11 years after the ambitious project was announced, the NBN has completed the initial phase of its rollout and 11.7 million customers can now connect to the network.

In the nick of time, too; the NBN has powered the pandemic, allowing millions of Australian families to work and study from home amid rolling lockdowns caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

“I’m just so pleased and proud of our team that we did that, just at the time when the nation needed ubiquitous access to high-speed broadband through COVID,” said NBN Co CEO Stephen Rue.

“The number of people connected to our network grew from 5.5 million at the end of last year to 7.3 million at the end of June 30, 2020,”

NBN Co ended the financial year with a $3.78 billion loss, which masked its best-ever revenue result of more than $3.8 billion, about $130 million more than analysts had predicted.

The loss was, in part, due to the record $2.41 billion paid out to Telstra and Optus in compensation charges for use of their infrastructure and the migration of existing customers.

NBN CEO Stephen Rue says the payments to Telstra and Optus will decline in the near future.

“Over the next four years, those payments will reduce to about $1.5 billion over that period, and then they cease,” Mr Rue told Brooke Corte.

“That will help us get to cashflow break-even which is important because then we’ll have surplus cash which we can continue to invest in the network,”

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