ITNEWS, 1 March, 2018 – NBN Co will extend its promotional 50Mbps price offer through to the end of October to give retail service providers more time to prepare for the switch to a more permanent price construct.
The company this week revealed plans to create a “second promotion period” for its 50Mbps product and for the connectivity virtual circuit (CVC) discount that accompanies it.
Where the original promotional price offer had been due to run out at the end of April, the extension – if it wins regulatory approval – would see the offer run for an additional six months.
The extension will create a greater period of overlap between the temporary and permanent price offers that NBN Co unveiled at the end of last year.
The promotional offer – which is known as ‘Focus on 50’ – works within the boundaries of the existing NBN price construct, cutting the AVC cost of a 50Mbps product and offering 50 percent extra CVC – on top of what the RSP buys – for free.
It was intended to be a bridging measure that enabled NBN Co to bring a large percentage of its user base onto a higher-speed and less congested service, while giving RSPs time to make IT changes to work with an entirely new price construct.
The new price construct will offer AVC and CVC bundles for both the 50Mbps and 100Mbps wholesale tiers.
A consultation on the final form of that new price construct wraps up in NBN Co’s internal product development forum at the end of February.
NBN Co has indicated it remains on track to launch the new wholesale price bundles by the middle of this year.
As it looks now, RSPs will need to migrate a substantial number of 50Mbps customers from the temporary to permanent price construct.
NBN Co has said it expects more than 1.2 million premises to be on the 50Mbps tier by June, when the permanent construct comes into effect.
The lion’s share of these premises will be with Telstra, who this week said it would upgrade all its existing 25Mbps users to the 50Mbps tier.
Vodafone also recently said 80 percent of its NBN user base is on 50Mbps or higher plans.
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(2018), NBN Co to extend 50Mbps promo pricing until October, ITNews, viewed 1 March 2018, <https://www.itnews.com.au/news/nbn-co-to-extend-50mbps-promo-pricing-until-october-486052>.