There’s a long standing joke at Reckoner that we could pivot the entire site to focus on just the NBN and it’s zany adventures and probably pull in more traffic than we currently do.
This week is a perfect example of that with the flood gates opening with information and stories all centred around the NBN. So instead of peppering your news feeds with a bunch of little stories we’re putting into one.
I present to you… “This week in ‘NBN'”.
TPG and their now subsidiary iiNet have a combined NBN subscriber base of 561,000 users. The TPG branded connections account for 262,000 users with an average revenue per user (ARPU) of $66 whilst the iiNet group accounts for 299,000 with an ARPU of $72.60.
TPG’s ARPU, down $1.20 from this time last year, continues to be their main point of contention in the NBN’s rollout and a driver in their decision to deploy their own mobile 4G/5G network in the new year.
“The fixed-line residential broadband margin erosion faced by the industry in light of the NBN underlines the importance of the group’s strategy to take advantage of the valuable assets it has assembled to inject itself into the industry’s mobile sector…” said TPG executive chairman David Teoh.
TPG have something to say about the construction of their new network too. Themselves along with dark fibre company Superloop group are petitioning that planning changes passed in 2011 and 2015, allowing the construction of telco infrastructure without council approval, should apply to everyone.
Currently the skirting of council regulations only applies should the infrastructure be contributing to a “national” network for wholesale purposes only, say for instance…. oh I don’t know, the NBN.
NBN Co themselves announced the creation of a new “tech lab” this week. The new lab will use machine learning to scour data sets in order to potentially highlight and isolate faults.
The new “lab” exists only in a virtual sense being staffed in both Melbourne & Sydney. NBN Co are hopeful that through its currently undeveloped and unannounced algorithms they can determine if a fault can be handled remotely or requires an on-site tech.
In association with the new lab NBN Co also announced a “limited” in home service trial to address speed issues. With more than 54,000 users unable to achieve promised peak speeds of just 25 Mbps via FTTN or FTTB they have found repeated cases of in-home wiring as the root cause.
NBN Co said it would conduct “a limited range of remediation activities – including isolating wiring from the first phone socket and simple repair and alteration of premises wiring – at no charge to the end user”.
Finally NBN Co have done a back-flip (they must be good at those these days) and decided to reveal the numbers for users in currently ADSL covered fringe areas that will be forced to migrate satellite or fixed wireless instead of receiving hardline service.
Approximately 1500 premises (as of August 2017) fall into what NBN Co CEO Bill Morrow calls “very unique, rare circumstance[s]” where homes are on copper loops too long to support 25Mbps and likely to thus receive satellite.
And that’s the end of This week in ‘NBN’.