Good news for apartment livers: NBN is upgrading the internet for 700,000 units in 50,000 buildings. The apartment upgrade is all part of NBN Co’s fibre upgrade program that until now seemed to somewhat skirt those of us not residing in a house.
We last covered NBN Co’s upgrade plan last month, when the company responsible for rolling out the National Broadband Network declared a further 2 million homes currently served by Fibre to the Node (FTTN) would be upgraded to Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) – which, as you all know, means a significant boost in quality and speed.
But today, NBN Co is prepping 700,000 apartments. Listing the areas eligible would be a very long list, so instead, to check if your apartment is one of the lucky bunch, head over here.
Full fibre offers customers access to the highest residential speed tiers (NBN 100, NBN 250, and NBN 1000) which deliver a better, and more reliable internet experience. While there are some caveats, mostly dependent on your ISP, as a general rule, full fibre can deliver wholesale download speeds of close to 1 Gbps.
“Full fibre is NBN’s fastest and most reliable residential connection on the NBN network – offering speeds 15 times faster than our NBN Home Standard plan,” NBN executive general manager for products Ken Walliss said in a statement.
“On this fastest residential speed, you can stream 4K videos with ease, and play online games with minimal lag.
“You may also be able to download a Call of Duty – Cold War (130GB) game update in under 30 minutes – compared to 7 hours on a 50 Mbps tier.”
We don’t hate hearing those stats.
But while this is of course great to see, you as the renter (or even owner) will need to appeal to body corporates/strata owners, as they’ll be the ones who actually have to arrange the full-fibre upgrade. But the good news is that under the program, NBN Co said it will enter into an Area Switch Agreement with the body corporate for each building which will see fibre delivered to each apartment from $275 including GST (for example, a 10-apartment building would cost $2,750 to connect, so it’s not bank-breaking and honestly could draw in more interest from renters…).
The company responsible for the NBN network is hoping to upgrade 10 million premises, or up to 90 per cent of its FTTN customers to FTTP ‘Home Ultrafast’ by the end of 2025. Currently, more than 4.36 million Australian households have full fibre or are able to order full fibre.