NBN Co reported that 2 million premises were now eligible, and more than 100,000 had upgraded as of the beginning of this month, which is slightly below its previous estimate. Rue said the multi-year project to eliminate ageing copper infrastructure was on track, but that some service providers had been slow to offer the upgrade for marketing or IT reasons.

“We’re expecting in coming months, a ramp-up in the number of retailers who will be in market, a ramp-up in marketing dollars, and therefore a much greater take-up,” he said.

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“There’s latent demand that the retailers will tap into, and a cohort of customers who, when their area becomes available, will move up. And there will be an increasing number of people who will move on as well over this decade.”

Some 2.5 million premises will continue to be covered by the HFC cable network, with NBN Co foreshadowing upgrades that will help it keep up with full fibre connections. Rue said the company intended to follow US cable operators in implementing a distributed access architecture — meaning replacing some components to get fibre deeper into the field and closer to people’s homes — while keeping the existing cables.

“On the HFC network, people can order our highest speed tier today,” he said.

“Distributed architecture enables us to not just provide more capacity and lengthen the life cycle of HFC, but also over time will enable us to do things like deliver like multi-gig [exceeding 1Gbps] services.”

The company has previously announced plans for multi-gigabit speeds on fibre-to-the-premises connections, utilising new optical network equipment from Nokia.

NBN Co is also varying its Special Access Undertaking, which would revise the commercial contract between it and retailers, but Rue said consumers should not expect this to translate into increased prices this financial year.

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