Belong will no longer sell NBN 100 plans to FTTN or FTTB customers

Alex Choros - Managing Editor + Group Telco Editor

Last updated 16 March 2020

Belong has followed Telstra's lead, and will no longer sell NBN 100 plans to customers connecting to the National Broadband Network via Fibre-to-the-Node (FTTN) or Fibre-to-the-Basement (FTTB) technology types.

This limits Belong NBN 100 plans to customers with a Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP), Fibre-to-the-Curb, or Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC) connections.

As with Telstra, the decision was made due to the potential for FTTN and FTTB connections to under-perform.

"We have made a decision to only offer [NBN 100 speeds] on FTTP, FTTC, and HFC for the time being," said a Belong spokesperson. "The reason for this is because a number of our customers on FTTN and FTTB do not have connections that are capable of achieving 100Mbps."

"It is often the case that customers that sign up to these plans will be subsequently notified that they cannot achieve top speed and end up downgrading to a lower plan or leaving."

While the move isn't all that surprising - Telstra is Belong's parent company - there is one key difference between the two approaches. Telstra will not sell an NBN 100 plan to FTTC customers, while Belong will. FTTC connections use a much smaller amount of copper, which minimises the potential for speed degradation. In many cases, a FTTC connection will terminate at a premise's driveway, and rely on short length of copper for the final few metres.

A Belong spokesperson told us that the telco will continue to sell NBN 100 plans to FTTC customers, because a greater proportion can achieve the advertised speeds.

"This is not feasible for Telstra given the sheer volume of connections that Telstra might have to reconfigure following speed tests," said the spokesperson. "While the propositions are roughly the same for Belong and Telstra, Belong connects fewer customers in total."

There is no way for a telco to test a customer's physical connection speeds until a plan has been purchased. This means providers have no idea on what plan speeds a customer can realistically obtain until they're connected to the NBN.

In the latest Measuring Broadband Australia report, the ACCC found that a quarter of FTTN customers on NBN 100 and NBN 50 plans did not receive anywhere near the speeds they were paying for. NBN Co expects that 76% of FTTN connections won't be able to achieve NBN 100 speeds by the end of the rollout.

According to the latest NBN corporate plan, about 40% of all NBN connections will be facilitated via FTTN or FTTB connection types (NBN Co doesn't breakout individual numbers for these two). Only 30% of premises will be connected via FTTP and HFC technologies, and about 10% via FTTC.

Alex Choros

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Alex Choros is the Managing Editor of WhistleOut Australia and an award-winning journalist. He's been writing about consumer technology for over a decade and is an expert on the Australian telco sector, to the point where he knows far too many phone and internet plans by heart. In addition to leading the WhistleOut editorial team, Alex is responsible for ruining the office Sonos with his troubled taste in music.

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