The Australian Department of Communications has announced that the National Broadband Network (NBN) has reached a major milestone with more than 10 million Australian homes and businesses ready to connect to broadband services. Australia’s largest infrastructure project is on track for completion in mid-2020. More than 85 percent of the network build is now complete and 5.6 million homes and businesses have already connected to the NBN’s broadband services. In the past 12 months, the NBN has connected an additional 2.9 million Australian premises to internet services.
NBN Co, the company building and operating Australia’s broadband access network, announced in July that it has exceeded its rollout and activation targets for FY19. In the three months to 27 June, NBN Co connected more than 1.1 million premises to its network, which brought the total number of ready to connect premises to 9.93 million at 27 June. NBN’s FY19 forecast target was 9.7 million ready to connect premises.
According to research commissioned by NBN Co, at end-May, around 62 percent of homes and businesses were on a 50Mbps wholesale speed plan or higher, compared with 44 percent in May 2018. There are currently more than 160 million connected devices in Australian households and almost 400 million expected by 2023, according to Telsyte’s Australian IoT@Home Market Study 2019. Nearly 25 percent of people say they are interested in making their homes ‘smarter’, but 35 percent indicate they would like help to set-up their connected services.
