If your home is on Fibre to the Curb (FTTC), the main barrier to a free full fibre upgrade has just been removed. From July 2026, NBN Co no longer requires FTTC customers to order a 100/40 Mbps or faster plan to qualify for an upgrade to Fibre to the Premises (FTTP). You can now stay on a cheaper speed tier and still have the fibre run all the way into the house at no installation cost.
NBN Co estimates around 600,000 single dwelling homes served by FTTC become eligible under the relaxed rule. Roughly 240,000 FTTC homes had already upgraded under the old criteria.
Why NBN Co is doing this
In its announcement, NBN Co said FTTC has higher fault rates than either FTTN or FTTP, and that global supply of FTTC equipment is declining. Prioritising these upgrades lets the company retire the technology and recover equipment where feasible. Bec Heap, Executive General Manager Products and Pricing, framed it around reliability, saying full fibre connections are faster, more reliable and less susceptible to faults and outages.
Note that homes upgrading under the Full Fibre Upgrade for Complex Multi-Dwelling Properties program were already exempt from the high-speed tier requirement, and that has not changed.
Our take
This is the rare regulatory-flavoured change that costs households nothing and removes a genuine trap. Under the old rule, plenty of FTTC customers took a 100 Mbps plan they did not need purely to unlock the free install, then either forgot to drop back or found the minimum term made dropping back awkward. Now the trade is gone. If you are on FTTC and have been sitting on NBN 25 or 50 because that is all your household actually uses, take the upgrade anyway. Fibre is more reliable than the copper in your street, and having FTTP in place means any future speed upgrade is a plan change rather than a truck roll. The one thing to check is whether your provider passes the relaxed rule through cleanly, because retailers control the ordering process and some may be slower than others to update it.
What to do
Check your technology type using the address checker on the NBN Co website. If it returns FTTC, contact your provider and ask to order the Fibre Connect upgrade without a speed tier change. If they tell you a 100 Mbps plan is required, point them to the July 2026 change or consider a provider that has updated its process. Our NBN speed tiers guide covers which tier actually suits your household once the fibre is in.
Source: NBN Co media statement, "NBN Co plans to relax eligibility requirement for customers seeking to upgrade from Fibre to the Curb to Fibre to the Premises in 2026".
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