Why Does the NBN Keep Going Up?A Look at What These Companies Are Actually Making

Telstra's most recent full year result, for the twelve months to 30 June 2025, showed a statutory net profit of $2.34 billion, up 31 per cent on the year before. Total income was $23.12 billion. Reported EBITDA came in at $8.6 billion, up 14 per cent.

TPG Telecom, the company behind Vodafone, TPG, iiNet, Internode, felix and Lebara, swung from a $107 million loss to a $461 million net profit for the year to December 2025. A large chunk of that came from selling off fibre network assets, so it is not a perfectly clean number, but even stripping that out, the underlying business grew.

Optus is trickier to pin down because it does not file separate Australian financials. Its parent, Singapore's Singtel, reports Optus as a segment, and that segment posted EBIT of $446 million for the year to March 2025, up 55 per cent, on EBITDA of $2.22 billion. Worth noting in fairness, Optus's actual Australian legal entity has posted statutory losses in recent years, so its picture is genuinely more mixed than Telstra's or TPG's. We are not going to pretend otherwise.

Not every provider in this market is coining it. Aussie Broadband's profit margin is a fraction of the majors'. This is not a blanket claim that every telco is exploiting customers. It is a claim about a specific pattern among a specific handful of very large companies.

This is the defence you will hear most often, and it deserves a fair answer rather than a dismissal.

NBN Co, the government owned wholesaler that every retail provider buys access from, does raise its own prices each year, capped at CPI under an agreement with the ACCC. For the July 2026 round, that wholesale increase added somewhere between nothing and $2.34 a month on the most popular plans.

So some of what lands on your bill genuinely is a pass through cost that providers do not control. That much is fair.

What is less fair is the gap between that wholesale number and what actually shows up on invoices. In 2025, several retail NBN price rises hit $4 a month, more than double the largest wholesale increase of $1.71 that year. Providers are not required to charge exactly what NBN Co charges them. They choose their own retail margin on top, and that margin is where the real story sits.

It is also worth noticing which plans get targeted. Almost every provider raised its cheapest plans this year. Some also lifted their fastest tiers, but the increases land hardest on the entry-level NBN 25 and NBN 50 plans, which is where the biggest share of customers sit and where a $3 rise is the largest in percentage terms. That is not a coincidence. It is the customers least likely to shop around, often on a budget for a reason, who end up carrying the increase.

None of this makes anyone a villain for running a profitable business. But there is a difference between a company earning a fair return and a company posting record profits while quietly leaning hardest on the customers who can least afford to notice.

Telstra's own results transcript, in the same breath as reporting a 31 per cent profit jump, referenced the price rises rolling out that same month. That juxtaposition is not something we are reading into. It is sitting right there in the public record.

If a provider needs to raise prices to cover a genuine wholesale increase, fine. Say so, show the number, apply it evenly. What is harder to accept is a small increase dressed up as unavoidable, landing only on the plans held by people who are unlikely to check whether they are still getting a fair deal.

This is exactly the gap Bill Owl was built to close. You tell us what you are currently paying, and we tell you honestly whether you are overpaying and by how much, based on every plan we can find, not just the ones that pay us a commission.

Every plan shown displays both the promotional price and the ongoing price once you expand the card, so you can see the real cost, not just the honeymoon number. You can view results three ways: cheaper plans at the same speed, cheaper plans at a faster speed, or the Owl's Choice, and sort by ongoing rate, first year cost or best deal rate, whichever matters most to you. We never rank by commission. If your current plan turns out to be genuinely fair, we will tell you that too.

The individual increases are small enough that nobody cancels over them. That is precisely why they work, and it is precisely why it is worth checking your bill against the market at least once a year rather than assuming loyalty is being rewarded. It usually is not.

Telstra and TPG Telecom are profitable companies. Optus posted a full-year loss, driven largely by the cost of its September 2025 outage, but its underlying operations still earned $446 million, up 55 per cent. None of these are struggling businesses passing on costs they can't carry. Their pricing decisions land hardest on the customers paying the least attention. Checking whether you are one of them takes two minutes.