offer” for low-usage clients, but it wouldn’t be able to do so until mid-2024 unless it first consulted the market.