Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I thank members for their questions. Dealing with the member for Greenway's question, the best forecast we have for premises with access to 25 megs by 2016 remains the strategic review, although that will of course be superseded in due course by the new corporate plan, which is in preparation. I refer the honourable member and anyone listening to this discussion to its forecast that, by 2016, 43 per cent of the fixed-line footprint—that is, 43 per cent of 93 per cent—will have access to 25 megabits per second.

There will obviously be other premises outside the NBN footprint which will have more than 25 megabits per second, although it is hard to identify what that percentage is, and it is expected that, if the fixed wireless build is substantially completed by that stage and of course if the satellites are deployed by that stage, people covered by that will have 25 megs. By 2019, the strategic review forecasts under scenario 6, the optimised multitechnology mix, that 91 per cent of premises in the fixed-line footprint would have 50 megs and, of that fixed-line footprint, by that time, 65 to 75 per cent of the fixed-line footprint would have 100 megabits per second.

Now, I should say that, in terms of access to speeds, the technologies are improving all the time. The ability to get higher and higher speeds out of a connection which consists, for the last few hundred metres, of copper, is getting better all the time. That is why Deutsche Telekom, for example, which had started off with a very ambitious substantial fibre-to-the-premises rollout, has stopped it and is now overwhelmingly concentrating on a VDSL deployment—because of the cost—

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