NBN has delivered "another quarter of solid progress," the company's chief financial officer, Stephen Rue, said today.
The company reported revenue of more than $100 million for the nine months to 31 March, at the same time as NBN reported increased losses. Operating expenses hit $893 million and the company reported negative EBITDA of $785 million. NBN also reported $2.2 billion in capital expenditure in the period.
"There continues to be a marked improvement in the way we're rolling out the network," NBN CEO Bill Morrow said. "That's driving connections resulting in revenue growth."
As of 31 March, there were 899,000 serviceable premises on the National Broadband Network, including 389,000 activated.
"We've nearly doubled serviceable premises since last year," the Rue said during a presentation on the company's Q3 results.
"We have more than doubled the number of active end users."
Premises serviceable at the end of the quarter were up 20 per cent from December last year, representing 150,000 premises.
"The growth in the quarter represents an average delivery of over 12,000 serviceable premises a week," Rue said.
"We've earned more revenue in the past nine months than over ... the prior years combined. And all of this gives us confidence that we are tracking well towards our full year targets," the NBN CFO said.
The company report revenue from its customers on the network — retail service providers (RSPs) — of $106 million for the nine months ending 31 March, compared to the corresponding prior period.
The bulk of the revenue was from fibre NBN connections — $61 million for the nine month period, compared to $19 million. This was followed by revenue the capacity-based charge levied on RSPs, the CVC or Connectivity Virtual Circuit charge.
NBN reported CVC revenue of $30 million for the nine month period, compared to $9 million for the prior comparable period.
"We have seen strong growth in CVC revenue in the past few months as our customers react to greater demand for download capacity," Rue said.
NBN reported a steep increase in capex.
"During the nine months to 31 March, NBN Co incurred $2.2 billion in capex — or an increase of 493 million on the prior comparative period," Rue said.
"The largest area of capex was in the FTTx access network of $1.3 billion," the CFO said: Approximately $700 million was on brownfields, $90 million on greenfields, $335 million on the customer connect program, and $169 million on FTTN deployment activity.