Best Ballarat suburbs for NBN internet

Soldiers Hill tops the ranking, with 100% of its NBN premises on full fibre. Mount Pleasant and Golden Point round out the top three. These 15 suburbs came from a field of 32 eligible Ballarat suburbs.

Every NBN premises in a Ballarat suburb is weighted by its access technology and averaged into a single 0-100 score. Fibre to the premises (FTTP) scores highest, then fibre to the curb, hybrid fibre-coaxial cable, fibre to the building, fibre to the node, fixed wireless, and satellite last. A suburb that is entirely full fibre scores near 100; one still largely on fibre-to-the-node copper scores much lower. Percentile ranks are computed within Ballarat's candidate pool, not nationally.

NBN Co publishes the access technology available at every serviceable premises. We use an aggregation of that public rollout data — around 12.6 million premises nationally — and spatial-join each one to its ABS suburb boundary, then keep only the per-suburb rollup (premises count, technology mix, and the score). No individual addresses are stored or shown.

No — the score reflects the network technology available, not the plan a household buys. A full-fibre suburb can deliver gigabit speeds, but a resident on an entry-level plan won't see them. Real-world speed also depends on the retail provider, in-home wiring, and network congestion. The score measures the ceiling the infrastructure allows, which is the part that varies by suburb.

The top 15 is recomputed whenever we refresh the NBN rollout data, which updates weekly at the source. Technology upgrades — such as a fibre-to-the-node area being switched to full fibre — land in the next re-computation.