NBN Co CEO Bill Morrow has offered a rosy take on the state of the National Broadband Network.
Ahead of giving testimony to the Senate Select Committee on the NBN, Morrow issued an upbeat statement detailing NBN Co’s progress in the financial year ended 30 June.
Morrow claimed an uptick in effort, morale and performance at NBN Co despite uncertainty surrounding the NBN. While NBN Co said it won’t share financial details until later in the year, Morrow claimed that “revenue targets have been met and our expenditure has been managed within targets.”
As of 30 June, the NBN was ready for service at 658,000 premises, and NBN Co has activated about 210,000 homes and businesses, according to NBN Co.
It said 380,000 brownfield premises were ready for service and 105,000 have been activated.
In greenfield areas, NBN Co said it’s passed 111,000 premises and activated about 46,000. The company said it has overcome earlier issues that it faced with housing estates and shopping centres.
NBN Co switched on 366 fixed wireless facilities in the financial year, providing access for about 112,000 premises. There are now 16,000 Australians on the fixed wireless network, it said.
Last month, NBN Co and Tesltra announced a construction pilot to trial 1000 nodes in the fibre-to-the-node deployment across Queensland and New South Wales.
"We are heading in the right direction and are very focused on creating an environment for our people that engenders success and translates to quicker access for all Australians to a fast, affordable NBN,” Morrow said.
"While we still have a way to go on customer satisfaction during the installation process in particular, I believe we have identified some of the root causes behind some of the more common poor customer experiences. We will work hard to bring our scores up.”
Adam Bender covers telco and enterprise tech issues for Computerworld and is the author of dystopian sci-fi novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall. Follow him on Twitter: @WatchAdam
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