The report also shows that the NBN has now passed 5 million residential premises connected and using an NBN service, and more than half of those customers are on higher speed plans. Higher speed services represent 58.4 percent of all NBN broadband connections, with more than 3 million subscribers on services of 50 Mbps or above. More than 2.6 million 50 Mbps services were connected at the end of March (or 50.4 percent of connections), compared to 159,000 consumers on 50 Mbps plans (or 4.6 percent of connections) in December 2017.
The report further indicates that a large number of higher speed plans are likely being taken up by customers newly connected to the NBN, after migrating from ADSL and HFC, while other consumers are switching from the lower speed NBN plans. The number of customers using the entry level 12 Mbps plan has declined for the second quarter in a row. There are still 1 million consumers on these plans, although the number has declined by 200,000 over the past two quarters.
Connectivity Virtual Circuit (CVC), the NBN bandwidth acquired by ISPs to provide data to their customers, slightly increased on a per user basis over the quarter from 1.65 Mbps to 1.67 Mbps. The retail ISPs’ market shares remained mostly stable during the December quarter, with smaller retailers slightly increasing their collective share from 6.6 percent to 6.8 percent, which represents a growth of about 38,700 services.
The study also found that there were at least seven access seeker groups acquiring NBN services directly from NBN Co at each of the 121 points of interconnect and at least eight access seeker groups at 118 of the POIs.
