Some celebrations are in order today, as it’s been one year since NBN Co rolled out its ‘Accelerate Great’ program, giving Australia’s internet a much-needed boost and providing some excellent new entries in my guide to the best NBN plans.
On September 14, 2025, millions of Australians connected to the fixed-line NBN network via fibre to the premises (FTTP) or hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) became eligible for substantially faster internet speeds.
NBN 100 — or Home Fast — received the biggest uplift, jumping fivefold from 100Mbps to 500Mbps, while the NBN 250 Home Superfast tier was tripled to 750Mbps. The Home Ultrafast tier retained its near-gigabit download speeds but had its maximum upload speed doubled to 100Mbps.
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NBN Co also introduced Home Hyperfast, its first residential multi-gigabit tier, offering wholesale speeds of up to 2,000/200Mbps over FTTP and 2,000/100Mbps over HFC.
It was one of the biggest changes to the NBN since the network’s rollout began. But one year later, did Australia’s fixed-line network actually cope with all that extra speed?
The short answer appears to be yes.
The NBN got faster — even if one number suggests otherwise
Using data supplied by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), we can obtain a particularly useful before-and-after snapshot.
Its September 2025 report used measurements taken in the May prior, several months before Accelerate Great arrived. At that point, fixed-line NBN services delivered an average of 102% of their advertised download speed during the busy evening hours.
The ACCC’s next round of testing began on September 14 — the same day the new tiers launched — and measured upgraded services only after they had transitioned to their faster speeds.
Average busy-hour performance subsequently slipped to 100% of plan speed. By the ACCC’s final report in June 2026, based on March measurements, it stood at 99.4%. While these average download speed figures appear to show a dip in performance, the opposite is in fact true.
This is because the percentage is relative to the speed customers are paying for. Before the upgrade, a connection delivering 102% of a 100Mbps plan would be achieving roughly 102Mbps. A connection delivering 100% of a 500Mbps plan is achieving around 500Mbps.
The latter statistic shows not only that NBN Co delivered on its promise of accelerated download speeds, but that the superior FTTP infrastructure was capable of delivering stable connections to Australian homes during the busiest hours of the day. If you still connect via fibre to the node (FTTN) or fibre to the curb (FTTC), upgrading to FTTP can therefore open the door to substantially faster speed tiers, while removing the copper-based limitations that can affect them.
Indeed, immediately after the launch of the Accelerate Great program, FTTP customers on the new NBN 500 tier averaged 102.5% of their plan speed during the busy hours of 7pm to 11pm. That’s equivalent to a little over 500Mbps. HFC NBN 500 connections averaged 97.4%, or roughly 487Mbps.
NBN 750 services over FTTP averaged 97.3%, equivalent to around 730Mbps.
So, rather than struggling under the sudden increase in available bandwidth, the fixed-line network was generally able to deliver close to the full speed of these substantially faster plans.
NBN 500 quickly became the new normal
I’m not alone in thinking the best NBN 500 plans are the goldilocks option for the majority of Australian homes — NBN Co itself has deemed it to be the most popular. And the change in the ACCC’s testing sample perfectly illustrates just how quick the uptake of this particular tier was.
Before Accelerate Great, NBN 100 dominated the ACCC’s monitored higher-speed connections, with 530 services in its May 2025 sample. For added context, there were just over 2.1 million active NBN 100 connections in the ACCC’s June 2025 Wholesale Market Report.
In the first testing period after the upgrade, there were already 462 NBN 500 connections and 112 NBN 750 connections, while the number of NBN 100 services had fallen to 124. At the same time, the ACCC’s Wholesale Market Report showed a huge decrease in active NBN 100 connections, to just over 780,000. Subsequently, the number of active connections of 100Mbps and faster (they’re currently not split by download data rate) jumped from around 695,000 to just over 2.4 million.
By March 2026, the ACCC was monitoring 624 NBN 500 services. There are also now over 3 million active connections 100Mbps and faster, while 100Mbps connections have dipped further still to just over 713,000.
In other words, the mainstream high-speed NBN connection had effectively shifted from around 100Mbps to around 500Mbps in a matter of months.
What’s more, that extra speed didn’t appear to come at the expense of widespread network reliability. The ACCC’s final report recorded an average of 0.16 outages lasting more than 30 seconds per fixed-line service per day, which it said was consistent with previous reports.
That’s significant. Accelerate Great dramatically increased the amount of bandwidth available to many households, but there isn’t an obvious corresponding spike in outages or a collapse in evening performance.
There is one catch
While the published figures indicate a positive outcome for the Accelerate Great program, it’s not all good news all round. The ACCC’s data also shows that not every connection has been able to make full use of the extra speed.
Before the upgrades, around 3% of the fixed-line services monitored by the ACCC were classified as underperforming. An underperforming service is one which “rarely or never attains plan speed”. The percentage of underperforming services increased to around 4% immediately following Accelerate Great and increased further to 5.6% by the final report.
Historically, underperforming connections were overwhelmingly associated with fibre-to-the-node (FTTN), where the final section of the connection still travels over copper. Following the introduction of the new tiers, however, the ACCC started seeing a greater proportion of underperforming FTTP and HFC services as well.
That doesn’t necessarily mean FTTP or HFC were struggling with the increased bandwidth. The ACCC identified customer-side equipment as one possible cause of underperformance, including network hardware and cabling incapable of supporting the new higher speeds.
Moving from 100Mbps to 500Mbps suddenly makes parts of your home network that previously weren’t a limitation much more important. Primarily, I’m talking about network equipment. For example, an older or lower-spec router could become the weak link, preventing you from seeing the full benefit of a 500Mbps or 750Mbps NBN connection over Wi-Fi.
In some respects, Accelerate Great has therefore moved the bottleneck. For many households, the question is no longer whether the NBN connection itself is capable of delivering enough bandwidth, but whether the equipment inside the home can keep up with it.
You can learn more about the equipment best suited to take advantage of the new speed tiers here.
A year later, the upgrade looks like a success
There are caveats to the ACCC’s figures. Its Measuring Broadband Australia program used a sample of volunteer households rather than every NBN connection in the country, and the make-up of that sample changed between reports.
But the overall picture is difficult to interpret as anything other than positive.
Eligible NBN users were given substantially more bandwidth, the majority of monitored services continued to deliver around their advertised speeds, and the network did so without an obvious deterioration in reliability.
That’s especially impressive considering how large the jump was. Going from 100Mbps to 500Mbps wasn’t a modest annual speed bump — it increased the headline download speed of one of Australia’s most popular NBN products fivefold.
A year later, the ACCC’s figures suggest the network was largely ready for it.
And that’s also why anyone still sitting on an NBN 50 plan with an eligible FTTP or HFC connection should probably take another look at what’s available.
The move to NBN 500 is far more substantial than switching from 50Mbps to 100Mbps. The extra bandwidth won’t make every web page load five times faster, but it can make a considerable difference in homes where several people are simultaneously streaming, gaming, downloading large files, using cloud services or working from home.
With Australian households connecting more devices and consuming increasing amounts of data, those benefits are only likely to become more relevant.
One year after Accelerate Great arrived, the most encouraging thing isn’t simply that NBN plans became faster. It’s that when NBN Co substantially raised the speed limit, the network largely managed to keep up.
The plans to get
If you’re eligible for the free fibre upgrade, have yet to make the switch, but are interested in doing so, then you may wish to find out more about the fastest NBN plans. These are, understandably, going to be the ones that will see you taking advantage of the superior infrastructure.
If you’re looking for some quick and easy recommendations, look no further.
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Max Langridge
