Commenting on NBN Co’s release of its corporate white paper on Tuesday, Communications Minister Paul Fletcher said the plan assumed about 75% of households would take up the NBN, “so there’s already an assumption that some households will not take up the NBN for a range of reasons and that can potentially include 5G”.
In response to questions, he said it was “premature” to be talking about the privatisation of NBN Co. Asked how many more households he was expecting to sign up to the NBN under the new pricing, Fletcher said, "We believe there are about 500,000 budget conscious households within the existing NBN footprint who right now are not taking the NBN because they don’t think it represents value for money for what they want to do”.
“If we can have more retail service providers offering a $60 a month retail priced plan with no monthly data download limit, we think that here’s a prospect of getting some of those 500,000 households to come onto the NBN.
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Fletcher said that when the previous Labor government established the NBN and legislated the arrangements in relation to it, “they set out in the legislation a series of steps that need to occur before NBN Co can be privatised".
And, while acknowledging that 5G was a “very significant development” in mobile telecommunications, he said, however, that it was unlikely to present a significant threat to the NBN Co business plan.
“It’s important to understand the amount of data that households are consuming is going up very dramatically. In June this year on the NBN, the average user downloaded 255GB a month,” Fletcher said.
“Just nine years ago on fixed line networks that number was 11GB a month. We’ve gone from 11 to 255 a month.
“With that continued growth in data demand, a fixed line network like the NBN is always going to have an advantage in delivering efficient and economic prices at a proposition that is attractive to customers.
“That capacity to download huge amounts of data people are already consuming and they’ll likely increase."
