NBN revealed that more than seven million Australian consumers are now connected to the NBN after the activation of 455,000 new services in the three months to March 31.
The connections were made as available NBN bandwidth per user jumped by 31 percent in the March quarter, following NBN’s boost of the network capacity in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The ACCC’s latest quarterly Wholesale Market Indicators Report shows total Connectivity Virtual Circuit (CVC) per user increased from 1.92Mbps to 2.52Mbps during the March quarter, after NBN Co temporarily provided retail service providers (RSPs) with up to 40 per cent extra capacity at no additional cost.
The report shows smaller RSPs increased their collective share of the NBN wholesale market from 7.5 percent to 8.1 percent during the quarter. Leading this group, Aussie Broadband and Vodafone acquired 3 percent and 1.9 percent of wholesale services respectively.
Telstra is the NBN’s biggest wholesale customer, accounting for 47.6 percent of all services acquired, followed by TPG with 22 percent, Optus with 15.3 percent and Vocus with 7.1 percent.
The number of higher speed plans (50Mbps and above) taken up by Australian households continued to increase, to comprise 65.4 percent of all NBN services. Almost 57 percent of residential NBN were 50Mbps plans at March 31, while 100Mbps plans accounted for 8.6 percent of all services.
However, more than 2.2 million households remained on 12Mbps and 25Mbps plans. The number of entry-level 12Mbps services remained at about 1.16 million, representing 16.4 percent of all residential services on the NBN, slightly lower than 17.6 percent at the end of December 2019.
There remained at least 10 wholesale access seeker groups directly connecting to the NBN at each of the 121 NBN points of interconnect.
