Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome back Senator Colbeck. It's very good to see regular transmission resumed in Tasmania.

I'm very pleased that once again I can report that NBN has delivered on its operational and financial targets for the most recent half year, achieving a record number of connected services. In the six months to 31 December, NBN managed to connect an average of 7,000 premises every working day, making a total of 942,000 activations. To put that success in context, NBN connected almost as many premises in the previous six months as it did in the first six years of the project.

Around 50,000 premises a week were also added to NBN's service footprint. With so many more homes and businesses connected to the network, revenue grew to nearly $900 million for the half year alone. Average revenue per user was up from $43 to $44. Couple this with the great response from retailers to the recent pricing discounts for higher speed tiers, and we are now seeing the amount of capacity per user being purchased growing by close to 40 per cent. NBN is also predicting that close to one million subscribers will be migrated to the 50-megabit-per-second speed tier by mid year. This is between five and 10 times the speed experienced on the pre-NBN ADSL network.

These results clearly demonstrate that NBN has a business model that is working. It's delivering fast, affordable broadband for the Australian community.