Morrow yesterday confirmed that, under his leadership, NBN Co will take on TPG directly by bringing forward its own rollout of wholesale broadband fibre-to-the-basement services to the same buildings.
And he revealed he NBN Co would urge the Vertigan cost-benefit analysis panel to approve an NBN Co plan for a levy on TPG and any other companies that seek to cherrypick major city rollouts. “We think that we need to consider: does the government impose a cross-subsidy component on the infrastructure competitors?,” he said.
“So if for example, TPG is going into a certain area, they can do whatever cost model that they can come up with, but there’s a levy, there’s a subsidy… to partly offset the costs of getting a broadband connection to rural areas.”
NBN Co yesterday also published its latest financial results. They showed that company recorded an operating loss of $1.18 billion after generating revenue of $69.8 million in the nine months ended March 31 2014. Telecommunications revenue rose to $38.5 million over the nine months.
At March 31, the network had passed 512,659 fixed line and fixed wireless premises, an increase of nearly 96,000, or 23 per cent over the previous quarter. But despite this Morrow confessed that only 166,642 premises had been connected to the NBN.
Morrow agreed this is not good enough.”The primary focus for management has been on building the network, rather than connecting families and businesses,” he said. “We need to do both and we need to do them better.”
NBN Co said it has now completed 113 of its 121 points of interconnect on its core network, and 80 per cent of the transit network has been built.
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