Australians will need to cough up for faster NBN

Australians stuck with 25 Mbps speeds on the NBN will need to pay up in order to secure a faster connection, according to nbn CEO Bill Morrow.

Responding during a Senate committee hearing, Morrow said nbn will upgrade connections limited to the slowest speeds offered over the fixed-line component of the network — but only once enough people have demonstrated they’re willing to pay for it.

Customers in the roughly 30% of areas due to be served with ageing copper last-mile technology under a fibre-to-the-node model will in the meantime have to pay out of their own pocket to upgrade the last-mile access technology if they want a faster connection, he said.

Morrow said nbn works on a five-year technology plan that is regularly reviewed to determine the market’s speed requirements and that the company is also constantly looking at reducing the number of households relying on FTTN.

He also repeated his assertion that there is no significant demand for ultrafast broadband speeds in Australia at present. He said retail service providers operating within the fibre last-mile footprint are able to offer gigabit-level speeds at any time but are choosing not to because the demand is just not there.

But Internet Australia CEO Laurie Patton expressed scepticism about Patton’s claims. He noted that last week, an nbn spokesperson tweeted that the company has “an upgrade path to take FTTN to 1gb downloads”.

“Mr Morrow’s evidence to the Senate last night directly contradicts his own PR people,” Patton said. “If they did have an upgrade path, why would he tell the Senate that people wanting faster speeds will have to pay to get different technology capable of delivering what they want?”

Patton also repeated Internet Australia’s call to have Australia abandon FTTN in favour of the new technology fibre-to-the-driveway, also known as fibre-to-the-distribution-point (FTTdp).

“[nbn has] already announced they’ll use FTTdp in lieu of the Optus HFC (Pay TV) cables that have been found to be unusable. So why continue to roll out inferior technology that they know will need to be replaced? If FTTN isn’t considered good enough for Optus customers, how can they expect anyone else to settle for an inferior product?”

Image courtesy of Jeremy Thompson under CC

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