NBN to add 2.5 million homes to network in FY17

By the end of FY17, NBN is planning to have some 5.4 million premises able to order a National Broadband Network service — adding some 2.5 million premises to the network’s footprint during the year.

NBN CEO Bill Morrow today offered an outline of the top-level goals for FY17 at a briefing on the government-owned company’s full-year results.

Morrow said that NBN is aiming to have 2.3 million premises with active services by the end of next fiscal year, which will involve an additional 1.2 million premises ordering services. In FY16 NBN activated 600,000 premises.

The company is aiming for $900 million in revenue, which would be more than double FY16’s result.

“This next year will see us approach the half-way point of the build, adding end users at a rate of one out of five seconds,” the CEO said. Morrow said that the company is set to release an updated corporate plan “in a couple of weeks”.

The CEO said NBN’s FY16 results were ahead of plan, with 2.89 million premises able to order an NBN service at the end of the fiscal year and 1.1 million active end users.

Revenue for the company hit $421 million, up from $164 million in FY15 and ahead of the current corporate plan’s projection of $300 million. Fibre to the premises connections again accounted for the bulk of revenue — $225 million — followed by the CVC/NNI charges levied on retail service providers ($131 million).

For the first time the results included revenue from fibre to the node services ($10 million). NBN launched FTTN in September. The other major fixed-lined NBN component, hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) officially launched at the end of June.

As of the end of June, NBN had 822,652 FTTP end users, 119,694 FTTN end users, and 10 active HFC connections. It also had 117,514 fixed wireless end users and 38,764 premises connected via satellite.

Operating expenses grew from $1.1 billion in FY15 to $1.41 billion (NBN now reports subscriber costs separately, revealing they grew from $193 million to $582 million). Capex grew from $3.3 billion to $4.67 billion, with the capital outlay for the FTTN rollout — $1.69 billion — the biggest component.