NBN Co published a December construction list covering 142 fixed-wireless sectors in Gippsland and the New South Wales Riverina, part of a regional upgrade program promising peak download speeds above one hundred megabits per second on the Sky Muster successor architecture.
The company’s weekly planner, updated Sunday, names towns from Sale and Traralgon through Griffith and Leeton, with staging crews scheduled to swap radio heads and backhaul links before the school holiday peak. Retailers on the list received a companion spreadsheet mapping sector IDs to tower codes so help desks can answer customer calls without waiting on NBN Co’s public map refresh.
Why these postcodes now
Fixed-wireless congestion has been a recurring complaint in Victorian dairy and NSW irrigation communities where fibre to the premises is years away. NBN Co said the December tranche targets sectors where evening utilisation crossed eighty-five percent on three consecutive weeks in its internal telemetry. Those thresholds differ from the congestion flags shown on the public map, which lag by several weeks.
Retail service providers will not need to recontract customers; speed boosts activate remotely once sector tests pass. However, installers may require brief outages of up to twenty minutes while tower radios reboot, the planner warns. Providers were told to schedule SMS templates in advance so households know whether an outage is planned work or an unrelated fault.
Advocacy groups in Gippsland said the December list finally includes sectors they flagged in a joint letter to the communications minister in August. They cautioned that amber map status is not a guarantee of on-time completion if weather or power approvals slip, but welcomed the named-town transparency compared with earlier rollout waves that only showed state-level totals.
Backhaul and power constraints
Several listed sectors still rely on microwave backhaul to regional points of interconnect. NBN Co noted three Griffith-area sites awaiting power utility approvals for battery cabinets before crews can lift transmit power within Australian Communications and Media Authority limits. Until those cabinets energise, engineers cannot run the higher-modulation profiles that deliver the advertised peak speeds.
Local councils said they had been asked to trim vegetation within easements ahead of contractor arrivals—a routine step that nonetheless snagged two Gippsland sectors last month when landholders disputed access roads. Shire officers said they were mediating temporary access agreements so December crews would not repeat November delays.
Fibre backhaul extensions planned for 2027 would reduce reliance on microwave hops for several Riverina sectors, but December work assumes existing backhaul paths with software tuning rather than new trenching. That keeps the timeline feasible but caps how much headroom engineers can add if uptake spikes after speeds rise.
What residents should expect
Households in the named sectors should receive SMS alerts from their retailer once commissioning finishes. Until then, peak-hour slowdowns are likely to persist. NBN Co’s public map now colours the 142 sectors amber for scheduled work rather than red for unplanned faults, a small transparency win rural advocates had requested for months.
If your address sits on the list but your retailer never sends confirmation, check the NBN Co address checker for sector ID changes—some boundaries were redrawn when radios split overloaded cells. Businesses running point-of-sale terminals during holiday trade were advised to keep a failover link if they cannot tolerate even a twenty-minute reboot window during commissioning.
NBN Co’s regional lead said Sunday that crews would publish daily completion tallies on the public map once December work starts, a habit borrowed from earlier fibre surge weeks in Queensland. That cadence lets MPs and shire officers chase slippage without waiting for monthly rollout reports.
Sky Muster satellite customers in adjacent postcodes should not assume they are in the December tranche; the list covers fixed-wireless sectors only, and mixed estates sometimes sit on different technologies street by street.
Griffith business chamber representatives said they would track evening speeds in three pilot streets and share results with NBN Co if promised peaks fail to appear after commissioning, a grassroots check rural groups used successfully in last year’s Wagga upgrade wave.