The short version
The National Broadband Network was built in two halves. About half the country got fibre run all the way into the building. The other half got fibre to a green cabinet down the street, or to a pit at the kerb, and then the last stretch was the copper phone line that was already there. Those are Fibre to the Node and Fibre to the Curb — FTTN and FTTC — and for a decade the official position was that you could upgrade to full fibre if you wanted to, at your own initiative, usually by buying a faster plan first.
That has now flipped. On 22 April 2026 nbn announced a Targeted Upgrade program: a managed transition of selected premises off copper, with suspension and disconnection of the legacy service as the end point for anyone who does not act. The dates it published are specific.
- First notifications: July 2027. About 130,000 homes and businesses in year one, contacted through their own phone and internet provider rather than by nbn directly.
- First suspensions: January 2028, and only at premises where no fibre upgrade order has been placed.
- The upgrade is free and does not require a faster plan. This is the part most people get wrong, because it was not true for most of the program’s history. Under the Targeted Upgrade you keep your existing speed tier and your existing price.
- You do not have to wait to be picked. The on-demand upgrade path, Fibre Connect, is still open and has already delivered more than a million upgrades. Ordering early is the entire trick of this article.
nbn’s own framing of the hard end is deliberately gentle: it describes “multiple notifications, the option to extend or defer before a service is suspended, and case-managed support”, with suspension and disconnection as a last resort. Trade reporting on the same announcement is blunter about the mechanics, and the two descriptions are not in conflict — they are the same process told from different ends.
What actually happens if you ignore the letters
The sequence below is as reported by WhistleOut on 23 April 2026, the day after the announcement. We flag it as reported rather than documented because nbn’s public statement does not spell out the intervals; it says only that there will be multiple notifications and an option to defer.
| Six months out | First notification, sent via your retail provider. The clock is six months to place an order for the free fibre upgrade. |
|---|---|
| Three months out | Second notification. |
| One month out | Third notification. |
| At the deadline | If no upgrade has been ordered, the legacy copper service is suspended. Placing an order at this point restores the connection. |
| Thirty days after suspension | If still no order, the service is disconnected. Getting back online then means ordering a new nbn service from scratch rather than resuming the old one. |
| Volume after year one | Reported at around 20,000 premises per month once the program is running — which is the number that should shape your timing, for reasons below. |
Reasoning beyond the sources: 20,000 a month is a throughput figure, not a demand figure. It reflects how many fibre installations nbn and its contractors can physically complete in the targeted areas. Anyone who waits until their letter arrives is queuing inside that number alongside everyone else in their suburb who also waited. Anyone who orders voluntarily in 2026 is being installed out of a much shorter, much less contended queue. The program is designed so that the patient customer and the impatient one both end up on fibre; the impatient one just picks the week.
Three doors closed on copper before the mandate
The April 2026 announcement did not come out of nowhere. Three earlier decisions had already made staying on copper progressively less attractive, and they are worth understanding because together they explain why nbn now feels able to set a hard date.
1. The fast speed tiers left copper behind
On 14 September 2025, nbn switched on a set of accelerated wholesale speed tiers announced a year earlier. Home Fast went from 100/20 Mbps to 500/50. Home Superfast went from 250/25 to 750/50. Home Ultrafast doubled its upload, from about 1000/50 to about 1000/100. A new Home Hyperfast tier arrived at 2000/200 Mbps. There was no increase in wholesale price for the accelerated tiers, and in most cases retailers passed the uplift to existing customers automatically.
Every one of those tiers is available on Fibre to the Premises and Hybrid Fibre Coaxial only. Anna Perrin, nbn’s Chief Customer Officer, framed it as more than nine million premises becoming eligible for the highest residential tiers. The corollary went unsaid: if you are on FTTN or FTTC, you cannot buy any of them at any price. The gap between the two halves of the network stopped being a matter of degree in September 2025 and became a matter of category.
2. The eligibility catch was removed for Fibre to the Curb
For years the free upgrade came with a condition that quietly disqualified the households most likely to want it: you had to order a plan of 100 Mbps or faster to become eligible. If your copper run could not deliver 100 Mbps — which was often exactly why you wanted fibre — you were being asked to pay for a speed you could not yet receive.
nbn signalled the end of that on 15 December 2025, saying it planned to drop the high-speed requirement for FTTC premises from July 2026 and estimating about 600,000 homes would become newly eligible. It followed through on 1 July 2026, and the figure it published on the day was larger: approximately 860,000 customers in the FTTC footprint, now able to order a full-fibre upgrade on whatever plan they already have.
There is an asymmetry here we have not seen explained anywhere. The removal applies to Fibre to the Curb. We could not find an equivalent statement extending it across the board to on-demand Fibre to the Node upgrades, which is the larger and generally slower-performing footprint. FTTN premises whose lines physically underperform have a separate route — see below — but a working-but-mediocre FTTN line appears, on the published material, still to sit behind the older eligibility rules until its area is targeted.
3. Bad lines started being upgraded without being asked
Running quietly underneath all of this is an assurance-driven program that converts underperforming copper lines to fibre proactively. iTnews reported in July 2025 that nbn was expanding it to cover all underperforming FTTN and FTTC lines that cannot achieve at least 50 Mbps — around 700,000 premises eligible as at 30 June 2025, about 110,000 already upgraded, and more than a million expected to qualify by the end of 2025.
If your FTTN connection is genuinely bad, that is the path to ask your retailer about by name, and it does not wait for 2027.
The evidence copper was the problem, and the scoreboard that just closed
None of this is nbn being arbitrary. The ACCC measured the difference for eight years through its Measuring Broadband Australia program, and the numbers were consistent to the point of monotony.
| Underperforming services, April 2026 report | FTTN 11.8 per cent, HFC 6.1 per cent, FTTP 4.9 per cent. A service counts as underperforming if it reaches 75 per cent of its plan speed in fewer than 5 per cent of download tests. |
|---|---|
| Share of the problem | In the May 2025 data, FTTN connections accounted for 86 per cent of all underperforming services measured. |
| What a 100 Mbps plan delivered | FTTN averaged 88.2 Mbps against 104.4 Mbps on both FTTP and HFC. On 50 Mbps plans: 47.6 Mbps on FTTN against 52.1 and 52.3. |
| The new fast plans | About 6.3 per cent of nbn 500 plans were underperforming in the April 2026 report, some failing to exceed 100 Mbps — a reminder that a fast tier is not self-executing. |
| The final report, 17 June 2026 | Fixed-line households averaged 99.4 per cent of plan download speed in the busy evening period. Underperforming services across the fixed-line network were down to 5.6 per cent, from 13.9 per cent in May 2018. |
| Fixed wireless, for comparison | The Fixed Wireless Home Fast plan measured 160.5 Mbps down and 12.6 Mbps up in busy hours — faster on the download side than any copper-fed fixed-line plan in the same report. |
Report 33 on 17 June 2026 was the thirty-third and last. The Measuring Broadband Australia program ran from 2018 and concluded on 30 June 2026. ACCC Commissioner Anna Brakey tied the wind-up to changes in nbn’s wholesale products, including the removal of capacity-based charging on fixed-line and fixed wireless services — the congestion pricing that made peak-hour slowdowns a commercial choice by retailers, and which the program was originally built to expose.
That is a defensible reason to stop. It is also, we would note, awkward timing. The independent quarterly scorecard that documented copper’s underperformance for eight years published its final report two weeks before the FTTC eligibility change and closed the day before that change took effect — about a year before the largest forced migration in the network’s history begins. Nothing improper follows from that. But from July 2027, when several hundred thousand households are moved onto new equipment on a schedule they did not choose, there will be no public, independent, quarterly measurement of whether the result is what was promised. The ACCC still publishes broadband performance guidance; the panel-based measurement is what has gone.
What the upgrade actually involves
Worth knowing before you order, because two of these catch people out badly and one of them is a safety issue.
| Who you order from | Your existing phone and internet provider, not nbn. You do not need to change retailers to get the upgrade, and you should be suspicious of anyone who tells you that you do. |
|---|---|
| What it costs | Nothing for a standard installation. Under the Targeted Upgrade there is also no requirement to move to a faster plan. Non-standard installations — long driveways, difficult conduit, heritage constraints — can attract quoted charges, so ask. |
| What gets installed | A utility box on an exterior wall and a connection box inside. You choose where the internal box goes, and you should choose deliberately: it wants to be near power and near where your router will live, not in the garage at the far end of the house. |
| If you rent | You need the owner’s consent for both boxes, and the technician will ask you to confirm you have it before proceeding. Start that conversation weeks early, not the morning of the appointment, and get it in writing through the agent. |
| Your existing hardware | Most modem-routers sold in the last decade have a WAN Ethernet port and will work fine — you stop using the DSL port and plug into the new connection box instead. A device with no Ethernet WAN port will need replacing. |
| Power | This is the one people misread. Fibre gives you no dial tone in a blackout — but neither does FTTN or FTTC today, because the voice service already runs through your mains-powered router. The change is not a loss. What fibre adds is an option: a battery backup on the power supply, giving roughly three hours plus about ninety minutes on an emergency reserve. It powers the connection box only, and you need a corded handset to use it. Battery backup is mandatory for Priority Assistance customers. |
| Medical alarms and monitored devices | Deal with this before the appointment, not after. nbn runs a free Medical Alarm Register, and its guidance is to check compatibility with the alarm provider first; many now recommend a device with its own battery and mobile connection. The same applies to monitored security panels, lift emergency phones and fax-dependent equipment. |
What we would do
This is our advice, applied to an Australian household, on the sourced picture above.
| Check your address this week | nbn’s address checker tells you which technology serves you and whether an upgrade is available or planned. It takes a minute and it settles whether the rest of this applies to you at all. |
|---|---|
| If you are on FTTC, order now | Since 1 July 2026 there is no plan condition. Around 860,000 premises became eligible on that date and most of them have not moved. There is no advantage in waiting and one clear disadvantage: installer capacity. |
| If you are on FTTN with a bad line, ask about assurance | If you cannot reliably reach 50 Mbps, ask your retailer specifically about a fault or assurance-based fibre upgrade rather than the on-demand one. That path exists precisely for lines like yours. |
| Do not buy a faster plan to qualify | Check the current condition for your technology before spending anything. The requirement has been removed for FTTC and does not apply under the Targeted Upgrade, and retail sales staff do not always know that yet. |
| Renters: get consent in writing early | The single most common way one of these appointments is wasted. |
| Sort the alarms first | Medical alarm, monitored security, lift phone. Before the technician arrives, not after. |
| Diarise July 2027 only as a backstop | It is the date the letters start, not the date to act. If you have acted, it will pass without involving you. |
What we could not establish
Four things, and they matter. We could not find a published list of which suburbs are in the first 130,000 premises, or any commitment from nbn to publish one in advance — so nobody outside the company can currently tell you whether their street is in the July 2027 batch. We could not find a statement extending the removal of the high-speed plan requirement to on-demand FTTN upgrades in general, which leaves the largest copper footprint in a different position from FTTC, and we cannot explain why. We could not establish a current, authoritative count of premises still on FTTN and FTTC as at August 2026; nbn’s April 2026 statement says more customers are now on full fibre than on legacy copper, which is a milestone rather than a residual. And we found no equivalent program, or any end date at all, for the HFC footprint — those premises are not part of this, and we could locate nothing from nbn about their long-term future.
The bottom line
If you are on FTTN or FTTC, the question is no longer whether you will end up on fibre. nbn has published the dates, the free upgrade is on the table, and the plan-upgrade catch that made the offer awkward for years has been removed for the footprint where it bit hardest. The only variable left is timing, and timing is the one part of this you still control.
Order it now and you pick the week, you pick where the box goes on your wall, you sort the landlord and the medical alarm at your own pace, and you spend 2027 on a connection that is measurably better than the one you have. Wait for the letter and you get six months, a queue running at 20,000 a month, and a suspension date attached to your household. Same outcome, considerably worse week.
And keep one thing in view past the install: this is the last act of a network that was deliberately built twice. The copper in the street was a cost-saving decision that Australia has spent more than a decade and several billion dollars undoing. The useful thing to take from that is not anger about the past — it is a reasonable scepticism the next time an infrastructure program offers a cheaper technology as a shortcut.
Sources
Dates and figures above are drawn from these sources, captured 30 August 2026:
- nbn — nbn planning limited targeted fibre upgrades to improve customer experience and strengthen network resilience (22 April 2026): the Targeted Upgrade program, approximately 130,000 homes and businesses in year one, first notifications from July 2027, first suspensions from January 2028 where no upgrade order has been placed, the absence of any high-speed plan requirement, the “multiple notifications, the option to extend or defer before a service is suspended, and case-managed support” wording, the statement that more customers are now on full fibre than on legacy copper, and Fibre Connect having delivered more than one million upgrades. Quote from Anna Perrin, Chief Customer Officer at nbn.
- WhistleOut — NBN will start forcing fibre upgrades next year (23 April 2026): the reported six, three and one month notification schedule, the six-month window, suspension at the deadline with restoration on ordering, disconnection thirty days later requiring a new service order, and the reported run rate of about 20,000 premises per month after year one. Cited as reported; nbn’s own statement does not publish these intervals.
- nbn — nbn removes high speed requirement to upgrade from Fibre to the Curb (1 July 2026): the removal taking effect, and approximately 860,000 customers in the FTTC footprint. Quote from Bec Heap, Executive General Manager Products and Pricing.
- nbn — NBN Co plans to relax eligibility requirement for customers seeking to upgrade from Fibre to the Curb to Fibre to the Premises in 2026 (15 December 2025): the advance notice of the change, the July 2026 effective date, the earlier estimate of approximately 600,000 single dwelling units, and the 100/40 Mbps wholesale condition being dropped.
- nbn — NBN Co to accelerate higher speed tiers and launch multi-gigabit speeds in September 2025 (5 September 2024): Home Fast moving from 100/20 to 500/50 Mbps, Home Superfast from 250/25 to 750/50, Home Ultrafast from about 1000/50 to about 1000/100, the new Home Hyperfast at 2000/200 on FTTP and 2000/100 on HFC, the 14 September 2025 launch, the restriction to FTTP and HFC, and no wholesale price increase for the accelerated tiers. Quote from Anna Perrin on more than nine million premises becoming eligible.
- ACCC — Households receive consistent broadband speeds on fixed-line and wireless plans (17 June 2026): the final Measuring Broadband Australia report, 99.4 per cent of plan download speed on fixed-line services in the busy evening period, underperforming services down to 5.6 per cent from 13.9 per cent in May 2018, Fixed Wireless Home Fast at 160.5 Mbps down and 12.6 Mbps up in busy hours, and the program concluding on 30 June 2026. Quote from ACCC Commissioner Anna Brakey on the removal of capacity-based charging.
- ACCC — Fibre to the node trails all other NBN connection types for download speeds (4 September 2025, on May 2025 data): FTTN accounting for 86 per cent of all underperforming services, FTTN 100 Mbps plans averaging 88.2 Mbps against 104.4 Mbps on FTTP and HFC, and FTTN 50 Mbps plans averaging 47.6 Mbps against 52.1 and 52.3. Quote from Commissioner Anna Brakey on retailers’ obligation to tell customers when an FTTN line cannot reach the plan speed.
- WhistleOut — ACCC MBA report for April 2026 finds FTTN underperformance (2 April 2026): FTTN at 11.8 per cent of services underperforming against HFC at 6.1 and FTTP at 4.9, the definition of an underperforming service, and about 6.3 per cent of nbn 500 plans underperforming. Quote from ACCC Commissioner Ian Oppermann. The underlying report is Measuring Broadband Australia Report 32.
- iTnews — NBN Co’s new push for 1 million premises to make fibre switch (24 July 2025): the expansion of proactive conversions to all underperforming FTTN and FTTC lines that cannot achieve at least 50 Mbps, about 700,000 premises eligible at 30 June 2025, about 110,000 upgraded by that date, and more than a million expected to qualify by the end of 2025.
- nbn — What happens in a power blackout: landline and internet services not working during an outage on FTTP, FTTN, FTTC and HFC alike; the optional FTTP battery backup giving roughly three hours plus about ninety minutes on the emergency reserve; the backup powering only the connection box; the need for a corded handset; and battery backup being mandatory for Priority Assistance customers.
- nbn — Medical alarms: the free Medical Alarm Register, the advice to confirm device compatibility with the alarm provider before migrating, and the recommendation of alarms with their own battery and mobile network backup.
- nbn — Check your address: the tool that reports which nbn technology serves a given address and whether a technology change or upgrade is available or planned.
- Telstra Exchange — A renter’s guide to getting nbn connected: the requirement for the property owner’s consent to install the external utility box and internal connection box, and the technician asking the occupant to confirm that consent and the agreed equipment location.