Its not everyday service providers come up to you and says hey, we will be increasing our services by about 5 fold but you will not pay anything extra above what you are paying already. If you receive an email saying this, you might think that this is a scam, and someone is out there trying to separate you from your hard earned cash. But alas, this is happening with all our NBN internet services. Did you say 5 times? Yep, I said 5 times faster internet speed for no increase in fees.

NBN has its fair share of supporters and haters as with most government backed projects. Some swear by it and think its the next best thing after sliced bread. Whilst the other half think, its the biggest load of rubbish and waste of money the government has ever done. And both sides will have solid arguments to back them up. In some places NBN is either absent or so slow to be as good as non-existent. This is the reason why StarLink was quickly adopted and taken up by thousands of people fed up with slow internet in Australia. It offered speeds that some people could only dream of especially in remote areas.

Then we have the other half which looks on with hands on their hips wondering what the fuss is about. This other half has the faster version of the NBN which is FTTP. With FTTP, a user has a fibre optic cable coming from NBN directly to their garage with no copper or coaxial in between. This is the fastest method to get internet to your house. It currently supports the fastest consumer internet speed of 1000Mbps which will soon be the 2000Mbps package which is blazingly fast. So the technology supports these speeds.

The NBN is a beast with many faces with the two extremes explained above. In December 2013, the Australian government adopted a Multi-Technology Mix (MTM) after NBN Co’s Strategic Review said MTM will save money and have high internet speed for everyone. To make MTM viable, NBN Co re-negotiated deals to access Telstra’s copper & HFC and Optus’s HFC, letting it reuse and upgrade existing plant instead of overbuilding it all with fibre.

This last part is the one that has resulted in the feelings that most people have of NBN. Upgrading the copper network meant that money was spent to upgrade a technology that was outdated and known to be slow. In every single instance users have complained about slow speeds, it has always been places where there’s some copper or HFC in the network. If the government had decided to bite the bullet once, all these issues would have been non-existent. They have since realised their mistake and this is being fixed. Since 2022, policy has pivoted back toward fibre: the government invested $2.4 billion to extend FTTP upgrades to an extra 1.5 million FTTN premises by 2025, and more upgrades for remaining FTTN areas were announced in early 2025 (targeting completion by 2030). This is good news.