We are still technically a few months out of the official roll-out of NBN 500 plans in Australia, but exetel-one of our favorite providers here at Techradar-Has jumped the gun early and introduced a brand new plan with 500 Mbps download speeds.
Available from today for anyone who wants to supercharge their home-In-Internet-predicted that you are on a fiber-to-the-room (FTTP) or Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) NBN Connection-Exetel claims its new plan is the only one you have to consider-and it is so confident that it has made the radical step to grabb all its other NBN plans.
The price is right
Price can be a huge contributing factor when deciding on a new NBN plan. Act around and you will find that the high prices ‘Premium’ providers charge for their plans, which can often be fooled from smaller ISPs – with almost identical service – too much less.
Exetel One Plan definitely adheres to this philosophy – not only is it the first consumer NBN 500 plan to come on the market, but it is also incredibly competitive price for only AU $ 80 a month.
To put this in context, the current average monthly costs of a 100 Mbps NBN 100 plan – which is 5x slower than what exetel’s offer – slightly above AU $ 90. And goes on, Telstras NBN 25 -Plan, which is 20x slower Than exetels a plan will set you back au $ 93 a month. Exponentially more speed for less money is a win in our book.
And while there may not be an initial discount-something we have come to expect from the best NBN plans-we will argue that the cost-per-megabit offered here is such an unusual value that it does not even need one.
Exetel is a Techradar preferred partner (What does that mean??
A plan that works for you
Exetel also introduces some new perks with this NBN 500 plan, including a development of its speed reinforcement days and the ability to save some cash by temporarily ‘downgrading’ the plan while away from home.
On the boosting front, if you find that you need faster speeds for a short period of time (to download a massive video game with new release, you can upgrade your NBN 500 plan to achieve NBN 1000-speeds — as exetel says is about 811 MBP’s typical evening speeds to au $ 1 per day. offered a speed increase feature across its now-discinated NBN plans that work in about the same way.
The other new feature that Exetel calls Hibernate allows you to drop the speed of your plane down to the equivalent of NBN 12 (with 12 Mbps maximum downloads) and save AU $ 1 from your monthly bill for each day it is active.
We can see that this is particularly useful if you get away from home for an extended period of time, you say when traveling on vacation. There is no limit to how long you can keep Hibernate active for, so if you go away for a month, for example, you can save up for AU $ 31.
Both variety and hibernation can be activated and deactivated directly in the exetel app available for iPhone or Android.
Friends with benefits
Another new feature introduced with the Exetel One NBN plan is a friend-referral program. It is not a new concept, but this is the first time Exetel has adopted one. Through this, if you refer a friend to exetel – and that friend signs up for NBN – you will both receive AU $ 1 from your plan each month as long as you both remain connected.
There is no limit to the number of people you can refer to and as it is stackable, you can theoretically get your exetel service free every month – even if you obviously need to have a very Large circle of friends.
How is exetel compared to other NBN providers?
We keep an eye on NBN Retail Service Providers (RSPS) here at Techradar and use a combination of plan prices and official recorded speed data from the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) to identify which providers are most worthy of your time and money.
Exetel has been at the top of the list of many measurements for some time now, as it has long offered competitive prices and regular over -developers when it comes to typical evening speeds.
In fact, in accc’s latest measurement rod report published in June 2025, it was actually found that Exetel achieved 104.5% of planning speeds for all hours in all hours and impressive 103.7% during the busy evening hours. Only Telstra, the country’s largest (and most expensive) provider, turned out to deliver faster speeds, and even then, only by a small margin of less than 1%.
Based on its results with other plans and what Exetels claim on itself, we would expect this new NBN 500 level to reach its theoretical maximum 500 Mbps download speeds in many circumstances – even though we will have to wait for the accc to weigh in (which usually takes at least several months) to have confirmation.
Next step
NBN CO has high hopes for the NBN 500 level in general, and although we have no direct competitors to judge it against, the Exetel One plan presents itself as a good opportunity for most homes that promise high-speed downloads at a price cheaper than many NBN 50 and NBN 100 options.
If you want to sign up, make sure you have an FTTP of HFC connection in your premises -To confirm both ways, simply go to the Exetel Web site to check your address and sign up. Telco has confirmed that at least at least you can’t activate the free fiber upgrade to take advantage of this plan.
And if you are already an exetel customer with an FTTP or HFC connection, you can easily migrate over to the new one plan via the Exetel app.
