MEDIA RELEASE - NBNCO CONCEDES HFC ROLLOUT DELAY COULD HAVE $500 MILLION HIT ON TAXPAYERS - 8 DECEMBER 2017

08 December 2017

Before a Joint Standing Committee this morning, the NBNCo CFO conceded the HFC rollout delay could have a $500 million hit on the financials:

“If the program was delayed by 6 months, what you have is, we have I think 1.9 million customers still to connect, that we expect to connect. So if all of those 1.9 million customers, and I don’t think that’s necessarily going to be the case, but if they were all delayed by 6 months, you’d be talking about a $500 million delay in revenue.” 

This outcome would require a further $500 million to be drawn down from a $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded contingency pool, which is repeatedly being used to patch-up Turnbull’s multi-technology mess.

This is yet another bitter pill for taxpayers and consumers who are being punished with a second-rate network that costs more and does less.