Fibre now the "dominant" tech in NBN Co's network mix

NBN Co says that fibre is now the dominant broadband connection technology used in its network, as its overbuild program starts to enter high gear.

The company’s chief executive Ellie Sweeney said the number of premises on fibre reached 2.99 million at the end of 2025, about 35 percent of the network footprint.,

This represents an increase of 570,000 or 24 percent over the previous year.

NBN Co said 287,000 upgrades to full fibre occurred in the last six months, 32 percent more than in the previous corresponding period.

In total, Sweeney said, more than a million of those premises were the result of upgrades from ageing copper lines and 26 percent of them were located in regional areas.

By the end of the half-year ended December 31, 41 percent of premises were on plans of 100Mbps or faster, and 31 percent were on 500Mbps services or faster.

Sweeney said that, on average, fibre upgrades had been proceeding at a rate 47,000 per month for the past year and that NBN Co would continue to concentrate its investment in fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) over other connection technologies, citing its resilience, reliability and scalability, and its ability to offer higher upload and download speeds.

“NBN Co has really invested in the fibre network … we’re pushing more and more fibre into the community. We were delighted to see that milestone where we have more than 3 million customers on FTTP and that is greater than the combination of [fibre-to-the-node] and [fibre-to-the-curb] combined,” Sweeney said.

“Once in the ground, the electronics are all we need to be updating, so the investment in fibre is critical to NBN to, I think, the digital backbone of Australia,” Sweeny added.

She said that the rate of fibre take-up was expected to get an additional boost from mid-2026 when fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC) users will become eligible for upgrades without the need to order a higher speed tier.

The company has reported flat growth in overall connections to its network of 0.3 percent compared to the previous half, reaching around 8.47 million premises.

Average residential revenue per user for the half was up five percent to $52.

NBN Co has steadily ramped up its fibre network modernisation program since the company first started get access to additional capital to pursue the builds.

It started with a plan announced in 2020 to spend $3 billion overbuilding last-mile connections for half of NBN Co’s fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) footprint to fibre, and a further $400 million on hybrid-fibre coaxial (HFC) and $100 million to upgrade 1.5 million premises to FTTC.

The build was funded from private debt markets, but in January last year the government announced that it would tip in an additional $3 billion from public coffers to help NBN Co upgrade all remaining 622,000 FTTN premises.

Sweeney said that the company expected 95,000 of the 622,000 premises marooned on the legacy copper lines to be eligible for fibre upgrades by December 2026.

FY26 guidance remains on track

NBN Co said it remained on track to meet its full-year guidance for 2026 of between $5.8 billion and $6 billion in revenue and EBITDA of $4.2 billion to $4.4 billion.

It reported a statutory loss of $350 million for the half to December 2025 against revenue of $2.94 billion, an improvement of 23 percent or $107 million compared to the previous period.

Its EBITDA line grew five percent compared to the previous half, reaching $2.32 billion while its operating expenses fell seven percent to $766 million.

With upgrades to its satellite and fixed wireless capacity behind it by December 2024, and its FTTN overbuild program winding down, NBN Co’s capital expenditure for the half fell 22 percent to $1.5 billion compared to the previous corresponding period.

NBN Co chief operating officer John Parkin said that the company wasn’t expecting any impacts from a growing shortage of fibre optic cable spreading across the globe as competition for it intensifies.

Gartner vice president analyst Peter Liu told iTnews that government network builders around the world, including Australia’s, currently faced for the resource from data centre operators and undersea cable builders.

“Government broadband programs in the US (BEAD), Australia, and UK are ramping simultaneously, creating sustained baseline demand that competes directly with hyperscaler procurement for the same constrained fibre supply, intensifying the shortage,” Liu told iTnews.

At the same time, Liu said, ramping up the material’s production can take 18 to 24 months and China, which supplies 80 percent of germanium critical to manufacturing fibre-optic glass has started restricting its export in retaliation for US semiconductor export controls.

At least one fibre cable manufacturer has completely sold out all of its inventory through 2026, he added.

However, Parkin said NBN Co’s fibre optic supply chain was not expected to be impacted by the global shortage.

“There’s no impact from an NBN point of view. We’ve got a very secure supply chain and we have a program in front of us for complete fibre deployment … there are no issues from NBN’s perspective,” Parkin said.