NBN Co wants to boost its 100/20Mbps tier to 500/50Mbps

NBN Co will today unveil a plan to change the top three speed tiers for residential broadband by the end of the year for users in its fibre and hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) footprints.

The company will issue a consultation paper to retail service providers to offer “no extra wholesale cost” speed increases on its fastest plans.

That would see the current 100/20Mbps ‘Home Fast’ product jump up to 500/50Mbps and the 250/25Mbps ‘Home Superfast’ increase to 750/50Mbps.

In addition, the range for up to gigabit services would move from 500-1000/50 Mbps to 750-1000/50-100 Mbps.

Chief customer officer Anna Perrin said that despite surging data usage year-on-year, causing customers to hit the speed limitations of their plan more often, “many … remained on the same broadband plan for years”.

“These customers may enjoy a better internet experience on a faster speed tier,” Perrin said.

While NBN Co won’t charge providers for the speed upgrades, they would potentially require some upgrades on the RSP side, as well as potentially to customer premises equipment (CPE).

“Critical to the success of the proposal will be internet retailers’ ability to transmit the higher wholesale speeds across their retail networks and ensure in-home equipment, such as modems and wi-fi routers, are capable of delivering the full benefits to customers,” NBN Co noted in a statement.

“NBN Co will be seeking retailer feedback on what in-home equipment will be needed to bring the increased speeds to market.”

Perrin hoped that the company’s consultative approach, which last year enabled it to pass complicated price and non-price terms for network access, would be successful in seeing this latest proposal through.

“By working together with the industry, we hope to deliver these accelerated services to customers later this year or early next year,” she said.

The company’s consultation paper - not sighted by iTnews at the time of publication - is said to canvas “a number of implementation considerations” that could enable the tier changes to be made “even sooner” than the end of the year.

It is understood that the full details contained in the paper will not be made public.

RSPs will have until April 19 to provide feedback on the proposal.

The proposal, if accepted, could put additional pressure on FTTN users that are in the overbuild footprint to agree to an upgrade sooner.

It would put a significant speed gap in NBN Co’s tiering system - with the next option after 50/20Mbps being 500/50Mbps, unless RSPs used the 500/50 tier to come up with their own custom tiered service in-between.

FTTC upgrade rules

Also to be canvassed today is a proposal to relax the order threshold needed for fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC) users to trigger an upgrade to a full fibre connection.

While currently set at 250/25Mbps, NBN Co intends to drop the minimum order to a 100/20Mbps product, bringing it in line with the threshold for fibre-to-the-node users.

NBN Co said it is currently upgrading around 7000 homes and businesses a week to full fibre.