NBN speed upgrades in September 2025: What you need to know

• What are the new NBN speeds?
• Will the upgraded plans cost more?
• When will I get the NBN speed upgrade?
• Will I need new hardware to get the NBN speed upgrades?

NBN speed upgrades will be kicking in on September 14, 2025, as long as your home has either an HFC or FTTP connection. For anyone else, the new NBN speeds won’t be available and you should probably stop reading now to avoid NBN envy.

That is, unless you’re eligible for a free FTTP upgrade. So far, almost five million FTTN and FTTC addresses are able to upgrade to the NBN’s best technology type for no installation fee, but only about 15% have taken advantage of this opportunity. Talk to your provider to find out if you’re eligible for a free FTTP upgrade. You might also have to upgrade your NBN plan to a higher speed tier to the eligible, but for the most part that’s all.

It’s also important to note that, while officially announced, the NBN speed changes are at the wholesale level – i.e. the prices NBN Co charges to internet providers for access to the network. The internet service providers (ISPs) are under no obligation to reflect any of this in their plans, though you can expect most of them to follow suit in short order.

This is where it gets a little muddled, so let’s start from a strictly wholesale perspective. We’ll also use the more commonly known names for these plans, such as “NBN 100” and “NBN 250”, instead of their NBN Co-branded names such as “NBN Fast” and “NBN Superfast”.

In short, NBN Co is changing the products it sells to ISPs, in instances where those ISPs are on-selling to HFC and FTTP premises. Most of the changes are speed upgrades to existing products, but there’s also a brand new speed tier.

Here’s a look at the NBN speed changes:

• NBN 50, NBN 25, and NBN 12 plans will be unchanged.
• NBN 100 will become NBN 500. In other words, plans with formerly 100Mbps maximum downloads will be upgraded to 500Mbps – effectively quintupled. For uploads, NBN 100 plans currently come with either 20Mbps or 40Mbps, but NBN 500 plans will all feature faster maximum uploads of 50Mbps.
• NBN 250 will become NBN 750. That’s an upgrade from maximum speeds of 250Mbps downloads and 25Mbps uploads to the new 750Mbps downloads and 50Mbps uploads. Essentially, it’s triple the maximum download speeds and double the uploads.
• NBN 1000 will remain NBN 1000, with a maximum download speed of 1000Mbps technically its former maximum was only 970Mbps, but who’s counting?. But this speed tier’s maximum uploads will double from 50Mbps up to 100Mbps.
• NBN 2000 will be the new hottest thing in town, taking the top spot for the fastest consumer NBN plan available. Customers with HFC connections will receive maximum upload speeds of 100Mbps, while those while those with FTTP will have max uploads of 200Mbps.

It’s very much up to a given provider whether it chooses to change its product lineup, though many already have plans ready to go for the September 14 date and a handful have already launched NBN 500 or 750 plans. Here's a look at a few of them, ranked by popularity with our readers over the last seven days:

But who knows? Some providers might choose to continue to offer NBN 250 plans on the cheap, buying a 750 plan from NBN Co and splitting it three ways. This would, of course, limit download speeds to slower than the previous 25Mbps (50Mbps divided by three is about 16.7Mbps, if you’re wondering), but we might also simply see anything between 50Mbps and 500Mbps disappear for HFC and FTTP homes.

No, at least from a wholesale perspective. NBN Co won’t be charging your ISP extra for upgrading your NBN 100 plan to NBN 500 or NBN 250 plan to NBN 750, nor will it be charging extra for the boosts to NBN 1000 upload speeds. And so far, Optus, Telstra, Aussie Broadband, Superloop, and Tangerine have each confirmed they won’t charge their customers more for receiving the upgrades.

The cost of the new NBN 2000 plan is still to be seen, but it stands to reason it’ll cost more than NBN 1000.

The wholesale NBN speed upgrades are scheduled to go live on September 14. As for when you’ll get them – that’s up to your ISP. A small handful have already launched the new plans, others are set to go live bang on September 14, and yet others are yet to announce their intentions.

We’d advise you get in touch with your internet provider and ask how it plans to implement the upgrade, though it might refrain from comment until after its new plans (if any) become publicly available.

But even once the new NBN speeds go live with your provider, you still might have to request an upgrade. Though some, like the aforementioned Optus, Telstra, Aussie Broadband, Superloop, and Tangerine will automatically implement the new speeds.

Possibly.

If you’re signing up to an NBN 2000 plan, you might need a new NTD, which is the NBN-owned connection box in your home. We’ve asked NBN Co about whether this will be free or incur a fee.

If you haven’t replaced it in a while, you also might need to upgrade your own personal networking equipment, even if you’re only considering NBN 500, 750 or 1000. There are three main things to consider: your router’s WiFi standard, its WAN port, and the type of ethernet cables you have.

Your router’s WiFi standard might be a little outdated, though is going to be fine for just about anything shy of NBN 2000.

The oldest WiFi standard your router is likely to have is WiFi 5, which is still technically capable of handling the new speeds with its maximum (in theory) throughput of 3.5Gbps. But that figure comes from a combination of two separate frequencies and… look, you want a little wiggle room, ok?

WiFi 6 should be totally fine, even for the foreseeable future. And if you have WiFi 7, you’re good for beyond that.

Your router’s Wide Area Network (WAN) port is where it connects to your NBN connection box, and thus is effectively your gateway to the internet. As such, your home’s connection can only be as fast as your WAN port. And keep in mind, this is also a situation where you want a little wiggle room, if possible.

Some newer WAN ports are rated to 10Gbps, which is more than enough for the new NBN speeds. More common is 2Gbps, but a lot of routers out there are limited to 1Gbps (1000Mbps). If that’s you, the absolute fastest plan you could get maximum speeds out of is… NBN 750. Yup, not NBN 1000.

Your WAN port’s rated speed applies to all simultaneous traffic, which means uploads and downloads combined. So at 750Mbps down and 50Mbps up, that’s combined traffic of 800Mbps, as far as your WAN router’s concerned.

As a reminder, an NBN 1000 plan has max uploads of either 100Mbps for HFC homes or 200Mbps for FTTP homes, for a total of 1.1Gbps or 1.2Gbps, respectively.

Now, even the most data-hungry of households are unlikely to ever hit 1Gbps traffic, but it’s still worth knowing if you can even theoretically get what you pay for.

And if you want NBN 2000, you’re probably the type of person who’s already rocking a truly top-tier router, so you probably have 10Gbps ready to go. If not, consider upgrading your home’s equipment and seeing the impact that has on your current internet performance before signing up to an NBN 2000 plan.

Ethernet is the stock standard way of connecting devices to your router via a cable – you know the one. It’s also what connects your router to your NBN connection box and has that tiny clip on the end that always breaks off. But it’s crucial to note that two Ethernet cables can have very different speed capabilities, even if the plugs on either end are identical.

Ideally, you want Category 6 (Cat6) cables, which have max speeds of 10Gbps across about 50 metres. You can also grab Cat6a, which has the same speed but maintains it over about double the distance. And if you’re feeling decadent, Cat8 can handle up to a blazing 40Gbps.

In a pinch, Cat5e will do, but it has a maximum throughput of only 1Gbps. The older Cat5 is far too slow at just 100Mbps. Also steer clear of Cat7 because it has different plugs and likely won’t fit into your devices.

And, for your own sanity, don’t try to run a high-speed NBN connection through an old cable that’s riddled with kinks and patched up with tape. If you tried to race a Ferrari down a dirt road you wouldn't expect it to fair well. Whether for luxury cars or speedy internet – the faster it can go, the better maintained the road needs to be.