There was great consternation within the telecommunications industry after figures from network giant Akamai suggested that Australia's broadband ranked 44th in the world based on average and average peak connection speeds. But some said the result had nothing to do with the NBN, even though a separate study was crediting the broadband project with findings that cloud services were growing in popularity amongst Australian SMEs.

TPG Telecom stopped selling its fibre-to-the-basement (FttB) broadband services after it admitted it would not be able to meet new license conditions imposed by the government, which would have forced TPG to wholesale services on its new network, in time. Some said TPG hadn't been given enough time but communications minister Malcolm Turnbull refuted the claims even as TPG's formal submission said the company had always planned to launch a wholesale product but could no longer do so for now, citing the "huge" cost of compliance with the new regulations.

NBN Co wasted no time in taking advantage of the move, announcing the first 43 apartment buildings to be connected to its FttB services - including prominent conservative radio host Alan Jones, a longtime critic of the NBN. Yet while the change would seem to have hobbled TPG's FttB ambitions, some observers believe TPG could still cause headaches for Turnbull and others said the move could have unintended consequences.

Meanwhile, NBN Co was imploring businesses in western Sydney to complete their transition to the NBN as soon as possible, and was working to provide more clarity around how it would decide which connection type would be provided to any given address. The company was also under fire as NBN contractor Techdrill was pushed into liquidation citing a lack of reliable NBN work.

The arrangements for migrating customers from Telstra's network were released amidst concerns that the new arrangements favoured Telstra and, among other things, would see a relaxation of controls around the handling of migration-related personal information.

This came as Turnbull confirmed that telcos would need to pay a levy to fund the rollout of the NBN in rural areas and CEO Bill Morrow fronted a Tasmanian ICT meeting to criticise earlier plans to roll out the network in rural areas first. Yet that wasn't the only concern of communications consumer organisation ACCAN, which was attacking NBN Co's greenfields rollout rules as "problematic".