According to the foreign media Light Reading, the Australian government is investing more money in NBN, announcing an investment of AUD 2.4 billion in the next four years. The new funding will enable an additional 1.5 million households and businesses to upgrade to Fibre to Node.

The Australian government said that this includes 660000 residences in rural Australia, which means that by the end of 2025, about 10 million households and enterprises across Australia will have the highest download speed of about 1Gbit/s.

A study commissioned by NBN shows that by 2030, the economic impact of upgrading another 1.5 million houses to FTTP connections may increase Australia’s GDP by 20 billion Australian dollars (12.6 billion US dollars).

In the latest Speedtest Global Index, Australia’s fixed broadband ranked 71st, 55 places behind its neighbor New Zealand.

This is not the first time the federal government has spent money on NBN this year.

In March this year, the former government promised to invest 480 million Australian dollars (US $303 million) to expand FWA and remote satellite services to as many as 1 million rural places. NBN contributed $270 million (US $170 million) to the plan and said it would use the funds to provide 5G support for its FWA infrastructure.

At the time of the latest capital injection, NBN was carrying out its plan to upgrade from FTTN to FTTP. The target of the project is 2 million houses, and it is estimated that about 550000 houses will be built by the end of the year.

As of June 30, 2022, more than 8.5 million Australian households and businesses have access to NBN, and another 3.6 million are ready to access. However, only 18% of NBN users use wholesale plans with download speeds of 100Mbit/s or above.