It’s a huge week for Australia’s National Broadband Network, as the NBN speed upgrades that have been teased and talked about for the past 12 months are officially now live.
As we expected, not every single retail service provider (RSP) has updated their websites just yet (and some have even said that while they’ll be honouring NBN Co’s upgrades, the changes won’t be rolled out until October), but based on the providers who have pushed through the updates, we can already see a pretty clear picture of what the new NBN 500 plans, in particular, can offer Australians.
One word: value.
Big speed, low price
When NBN Co first announced this month’s plan upgrades, it said they would arrive at no extra cost to RSPs. We of course hoped that meant customers wouldn’t be asked to pay anything extra and, based on what we’ve seen so far for the new NBN 500 tier, that’s largely been the case. The result is a set of NBN plans that now offer up to 500Mbps download speeds for prices that, just a couple of weeks ago, would only get you 100Mbps. Effectively, it’s a 5x increase for free.
In the table below, we’ve cherry picked a handful of providers now offering NBN 500 plans, to give you a good indication as to the sort of price you can expect to pay. We’ve chosen cheap options such as Spintel and Kogan Internet, alongside more expensive alternatives from the likes of Origin Energy. Origin is currently the most expensive provider of those we monitor, but we imagine that will change once Telstra activates its upgrades.
Over the past 18 months, we’d already noticed that the best NBN 100 plans had begun to offer much greater value than their slower NBN 50 counterparts, with the average monthly cost of the faster option generally costing users less than AU$10 more each month. Now that 100Mbps plans have morphed into plans offering 5x the speed for the same price, 50Mbps plans look like even worse value.
To paint a clearer picture, we’ll use Spintel as an example. The telco still offers an NBN 100 plan (likely for customers on older NBN connection technologies who aren’t yet able to take advantage of the speed-boosted plans) alongside a new NBN 500 plan that has the lowest introductory cost of any provider right now at just AU$64p/m.
Spintel’s slower, 100Mbps plan? That starts at AU$68p/m before settling at the same ongoing rate as its new 500Mbps counterpart of AU$86.95p/m. Not only does this mean you’ll pay less in the first year on the faster plan, but ultimately, you’d be paying the exact same amount each ongoing each year.
What you need to upgrade
Last week, we detailed everything you needed to get these brand new high-speed NBN plans. The main criteria is to have the right connection type. This is either fibre to the premises (FTTP) or hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC). If you do have either of these, you can sign up for a new NBN 500 plan right away.
If you don’t have either of these connections, then it’s quite likely you’ll be eligible for NBN Co’s free fibre upgrade, which get the required equipment installed at your premises. If you are in an eligible area and want faster broadband, we really don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t take advantage. Not only will you be able to experience much faster and more reliable internet speeds at home, but you’ll also be ensuring your home is futureproofed.
You can view our favourite NBN 500 plan options so far in our dedicated guide, or you can view a mixture of NBN 500 and NBN 100 plan pricing in the widget below. The price comparison widget perfectly visualises just how affordable some of the new plans are, compared to the slower options they replace.