When will I get the NBN?

More than six million homes and businesses will be able to access or be in progress to receive NBN services by mid-2016

The NBN fibre rollout will be underway or complete for more than 4.85 million homes and businesses by mid-2016, under NBN Co’s 2013-16 national fibre rollout plan .

NBN Co has also begun announcing its next-generation fixed wireless and long term satellite rollouts – expected to be finished in 2015 – with announcements to date covering more than 200 areas across Australia.

In the meantime, eligible rural and regional Australians have immediate access to better broadband services through the NBN Interim Satellite Service .

To see if the rollout in your area has already been announced, check out NBN Co’s rollout map .

What happens if I type in my post code or address and my home or business isn’t listed in the rollout?

NBN Co will be publishing updates to its fibre rollout plan each year on its website and more on its fixed wireless and satellite services, which it expects to complete in 2015, as it becomes available.

In general, when the NBN rollout has begun in an area, NBN Co will continue the rollout progressively from areas that have already been covered.

You can subscribe to NBN Co’s newsletter to stay up to date with all the latest rollout news here .

Why will I have to wait while everyone else gets the NBN?

We hear that a lot – and many of us at the Department of Broadband, Communication and Digital Economy are looking forward to the rollout in our streets too – but the answer is: NBN Co is connecting towns and suburbs according to its network plan.

It’s all about engineering. The NBN construction model is made up of several layers:

Firstly, the transit network, which is the large optic fibre ring that will go round Australia, and connects up 121 points of interconnect (POI). These POIs are where phone and internet providers connect their networks into the NBN.
Secondly, there are a number of smaller rings of optic fibre cable, which go from the transit network to telephone exchanges. Once NBN Co has installed equipment into the phone exchanges, they are known as fibre access nodes, or ‘FANs’.
Thirdly, each phone exchange, or FAN, can cover several suburbs, but each suburb is divided up into a number of fibre serving access modules (FSAMs). Each FSAM covers about 3000 homes and businesses and is surrounded by a loop of fibre.

You can read about this in NBN Co’s blog post ‘Why the NBN is like an onion’ .

That said, the Australian Government has given NBN Co some guidelines. These include:

construction should be across both rural and metropolitan areas
construction should be across all states and territories
the rollout in Tasmania should be finished by 2015
rolling out the fixed wireless and satellite networks as quickly as possible
giving priority to new developments.

You can read more about how NBN Co selects where to roll out the network next here.

Why does it take so long to build the NBN?

It’s a fair question. Everyone wants better broadband. And most of us would prefer to have it now.

However, building the NBN is a big job. It will take about 10 years to replace our ageing copper telephone network.

NBN Co wrote a great blog post about why it will take 10 years to build the NBN and compared it to the copper network rollout that was built (mostly) in the early 20th century saying this:

“Many people don’t know how long it took to build Australia’s current copper telephone network. According to the Telemuseum in Queensland, Australia’s first government-owned phone exchange opened in 1880 – but much of the network was still being built at the time of World War II.”