NBN doubles revenue in the space of a year as it looks to deal with complaints problem

Australia’s much-maligned National Broadband Network (NBN) has announced a more than 100% increase in profits over the past year, despite receiving record numbers of complaints.

The state-owned enterprise is continuing to rollout the broadband upgrade programme across the country, but has encountered numerous technical and financial problems along the way.

One such consequence is that more than half of the three million users now hooked up are using the fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) solution, cornerstone of the government’s mixed broadband approach. FTTN is said to be cheaper and faster to deploy.

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NBN is generating around $405mn a quarter, revenue it says will allow it to concentrate on fixing some of the problems with customer experience.

Recently, Telstra commitment to compensating 40,000 customers after admitting it advertised higher than delivered broadband speeds. There has been an ongoing dispute between telcos and NBN, the latter saying that insufficient capacity is being bought up by the likes of Telstra and others to serve customers properly.

NBN CEO Bill Morrow commented: “I want to note here it's going to take months to iron out much of the issues. We are overcoming obstacles almost on a constant basis in terms of being able to get to every home in this country."