NBN covering 70% of New England

12 Oct 2017

The National Broadband Network (NBN) is 70 per cent complete in the New England as connections continue to roll out across the electorate.

 

Deputy Prime Minister and Member for New England, Barnaby Joyce, highlighted the 59,603 New England premises that are “ready for service” according to the latest report on October 5.

 

“This is great news for people in the New England,” Mr Joyce said.

 

“It’s good for business, good for education and it’s good for families.

 

“This technology is going make our lives a lot easier in the years to come as more services are moved online, some exclusively.” 

 

The majority of New England’s “ready” connections are fixed wireless (18,546) but also includes satellite (13,912), fibre to the node - FTTN (13,437) and fibre to the premise (12,467). 

 

Kootingal is the next location to go live in New England with an estimated 700 premises expected to be ready for service with FTTN on November 17.

 

They will be followed by 4300 premises at Hillvue and South Tamworth on December 1, and a further 3510 premises at Calala, Kingswood, South and West Tamworth on January 1.

 

In April 2018, more than 2000 premises in Uralla and Walcha will receive the NBN, followed by a further 2000 homes in Werris Creek and Tenterfield in August.

 

Tabulum’s fixed wireless NBN is scheduled for completion on February 1.


In total, there are 11,982 connections under construction and an additional 13,730 in planning throughout the New England.

 

Mr Joyce encouraged residents in premises which are NBN-ready but yet to connect to the service, to do so at their earliest convenience.

 

“We’ve had a 34 per cent take-up rate of the NBN so far but that needs to be more,” he said.

 

“When the NBN rolls out into an area, you have 18 months to transition to a new NBN service, and I encourage all residents with a service available to do so.” 

 

Nearly 2 million NBN connections are ready for service across NSW and 6.4 million Australia-wide.

 

The rollout in regional Australia is more than two-thirds complete, and the fixed wireless technology often used in regional outskirts offers broadband speeds of up to 50Mbps, soon to be 100Mbps – much faster than ADSL services available in cities.

 

The Coalition’s NBN is one of the greatest corporate turnaround stories in recent memory. From a network which had just 51,000 active users in 2013 to almost 3 million users in 2017, the NBN doubled its footprint in the past year and is on track to do so again in the coming year.

 

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