Up to 7.5 million homes and businesses have been added to nbn’s construction plan for the NBN rollout.
The new plan covers the period to September 2018 and includes areas where nbn will use Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC) TV networks to connect premises.
More than 5.6 million homes will have access to a connection under construction through fibre-to-the-node (FTTN), basement or premises. Meanwhile, more than 540,000 homes will be covered by fixed wireless services, said nbn.
NBN will use existing copper and cable infrastructure running into homes to complete the network.
The company has a stated goal of connecting 8 million premises to the NBN by 2020.
According to nbn CEO, Bill Morrow, access to fast broadband can provide a range of benefits for homes and businesses such as improved opportunities to work from home, better access to online education tools and more options for on-demand entertainment.
The new numbers are in addition to the almost 700,000 premises under construction and nearly 1.3 million premises that can already connect to the NBN.
This brings the total number of premises across the country that will be able to order a service or be under construction by September 2018 to almost 9.5 million, said Morrow.
Around 2.8 million premises in New South Wales will be connected, 2.5 million in Victoria and 1.9 million in Queensland. A further 970,000 will be connected in Western Australia, 750,000 in South Australia, 72,000 in the Northern Territory and 134,000 in the ACT.
The full list of areas included in the plan can be found on the nbn website.