Op-Ed: Coming NBN completions mark turn-around and success

The National Broadband Network the new Liberal National Government inherited from Labor in 2013 was a failing project.

Labor had spent over six billion dollars on the NBN in their six years in government – but barely 50,000 premises were connected to the fixed line NBN.

We set out to turn the project around – with a focus on getting the network rolled out as quickly as possible.  Until this happened the impact of the NBN would remain purely theoretical for most Australians.

Six years on, the success of that approach is clear – with the majority of fixed line broadband services in Australia now delivered over the NBN, and in turn prices dropping and speeds increasing right across the market.

The numbers are set out very clearly in the ACCC’s latest telecommunications report.

It shows that the NBN has brought much lower prices for broadband.  Across all NBN broadband services, prices have fallen between 13 and 22 per cent over the last four years.

Prices for the higher speed services - 50 Megabits per second (Mbps) and 100 Mbps - have fallen even more, by over 35%.

It shows that more and more people are taking up the higher speed services – those taking a 50 Mbps or higher plan rose from 16 per cent in 2017 to 63 per cent by June 2019.

The latest NBN data shows two thirds of all subscribers now take these higher speed services – and of new subscribers, 87 per cent opt for the 50 Mbps or 100 Mbps plans.

And the NBN has made a very big difference to the amount of data Australians download each month.

Eight years ago, users of fixed broadband services downloaded an average of 27 gigabytes (GB) of data per month for fixed broadband services. Today that number is 255 GB – up eight times in eight years!

A big factor here is the sharp jump in the number of customers on unlimited broadband plans, up from six per cent in 2014-15 to 57 per cent today. 

All this is happening as the number of people using the NBN continues to grow very, very strongly.

Today NBN has around 6.4 million premises connected all across Australia – and the total number of premises able to connect is 10.4 million.

Every week between 30,000 and 40,000 new premises are connecting to the NBN – not much less than the total number of fixed line connections Labor achieved in six years.

The Morrison Government wants to see as many Australians as possible having the benefit of fast, reliable broadband services.

The NBN is very important – but so are other networks which deliver broadband such as the mobile networks operated by Telstra, Optus and Vodafone.

Mobile broadband prices are down 33 per cent over the last four years.

New 5G networks are starting to roll out – bringing a further jump in the speed of mobile and wireless broadband.

The Morrison Government has announced its plans to allocate further radiofrequency spectrum for 5G over the next few years.

In turn the new 5G networks will give consumers more choice of broadband service provider.

Our government believes that competition between network owners is good news for customers – delivering better services and lower prices. 

As well as encouraging competition from 5G, we have recently introduced legislation allowing non-NBN firms to operate at both the retail and network level in competing with the NBN. 

The previous Labor Government took a very different position – paying Telstra and Optus $11 billion to shut down their fixed networks because they wanted NBN to have a monopoly.

For Labor to put all of Australia’s broadband eggs in the NBN basket was bad policy;  Labor made it worse because of its remarkably incompetent execution of the NBN rollout. 

Our Liberal National Government has worked to fix both of these problems – by encouraging more competition at the same time as dramatically speeding up the rollout. 

The numbers from the ACCC report this week tell a very clear story – our NBN turnaround has brought lower prices, higher speeds and much more data for Australian broadband users.

Paul Fletcher is Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts in the Morrison Government

----

Originally published in Communications Day, 22 January 2020