NBN activations to rise from 10,000 per week to 8,400 ... wait, what?

Last Friday, nbn^TM congratulated itself on a positive user experience and a record number of activations.

With its half-year results out and an election year beginning, it's hardly surprising that the company building Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) is touting the success of the multi-technology model with the claim that customer enthusiasm is equivalent for both fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) and fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) products.

However, it's the company's claimed activation rate fir new services that is raising eyebrows.

The company's media release is unequivocal about the numbers. It reports:

That last claim has been queried by former nbn^TM CTO, Gary McLaren (now CTO and co-owner of Hong Kong Broadband).

As he points out in this blog post, NBN's forecast for activations in the next half-year indicates a slowdown.

The graphed target (219,000 activations in 26 weeks) doesn't assume 10,000 activations per week, but just above 8,400.

McLaren notes this could merely be conservatism in forecasting, but another possible reason for the discrepancy can be inferred from the media release, which says FTTN ran at 8,000 activations per week (12 week rolling average), while total activations hit a rolling average of 10,000 per week (suggesting that fibre connections on the FTTP network are running well ahead of 10,000 per week).

However, the FTTP network is going to start winding down soon, since it's nearly at the 20 per cent of premises nominated in nbn^TM's 2015 corporate plan as its final target.

If we take 11 million homes and businesses as the final NBN footprint, that sets the upper bound of FTTP-connected premises at around 2.2 million.

There are now 1.67 million premises ready-for-service on the Fibre-to-the-premises network (page 10 of its half-year presentation - PDF).

So the FTTP rollout is soon to start winding down, and the big boost from the Telstra and Optus hybrid fibre-coax cable networks isn't going to land in the next six months.

The company predicts 377,000 premises will be added to the FTTN ready-for-service footprint in the next six months, reaching 500,000.

Its financial results were unremarkable. The company reported total half-year revenue of AU$164 million, with a full-year target of $300 million, and monthly average revenue per user (ARPU) is $43, up 10 per cent on the corresponding 2014 half-year of $39. ®