Small businesses, particularly in regional Australia, are playing a significant role in the growing shift to faster broadband plans, according to NBN Co, as lower-priced business fibre options and changing workloads reshape demand.
Speaking on the company’s half-year results call on Wednesday, NBN executives said the uptake of higher-speed services was no longer confined to households, with SMEs increasingly moving to faster tiers.
This comes off the back of the Albanese government announcing a $3 billion upgrade to the NBN in regional and rural areas last year. This was followed by the announcement of free speed boosts across the network in September.
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“In regional Australia, we’ve now got 353,000 business premises and regional services that we’re providing connections for,” NBN Co chief customer officer, Anna Perrin, told SmartCompany on the call.
“We’ve definitely seen strong uptake in our business fibre products since it was launched,” Perrin said.
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Perrin said recent changes to NBN’s wholesale business pricing had helped make faster services more accessible to smaller operators.
“As we’ve driven fibre more across the country, we’ve been able to reduce the price and rebalance our portfolio,” Perrin said.
“We’ve seen strong uptake in that small business end of town, as we’re offering much more affordable options to small businesses across the country.”
Regional SMEs love a fast connection
The shift is also reportedly happening among businesses using regional fixed wireless connections. According to NBN Co, around 52,000 regional businesses are currently connected via fixed wireless, and most are already moving to higher-speed plans.
“Of those, 71% are connected to high-speed tiers,” Perrin said.
NBN Co said evolving technology needs were a key factor behind the broader trend, with businesses showing different usage patterns to households.
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“Business customers require higher download and upload than residential,” Perrin said.
She noted that business services typically require far greater upload capacity, with a download-to-upload ratio of “two-to-one for business and enterprise customers, versus eight-to-one for customers on residential plans”.
While the company did not directly attribute the change to specific tools such as AI, Perrin said the pattern reflected broader adoption of cloud services and remote work.
“We know that businesses of all shapes and sizes are wanting to access more cloud services and use more tools as people work from home,” she said.
What comes next for NBN satellite services
For businesses outside the fixed-line footprint, NBN Co confirmed that trials of its planned Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite service are expected to begin later this year.
“LEO services, we anticipate, in line with previous guidance, will be available for testing and trials by retailers in the second half of the calendar year,” said Gavin Williams, NBN Co’s chief development officer for regional and remote.
The service, delivered in partnership with Amazon, is intended to eventually replace the current Sky Muster satellite platform as it approaches end-of-life in the early 2030s.
Across the network, NBN Co reported continued growth in higher-speed plans, with 41% of customers now on 100Mbps services or above, up from 28% a year earlier.
The company said more than one million premises have now upgraded from legacy copper to fibre, with 26% of those upgrades occurring in regional areas.
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NBN Co CEO, Ellie Sweeney, said the figures reflected growing demand for faster connections.
“When Australians can access higher speeds at better value, they do not just upgrade, their use expands and demand keeps rising,” Sweeney said.
The push to higher speeds comes as NBN Co faces ongoing financial and regulatory constraints.
The Albanese government has limited how much of the company’s latest fibre upgrade costs can be recovered through future wholesale price rises, capping eligible expenditure at $1.7 billion of a $3.8 billion program.
While NBN executives maintain the network can still deliver a commercial return, the cap is intended to prevent steep price increases for consumers and businesses.
NBN Co has reported total accumulated losses of more than $36 billion to date, reflecting the long-term nature of the national network build and the limits on how quickly upgrade investments can be recouped.
