In Bill Morrow’s last full year results briefing before he leaves the role, the NBN Co chief executive today revealed that the company’s revenue for the 12 months ended 30 June had hit $1.99 billion — a 98 per cent increase on the prior year.
Despite the revenue boost the company still reported negative EBITDA of $2.05 billion — however, when the payments to Telstra and Optus for the migration process are removed that figure drops to negative $103 million.
The company reported a slight bump in ARPU during the year, from $43 to $44.
NBN Co met its revenue target despite not meeting its activation target of 4.4 million premises: The company ended FY18 with more than 4,035,000 active end users on the National Broadband Network.
The company in November last year decided to pause the sale of services based on hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) technology while it worked on addressing performance issues. That freeze wasn’t lifted until April this year.
The company ended the year with some 415,000 end users on HFC, compared to 153,000 at the end of the prior year.
“After making the tough call to pause HFC sales in November of last year, we’ve worked to optimise this part of the network to improve performance and reliability,” Morrow said today.
“This work continues at pace and we’ve now released over 73,000 homes back into the footprint. We remain on track for the average nine months release of premises but are being especially careful with the release to ensure that we get it right.”
“Today we know the pause was the right decision the network is of a much higher quality and is providing a greater experience for both existing and new end users,” the CEO said.
“In total across all technologies nearly all of Australia’s households and businesses are either in design, construction or are already able to order a service over the NBN network,” NBN Co CFO Stephen Rue said. More than 7,036,000 million premises are able to order an NBN service, NBN Co said.
The company ended the year with 70 per cent of network construction complete, and said that as of today that figure has climbed to 75 per cent.
Morrow said that NBN Co is preparing to deploy its first G.fast-capable DPU for FTTC. The CEO said that although the technology potentially make higher speeds available to end users, NBN Co's priority remains completing the network rollout.