NBN Co reports an additional 700,000 premises were connected in the last quarter.
NBN Co's report for the quarter ending 30 September 2017 shows another 708,000 premises were “ready for service”, bringing the total to 6.4 million.
The “ready to connect” figure was slightly lower at 6.1 million, but the company pointed out that this means more than half of the premises in Australia are now able to order an NBN plan from a retail service provider.
By the end of the quarter, 2.9 million premises had actually activated services.
The lag between premises being ready to connect and actually activated is inevitable, but activations were up 115 percent year-on-year, while the number of connections 'only' increased by 92 percent.
As for the multi-technology mix, NBN Co reported that more than 2.8 million ready for service premises are connected using fibre to the node (FTTN) or fibre to the building (FTTB), and 1.1 million by HFC.
The remaining 2.5 million are served by fixed wireless (545,588), satellite (421,028), and fibre to the premises (FTTP; 1,559,972).
“Strong foundations have been laid by the hardworking NBN team, along with our delivery partners and retailers, playing a significant role in accelerating the rollout and activating services at an extraordinary pace,” said CEO Bill Morrow.
“With confidence we seek to take it a step further to deliver the biggest deployment year in NBN history, which will bring us to three quarters of eligible premises ready for service by the end of fiscal year 2018.”
NBN Co officials said the current progress meant the company is on track to complete the rollout by 2020.
