NBN has reached more than 5.2 million households in Australia, with 60 percent subscribed to higher speed plans, according to the ACCC’s latest quarterly Wholesale Market Indicators Report.
NBN residential broadband connections rose 8.5 percent in the March quarter from 4.8 million at the end of the previous three months.
Telstra, TPG Telecom, Optus, Vocus Group, among others, are the leading wholesale clients of NBN.
“The NBN has now passed five million residential premises connected and using an NBN service, and more than half of those customers are on higher speed plans,” ACCC Chair Rod Sims said.
Higher speed services represent 58.4 percent of all NBN broadband connections, with more than three million subscribers on services of 50Mbps or above.
The number of 50Mbps plans taken up by consumers has grown substantially, following the introduction of discount offers and wholesale bundled products by NBN Co.
More than 2.6 million 50Mbps services or 50.4 percent of connections were connected at the end of March 2019 compared to only 159,000 consumers on 50Mbps plans or 4.6 percent of connections in December 2017.
A 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 consumers on the entry level 12Mbps speed plan has declined for the second quarter. There were one million consumers on these plans at the end of March, though this number has declined by 200,000 over the past two quarters.
Connectivity Virtual Circuit (CVC), which is the NBN bandwidth acquired by RSPs to provide data to their customers, increased slightly on a per user basis over the quarter from 1.65Mbps to 1.67Mbps.
RSPs’ market shares remained mostly stable during the December quarter, with smaller retailers slightly increasing their collective share from 6.6 per cent to 6.8 per cent – a rise of about 38,700 services.
There were at least seven access seeker groups acquiring NBN services directly from NBN Co at each of the 121 points of interconnect (POIs) and at least eight access seeker groups at 118 of the POIs.
