Australia’s NBN has been the subject of numerous posts on these pages. NBN Co’s latest half‑year results [pdf, 2.1MB] offer a clear signals that Australia’s long (and often messy) transition from copper to fibre is finally tipping into a new phase. The headline numbers are solid enough (revenue up 2%, EBITDA up 5%), but a hidden story lies beneath the financials, where we see a behavioural shift by Australian broadband users. It’s a shift that echoes themes I’ve written about before: the disconnect between the price of telecom services and service provider ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).
The most striking figure in the report is the tenfold jump in customers on 500 Mbps and above, from 3% to 31% in just twelve months. That’s not incremental growth; that’s a structural pivot in how households consume connectivity. It validates what I argued in earlier posts about the NBN’s design compromises: Australians were never “satisfied” with slower speeds — they were constrained by the economics of a network built around copper bottlenecks. Once the value equation changed, behaviour changed with it.
This is where the economics get interesting. NBN Co’s Accelerate Great initiative effectively boosted speeds for a third of customers at no additional wholesale cost. In other words, effective prices fell, yet residential ARPU rose by $3 to $52. That’s the paradox I’ve highlighted before in the context of Australia’s NBN and other wholesale fibre markets: when you give customers more for the same price, they don’t simply pocket the savings, many migrate up the value chain. Faster tiers become the new baseline, usage expands, and the network becomes more central to daily life.
This is a dynamic we’ve seen in other markets, including Canada: increasing speeds with the latest technology results in a better value proposition and it delivers more value to consumers and network operators alike. Lower operating costs, fewer faults, and a multi‑decade asset life create room for service providers to improve value without undermining revenue. NBN Co’s 7% drop in operating expenses and 15% reduction in direct network costs are dividends of replacing copper with glass.
The milestone of three million FTTP customers — and one million copper‑to‑fibre upgrades completed — marks a symbolic turning point for Australia’s NBN. A decade ago, fibre‑to‑the‑node was sold as a pragmatic compromise. Today, it’s being quietly retired, with 47,000 premises upgrading every month and the final 622,000 FTTN lines scheduled for completion by 2030. Australia’s political debate may have faded, but the engineering logic of increased investment has prevailed.
What’s equally notable is the shift in business demand. Nearly half of business customers are now on high‑speed tiers, driven by cloud workloads, AI tools, and the growing need for symmetrical bandwidth. The download‑to‑upload ratio for business is already 2:1—far closer to enterprise patterns than residential ones. That’s another indicator of a market moving up the curve, not down.
All of this reinforces a broader lesson: when networks remove friction — whether technological or economic — customers respond with higher engagement, higher usage, and indeed, higher ARPU. ARPU goes up, not because the price increased, but because customers are seeing greater value from the lower prices for the next tier. It’s a reminder that affordability and revenue growth are not mutually exclusive.
That phenomenon applies in Canada as well. At the recent Scotiabank TMT investor conference, TELUS CFO Doug French said success is based on being relevant to customers. As the NBN data demonstrates, value, not headline price, drives broadband behaviour. When networks deliver more speed, more reliability, and more headroom for emerging applications, households and businesses naturally migrate upward. The result is a healthier revenue mix, lower operating costs, and the financial ability for network operators to invest in platforms that can sustain the next decade of digital demand.
Canada is already deep into this transition to fibre, but there is a need to ensure the government policy environment encourages continued network investments. Yesterday, Ofcom (the UK telecom regulator) released a policy statement, “Promoting competition and investment in fibre networks: Telecoms Access Review 2026-31”. Most significantly, at paragraph 2.12, it states, “Our strategy is to promote investment in gigabit-capable networks through network competition in areas where this is viable. We consider that network competition brings potentially significant benefits to consumers, compared to competition based on regulated access to wholesale services provided by a single network.”
It continues in paragraph 2.12, “Network competition creates stronger incentives to attract and retain customers by offering them the services they want, and so is a more effective spur for innovation and investment in high quality networks than access-based competition. This is because network providers have much greater scope for product differentiation and can strive to win customers and generate higher margins by offering a better service than their competitors.”
The Ofcom policy statement, promoting competition and investment in fibre, will be worth further examination. I have already expressed concerns that Canada’s current regulatory framework is inhibiting investment. In a blog post yesterday, Ted Woodhead noted “there is a net reduction in total industry Capex which is a trend that Canadians hoping for better service, or any service at all, should find deeply disturbing.” A report from Scotiabank yesterday repeated previous advice for incumbents to materially reduce capital expenditures given the current regulatory climate.
Fibre is more than just a technology upgrade. It is an enabler for an economic reset, helping align network capabilities with customer expectations and needs for an AI-driven digital economy.
As we’ve seen in the results from Australia’s NBN, that alignment is where quality, coverage, affordability, and investment can coexist.