We’re still technically a couple of months out from the official rollout of NBN 500 plans in Australia, but Exetel – one of our favourite providers here at TechRadar – has jumped the gun early, introducing a brand-new plan with 500Mbps download speeds.
Available from today for anyone looking to supercharge their home internet – provided you’re on a fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) or hybrid fibre coax (HFC) NBN connection – Exetel is claiming its new One plan is the only one you should consider – and it’s so confident of this that it’s made the radical move of ditching all its other NBN plans.
Price is right
Price can be a huge contributing factor when deciding on a new NBN plan. Shop around and you’ll find that the high price ‘premium’ providers are charging for their plans can often be nabbed from smaller ISPs – with nearly identical service – for a lot less.
The Exetel One plan absolutely adheres to this philosophy – not only is it the first consumer NBN 500 plan to come to market, but it’s also incredibly competitively priced at just AU$80 a month.
To put this into context, the current average monthly cost of an 100Mbps NBN 100 plan – which is 5x slower than what Exetel’s offering – is just over AU$90. And, going further, Telstra’s NBN 25 plan, which is 20x slower than Exetel’s One plan, will set you back AU$93 a month. Exponentially more speed for less money is a win in our book.
And, while there might not be an introductory discount – something we’ve come to expect from the best NBN plans – we’d argue that the cost-per-megabit on offer here is such exceptional value that it doesn’t even need one.
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A plan that works for you
Exetel is also introducing some new perks with this NBN 500 plan, including an evolution of its Speed Boost Days feature and the ability to save some cash by temporarily ‘downgrading’ the plan while you’re away from home.
On the boosting front, if you find you need faster speeds for a short period (to download a massive new-release video game, for example,) you can upgrade your NBN 500 plan to achieve NBN 1000 speeds – which Exetel says is around 811Mbps typical evening speeds – for AU$1 per day. The telco calls this ‘Warp Speed’ and has, for a long time, offered a Speed Boost feature across its now-discontinued NBN plans that works in much the same way.
The other new feature, which Exetel is calling Hibernate, allows you to drop the speed of your plan down to the equivalent of NBN 12 (with 12Mbps maximum downloads) and save AU$1 off your monthly bill for each day it’s active.
We can see this being particularly useful if you’re going to be away from home for an extended period of time, say, when you go on holiday. There’s no limit on how long you can keep Hibernate active for, so if you go away for a month, for example, you could save up to AU$31.
Both Warp Speed and Hibernate can be activated and deactivated directly in the the Exetel app, which is available for iPhone or Android.
Friends with benefits
Another new feature being introduced with the Exetel One NBN plan is a friend-referral program. It’s not a new concept, but it is the first time Exetel has adopted one. Through this, if you refer a friend to Exetel – and that friend signs up for NBN – you’ll both receive AU$1 off your plan each month for as long as you both remain connected.
There’s no limit to the number of people you can refer and, as it’s stackable, you could theoretically get your Exetel service for free each month – though you’ll obviously need to have a very large circle of friends.
How does Exetel compare to other NBN providers?
We keep a close eye on NBN retail service providers (RSPs) here at TechRadar, and use a combination of plan pricing and official recorded speed data from the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) to identify which providers are most worth your time and money.
Exetel has been at the top of the list on many metrics for some time now, as it’s long offered competitive pricing and regularly overdelivers when it comes to typical evening download speeds.
In fact, in the ACCC’s most recent Measuring Broadband report, published in June 2025, Exetel was found to achieve 104.5% of plan download speeds during all hours of the day and an impressive 103.7% during the busier evening hours. Only Telstra, the country’s largest (and most expensive) provider, was found to deliver faster speeds, and even then, only by a small margin of less than 1%.
Based on its performance with other plans and what Exetel’s claiming on itself, we’d expect this new NBN 500 tier to achieve its theoretical maximum 500Mbps download speeds in many circumstances – although we’ll need to wait for the ACCC to weigh in (which usually takes at least several months) to have confirmation.
Next steps
NBN Co has big hopes for the NBN 500 tier generally, and even though we don’t have any direct competitors to judge it against, the Exetel One plan does present itself as a good option for most homes, promising high-speed downloads for a price that’s cheaper than many NBN 50 and NBN 100 options.
If you want to sign up, you’ll need to make sure you have a FTTP of HFC connection at your premises – to confirm either way, simply head to the Exetel website to check your address and sign up. The telco has confirmed that, for now at least, you won’t be able to activate the free fibre upgrade to take advantage of this plan.
And if you’re already an Exetel customer with an FTTP or HFC connection, you can easily migrate over to the new One plan via the Exetel app.
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