Gungahlin was included in Stage 2 of the National Broadband Network (NBN), with the first fibre optic cable installed in 2012 as part of a complete fibre-to-the-home deployment across the entire district. As a result Gungahlin has by far the best NBN infrastructure in Canberra … unless you happen to live in Casey Stage 1.
For reasons that have been lost in time, the first portion of the suburb of Casey that was constructed (Casey Stage 1) was not included in the fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) deployment and instead received NBN services over lower quality fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) technology. This resulted in some streets having FTTP-connected homes on one side of the street, and FTTN-connected homes on the other. Residents in the affected area (see map below), with the strong support of the GCC, have campaigned to have this anamoly fixed for may years.
Map showing the southern part of Casey – yellow areas are NBN Fibre to the Node connected (April 2023) – others are Fibre to the Premise connected (Source: https://nationalmap.gov.au/, NBN All Technologies Types)
In 2020 a possible solution emerged in the shape of a $4.5B Federal government initiative to upgrade portions of the NBN by “taking fibre deeper into neighbourhoods serviced by Fibre to the Node (FTTN) technology, enabling on demand fibre upgrades and speeds of up to 1 Gbps”. The GCC called for Casey stage 1 to be included in the program, and worked with the Combined Community Councils of the ACT to campaign for Canberra to get its “fair share” of this upgrade program. As result, in mid-July 2021 NBNco confirmed “the part of Casey that is currently not served by FTTP is on our list of suburbs that we intend to perform an FTTP-enabled upgrade in.”.
Work commenced in late 2022 on this upgrade and in the first week of May 2023 residents began to receive offers to upgrade and been placing upgrade orders with their Internet service providers.
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