New economic research from Accenture estimates that a faster, higher capacity NBN will improve Australia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by a total of around AU$400 billion over the eight years from 2023 to 2030.
For the first time in Australia, a new longitudinal dataset has been used to model the relationship between increases in average Australian broadband download speed over time and its impact on key economic indicators including GDP, employment and new business starts.
It found that for every one Mbps increase in average broadband speed, Australia’s productivity-driven GDP increased by 0.04% on average, in the period from 2012 to 2022. The cumulative GDP uplift during this ten-year period was estimated at $122 billion.
The research also found that the economic impact derived from increases in average broadband speeds were 16 times greater in remote areas of Australia and twice as profound in regional areas relative to the impact in major cities. Accenture research analysts suggest that the outsized productivity impact of faster broadband speeds in more isolated regions relates to the fact that regional and remote areas of Australia started from a much lower base in terms of average broadband speeds. More ubiquitous access to better broadband has expanded the customer reach of e-commerce entrepreneurialism and provided better online access to work and education.
The timeframe coincides with the rollout of the NBN, which has been the largest contributor to increasing average download speeds across Australia from 9 Mbps to 53 Mbps between 2012 and 2022.
NBN Co’s current network upgrade program has so far enabled more than 8.4 million residential and business premises, or 75% of the NBN Fixed Line network, to access the NBN Home Ultrafast wholesale speed tier.
In November 2023, NBN Co announced a proposal to increase the potential maximum information rate for the existing NBN Fixed Wireless Plus wholesale plan from up to 75/10 Mbps to up to 100/20 Mbps.
In December 2023, the company also provided customers in regional and remote Australia access to uncapped internet data use with the launch of new NBN Sky Muster Plus Premium satellite plans.
Accenture estimates that the NBN network’s provision of higher average broadband speeds has supported the creation of 169,000 additional jobs and 87,000 new businesses between 2012 and 2022. Accenture also estimates that improving access to faster, higher capacity NBN broadband services generated a GDP uplift of approximately $31 billion in 2022 alone.
The productivity benefits are expected to rise to approximately $68 billion per annum by 2030 and support the creation of a further 113,000 new jobs and support the creation of an additional 55,000 new businesses between 2024 and 2030.