Stephen Rue (NBN Co)
NBN Co has posted $1.31 billion in revenue for the first quarter of the financial year, a 4 per cent increase year-on-year.
Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) reached $894 million in the three months to 30 September, up from $714 million in the first quarter of FY22.
However, as NBN Co began to wind up the transfer of customers from the Telstra and Optus networks to its own, subscriber costs fell from $86 million last quarter to virtually zero this year.
The broadband builder now expects to generate total revenue in the range of $5.2 billion to $5.4 billion and EBITDA of between $3.4 billion and $3.6 billion for the full FY23.
Capital expenditure for the three months ended 30 September 2022 was $712 million, up from $562 million in the prior corresponding period primarily due to the increased focus on fibre expansion.
More than 9,200 additional homes and businesses were connected to services over the National Broadband Network (NBN) during the quarter, taking total activations to more than 8.5 million.
As of 30 September 2022, approximately 77 per cent of residential and business customers were connected to plans based on NBN wholesale speed tiers with peak download speeds of 50Mbps and above and approximately 19 per cent were on NBN wholesale speed tiers offering peak download speeds of 100Mbps or higher.
In March, NBN Co announced the first 50,000 customers served by fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) had become eligible to upgrade to fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP).
The company has subsequently made around 50,000 FTTN premises ready to order higher speed services per month, on average and claims to be on target to make around 550,000 FTTN premises eligible to upgrade to FTTP by 31 December 2022.
It now intends to link a further 300,000 units to FTTP connections across Australia.
