Good morning, and welcome to those of you joining us here in the room today, and for those of you joining us online. I'm joining today from the lands of the Gadigal people, and on behalf of Telstra, I acknowledge and pay my respects to traditional custodians of country throughout Australia, and recognize the continued connection Australia's First Nation peoples have to land, water, and culture. We pay our respects to elders, past and present. Standing here today, it is almost unbelievable that we're almost at the halfway point of our T25 strategy. At our FY 2023 results in August, I spoke about the good momentum inside our business and the confidence we have that we can continue to grow. So today, rather than doing a broad update touching on all of the key parts of our business, we're going to dive a bit deeper into a few areas.
Now, out of today, there are five things we would like you to take away. First off, overall, our T25 strategy is on track, and we remain very focused on delivering our ambitions, including growing our underlying EBITDA and earnings per share. Two, we are uniquely placed to continue our strong track record of network leadership and differentiation. Three, we are well positioned to capture demand in digital infrastructure, and we have a strong pipeline of growth opportunities ahead. Four, we have a very strong balance sheet, which is enabling us to continue to invest and capture growth. And finally, we know underpinning all of this, investing in our customer experience is absolutely fundamental, so that we're providing the best experience, and we know that matters the most in terms of unlocking future growth and value in our business.
Now, today, you're going to hear from a few of the team. Channa is going to talk a bit more about our mobile network leadership, and it is so critical because it underpins the premium experience that we deliver to our customers, and it also helps enable the digital economy here in the country. In August, we shared our decision that we were going to maintain the current ownership structure of InfraCo Fixed, and so today you're going to hear a whole lot more from Brendon. He's going to dive into some a bit more detail into our digital infrastructure business and some of the opportunities that we see ahead to grow that business further. You'll also hear from Michael, who's going to talk about our financial strategy and how we continue to execute against that and continue to run our business with discipline.
At our full year results, I spoke a little bit about how the parts of our business were performing. In particular, there's some parts performing strongly, mobile and infrastructure. I also talked about some parts of the business where we're facing some challenges: enterprise performance, and of course, the external environment and its impact on cost reductions. So those challenges remain, and they continue to be a core focus for us. In our enterprise business, the headwinds we're seeing in data and connectivity and calling are broadly in line with what we expected. However, we now do not expect network applications and services, revenue, and EBITDA to grow in FY 2024. Michael is going to speak in a bit more detail about those challenges a little bit later this morning.
We are reconfirming guidance today, and in addition to reconfirming guidance for the year, we remain very optimistic about the long-term structural demand that we see, which is underpinning our business, and that supports our ability to deliver sustainable growth in the long term. So with that in mind, I had two things I wanted to cover off this morning. Firstly, what are some of those trends we're seeing here and globally, and how they inform our core beliefs about the future? And then secondly, how these translate into what we're really focused on over these next 18 months to finish the job on T25 and to set us up for growth beyond that.
So as we look at the world around us, technology trends are moving faster than ever, and as we look at those trends, they make us more confident that our T25 strategy is absolutely the right strategy, and the choices we're making today will set us up for beyond 2025. There are five core beliefs that really inform our strategy and that are really backed up by global mega trends, and I want to take just a little bit of time to talk about those five core beliefs. The first one is that connectivity will continue to play a vital role in the digital economy, and if anything, is only continuing to grow in importance. Now, we see this in a few ways. Firstly, unabating demand for data. As I spoke about in August, we're seeing on our mobile network data growth of around 30% per annum.
It doesn't stop there. If I look across APAC on our undersea cable network, we're seeing data demand on an annual basis growing between 30%-40%. Then if you look locally at the level of investment in data centers here in the country, that then translates into increased demand for connectivity as well. I also observe when you look at Australia today, we're sitting at a 60-year low in terms of productivity here in the country, and we believe digital technologies can play a big part in turning that around. In fact, there are some estimates out there today that estimate by 2028, they could contribute AUD 315 billion to the Australian economy.
Now, underpinning all of that is the need to be connected, and that's why investment in our mobile network, investment in our fiber assets, investment in our subsea cable network is absolutely critical. The second key trend, anywhere you go at the moment, you read media, there's a lot about LEO satellite, and we absolutely believe LEO satellite capability and capacity is going to continue to grow, and we see it as a fundamental technology that can complement our mobile network and experience. We do also believe that terrestrial mobile networks will be the primary method of connecting on the go. Again, when we look at some of the forecasts and expectations, global data growth on satellites is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 28%, 2020 through to 2030.
But just like we've not seen mobile networks replace fiber networks, we also do not believe that satellite networks will replace mobile networks, and that's because our mobile network has about 1,000 times the capacity in a nominal area compared to a LEO satellite. So it's going to be critical. We continue to invest in our mobile network whilst partnering and moving fast in terms of how we leverage these new satellite technologies to bring even better services to our customers in Australia, particularly those in remote and regional Australia. The third core belief is around digitization and AI, and we can still see there is a huge wave of innovation ahead across industries here in Australia. Our enterprise business is very much focused on how to help support and enable our customers with that.
Again, global forecasts are saying that this next wave of digital innovation is expected to generate $10-15 trillion globally. We're already working with some of the largest organizations here in the country to help them digitize their businesses, from sectors like mining and logistics to infrastructure and agriculture. The fourth area is trust and sovereign capabilities are more important than ever, particularly in a world with such heightened geopolitical tensions. How are we seeing this play out? In our international business, we're seeing a real demand for different and new subsea routes. Here onshore, we're absolutely seeing a focus where organizations are looking at onshore infrastructure that can host their data and AI, so that they've got that security and business continuity.
Our scale, our infrastructure, and our trusted partnerships provide really unique opportunities for us, and you're going to hear a whole lot more about that from Brendon a little bit later. Our final core belief is all about security, which continues to increase importance. It is extraordinary that today, cybercrime is now the third largest economy behind the United States and China. It is rapidly evolving, and that threat landscape just continues to reach new levels. It absolutely requires coordinated response across industry and with government. So for us, it's both a risk and also an opportunity, given our leadership in cyber and the ever-evolving threat landscape. So if you step back and you look at those five core beliefs and trends, Telstra is absolutely uniquely placed to deliver for our customers. Why do I say that? We've got a long history of leadership, we've got...
We're very much trusted on security, and we have the strength of our infrastructure assets. So that's all front of mind as we're thinking about the next 18 months and continuing to deliver on T25, and also setting us up for growth in that much more digitized future. So given today, we've got a big focus on infrastructure and networks, I'm going to touch on our T25 pillars, but I'm going to start with those. So let me go to growth and value first. InfraCo Fixed, as I said, we've made the decision to retain the current ownership structure of InfraCo Fixed, and as I just spoke about, we see very strong structural demand for digital infrastructure. In fact, here in Australia, we are the biggest investor in digital infrastructure.
Over the last five years, if you look at our total CapEx investment, it's a little over AUD 17 billion, and we're very much committed to continuing to invest. This includes the around AUD 1.6 billion to build the Intercity Fibre network and the ground infrastructure to support Viasat. In August 2022, we announced the first five routes of our Intercity Fibre project, and construction is well underway, with more than 400 kilometers of fiber now in the ground. Today, we're announcing an additional five routes that will begin construction in 2025, plus an additional investment in the Pilbara region of WA. Having been there with Brendon just a few months ago, it is evident, the economic opportunity in the Pilbara and our ability to help enable that. Brendon, again, will go into quite a bit more detail shortly.
So on our Intercity Fibre project, that takes us to a total of 10 routes and almost 14,000 km of fiber that will be delivered across FY 2023 to FY 2027. This is foundational infrastructure. It is foundational infrastructure for the country, and it will help deliver demand across the coming decades. Outside of Australia, we also actually operate APAC's largest undersea cable network, and we're responsible for about a third of intra-Asia traffic and about a quarter of trans-Pacific traffic. You might recall in our CapEx guidance for this year, we allocated an additional AUD 100 million of CapEx to go into our undersea cable business. Where's that going? That's going into intra-Asia and US-Asia capacity, but also a new route from Singapore, Philippines, through to the US, that we expect to be available from Q3.
Over and above, of course, all of the investment, when it comes to delivering growth and value, we're very much focused on keeping our business as simple and as efficient as possible, so we can maximize that value. Let me now shift to network leadership. On our mobile network alone, over the last 7 years, we've invested AUD 11 billion. AUD 4 billion of that has gone into regional areas. That results in us having the largest and most reliable mobile network here in the country. We also continue to track well against our T25 ambitions from a network point of view, and Channa is going to take you through those in a bit more detail shortly. I spoke a lot about satellites and a lot going on in the satellite space.
We've moved fast, and we have already three deals in place with satellite operators, with Starlink, OneWeb, and Viasat, and that's all about bringing even better options and services to regional and remote customers. We will have an, a world first when we launch our consumer broadband and voice service over Starlink. We're currently trialing this with customers and are anticipating we will launch that in March next year. We're also going to resell Starlink's enterprise and business product, both here and overseas, and the teams have been busy trialing that over the last few months, and I'm very pleased to say that the product is available for sale. If I turn now to customer experience, as I said, it is foundational to unlocking the opportunities ahead of us.
All of those investments I spoke about, from infrastructure to networks, they're absolutely fundamental to delivering and enabling that premium and differentiated experience on our network, and we know our customers value that highly. On top of that, we're investing in other places. We're investing in security capabilities to keep our customers safe. A couple of examples, our Cleaner Pipes initiative, where we are blocking more email, SMS, and calls than ever before. Our collaboration with CBA, with the Quantium Telstra venture, where we're using AI to detect phone scams in real time. We're also investing to help businesses really be able to capture the opportunities of the digital economy. If I look at enterprise, David and the team are transforming the way that they support industries, focusing on industry verticals, helping those industries to digitize. A good example of that is our proposed acquisition of Versent.
It's all about helping Telstra Purple accelerate its ambition of building a market-leading cloud practice. Now, Versent has a customer base that's made up of strong blue-chip customers. They're highly complementary to Telstra Enterprise and Telstra Purple because, for most, we're providing the connectivity today, and Versent is providing the digital transformation capabilities. We're also investing in Telstra Business because we see a huge opportunity when it comes to small and medium businesses in the country. We think they need access to the same transformative benefits of technology that larger businesses have access to. We also continue to invest in digitization because we know we need to make it even simpler for our customers to deal with us. In the next 18 months, we need to finish the job on digitization.
Where we stand today, we have all of our prepaid customers now migrated into our new digital environment, and we can see the benefits for customers. If I look at just the recharge experience alone, we see Episode NPS up 20 points over the last year. In consumer and small business more broadly, we now have more than 90% of our sales in our new environment, and we continue to see complaints at record lows and our Episode NPS at record highs. Our focus is absolutely on completing the job on migration of our customers. In fact, in the second half of this financial year, we will deliver capability that will give our customers choice of payment methods, which will be a key unlock in completing that migration. Finally, I do want to touch on the place you want to work pillar.
I'm not going to go into a lot of detail today, given our focus today is more on the network and infrastructure side. Again, it is absolutely fundamental to us being able to achieve our ambitions and to deliver for our customers.... We will remain on track across all of the elements under this pillar of our strategy, including driving digital leadership across the organization. We also continue to focus on having strongly engaged teams and then, of course, operating in a sustainable and responsible way, which is a core part of our T25 strategy. Let me wrap up there. Overall, our strategy is on track.
We're very much focused on delivering the second half of T25, and the global trends I spoke to, they make us more confident than ever that T25 is the right strategy, and the decisions we're making today will set us up strongly to be able to grow in the future. So on that note, let me hand over to Channa.
Thanks, Vicki, and good morning, everyone. Very pleased to be here with you today. So a question on many minds is: Why is Telstra's mobile network better and different to our competitors? And importantly, what's in our future that will maintain that differentiation? So to answer that question, I'm gonna focus on three things today. Firstly, explain why we are the network leader, our commitment to maintaining that world-leading customer experience, and underpinned by best-in-class network resilience and security. Secondly, I just want to emphasize that we will continue to pioneer and innovate and push the technology envelope. Our capability is at a global leadership level and has been for over 15 years, and during that time, we've delivered 52 world firsts, with 19 of them just in the last 5 years on 5G.
And then thirdly, our drive to define the next horizon of secure and reliable customer experience and how we will deliver these to our customers. Without doubt, we have built Australia's best, largest, and most reliable network. We've invested AUD 11 billion over 7 years just to build that network, and it provides 2.7 million sq km of coverage, which is around 1 million sq km in excess of our nearest competitor, and we expect to maintain this terrestrial coverage leadership. We have the largest 5G network in over 450 major towns and cities, and it covers 85% of the population today. On the back of our 4G network, we've also built one of the largest terrestrial Internet of Things networks at over 4.4 million sq km, which obviously exceeds our handset coverage.
All of this is underpinned by a high-capacity, high-speed fiber cable backbone, which stretches over 270,000 kilometers. Resilience and security are at the heart of this network. We have advanced threat detection and remediation, which protects the network, and our Cleaner Pipes and security products protect our customers. I'm very pleased to say that our technology leadership has been validated with the announcement in the last couple of days that umlaut, a global company that independently tests networks, has validated our technology leadership and announced us as the 2023 Best in Test network across all the major categories from voice, data, quality, and, most important, reliability.
This is our fifth consecutive win, and it's been done over significant multibillion-dollar investments year on year, and with a deep commitment by our engineering and field teams to deliver this world-class quality that sets us apart in the domestic market. So we are delivering the best experience today, and this, in turn, is stimulating significant demand, which is growing year on year on the mobile network. As Vicki said, that's at 30% per annum for data. What's driving that is high-resolution video, video streaming, video conferencing, and also we're seeing video monitoring for operational and security purposes. The other thing is that with the increasing use of video conferencing and video calling, what we see is that, you know, they've got symmetric traffic flows.
So what we're seeing is a greater demand for capacity and speed in the uplink, uplink direction on our network. So we are catering for that as well. So, so more aspects of everyday and business life are now being conducted via smartphones or tablets compared to over residential or office-based PCs. So this in turn, and this growth is driving our investment to maintain that best experience and our leadership in the market. And I know sometimes when you look at some of these figures, you know, data figures, it's hard to wrap your mind around, you know, what is 8.4 petabytes of data downloaded in a day on our network?
Well, just to put a real-world context around that, if you were to sit and watch a high-definition video stream, it would take you 320 years to go through all of that data. So that's how much data is coming across our network every day. Okay, so to cement our mobile network leadership, we will continue to expand our mobile network coverage as we head towards shutting down our legacy 3G network at the end of June 2024, we will be providing the same or better coverage via 4G, where we only had 3G before. And importantly, 4G will deliver higher data speeds and a better voice quality to those customers who are only experiencing 3G today. And this expansion of our 4G network will further expand our IoT network to almost 5 million square kilometers of coverage.
So we will continue to grow our 5G network, increasing the capacity to maintain that customer experience in the face of this ever-increasing demand. And so we will extend the coverage footprint from 85% to 95% by the end of FY 2025. And at the outset of T25, we said that we would provide 100,000 sq km of new mobile coverage by the end of FY 2025. I'm pleased to say that we're actually really well progressed on that, and at the end of FY 2023, we've actually delivered 80,000 sq km of that 100,000 sq km. But coverage alone is not enough. We are innovating with new technology to increase the efficiency to further drive our leadership.
As I said, we're shutting down 3G, and then, and we're gonna repurpose that low-band spectrum to 5G, which provides a superior experience. So in regional Australia, that low-band spectrum drives coverage further out, and in cities, the low-band spectrum penetrates into buildings better. And by the way, 5G, as we, as more 5G comes on, it has a lower energy footprint, better efficiency. And we are also leveraging advances in the capacity of next-generation IP and optical transport, and we're working across all our ecosystems. So it's important not to just work on the network side. We're working with our handset providers to make sure that we have the handset capability to take advantage of that new technology. And importantly, with these new technologies, we are able to more efficiently carry more traffic in the same spectrum bandwidth.
So that means that we are driving down the unit cost to deliver a kilobit of data in that same spectrum. And, of course, we are using more advanced automation and AI, you know, to enable our key processes so that, you know, with processes like capacity planning and network deployment, again, that's an important part of increasing our efficiency. All right. Vicki sort of touched on LEO satellites. So look, there's rightly a great deal of excitement about LEO satellite technology because it does unlock new users and experiences for our customers. But we firmly believe that LEO will complement our terrestrial network, and we are actively advancing and exploring several LEO satellite solutions. So first is our partnership with OneWeb for LEO-enabled backhaul to remote mobile sites.
Now, the advantages of LEO and GEO for mobile backhaul makes possible improved customer experiences, but also more economic expansion of mobile coverage into remote areas. There's also the potential for OneWeb, that OneWeb solution for backhaul, to be used as a backup solution to improve the reliability in areas where our terrestrial backhaul is susceptible to natural disasters and communities go into isolation. Then, of course, there's our world-first agreement to resell Starlink, and that combined with voice. So this provides a cost-effective USO compliant solution with performance and customer experience that's going to be better than ADSL. And we intend to use our Smart Modem 3 to provide the voice component of that service.
Customers who take up a Telstra plan powered by Starlink will be able to bring their home phone number if they wish, and we expect to launch in March in our stores, and call centers will be able to help with for customers to understand what their connectivity options are. So let's talk about direct-to-handset services. So, as I said, this will complement our terrestrial mobile network. This technology will initially support text and, in the longer term, voice and low-speed data to smartphones across Australia, albeit outdoors and with a clear skyline. So in our view, direct-to-handset will be a remote safety net for basic connectivity. And just as mobile networks didn't replace fiber networks, it's important to realize the difference between the carrying capacity of satellite versus mobile.
There's an important metric that we use, slightly technical, but it's called bandwidth density. The bandwidth density of our terrestrial mobile network is 1 million kbps per sq km. Now, that compared to LEO satellites is one hundred to a thousand kbps. So our terrestrial mobile network has 1,000 times more capacity than the same nominal coverage of a LEO satellite, you know, in a given location. So that's a stark difference. But of course, you know, with direct-to-handset, we will be pioneering a service ourselves in 2024, and we plan to offer it to our customers as a trial service. Now, as I said at the beginning, security and network resilience are at the heart of how we differentiate and deliver our network leadership.
Network resilience remains a top priority, and we are continuing to invest in it to deliver, for example, that combination of terrestrial and satellite backhaul, which gives us optionality with diverse backhaul, which expands and uplifts our network resilience. Our towers are connected to our mobile network, and we are continuing to distribute that core network to reduce what's called a blast zone. The blast zone size, which minimizes the impact zone. And we are developing a capability to shift our core network function to a public cloud in the event of emergencies or unexpected demand. And of course, power systems. They've been an area of focus, and we are taking innovative approaches to standalone and backup power systems to enhance network resilience.
So we're working with various power companies like Horizon Energy, Western Power, and also, you know, we recently spoke about our hydrogen fuel cell pilot, which is going into a pilot phase across 5 sites in Victoria. Of course, at the same time as we continue to deliver on network resilience, we're continuing to further invest in our security capability. Further investment in Cleaner Pipes to both protect our network as well as our customers, and coupled with that comprehensive suite of security products backed by our team of world-class cybersecurity experts. So let me turn to enterprise, enterprise sector and private networks. So we have already built and manage 23 private networks today, and we are exploring 30 new market opportunities. According to the ACMA, private networks will grow by 30% per annum over the next 5 years.
So the enhanced resilience that I spoke about, with satellite optionality, with LEO, combined with our existing suite of public and private networks, and then you throw in some of the new advanced features on 5G, like network slicing, we think starts to open up some new market opportunities across defense, government, and enterprise sectors. And we're certainly seeing some of those opportunities in the critical communication sector, like mining, oil and gas, rail, and emergency services. So we have been growing this capability, to develop across our public and private network, and we think the combination of those is really gonna give us an ability to provide highly tailored, reliable, and near ubiquitous service coverage in places that we think that we can open up these market opportunities.
So I want to turn to an area, where we're increasingly starting to play a leading role at a global level, and this is in the area of advanced automation and AI. All of our core networks today are not the old black boxes connected, you know, together. All of them are running on software, and they're running in dynamic, virtualized environments with security and resilience by design. So we have to introduce rapidly advanced automation driven by AI, that allows us to improve and drive our technology leadership and to provide further differentiated customer experiences. And our architecture has been decoupled to securely expose, via APIs, network attributes that allow us to rapidly compose new and innovative products to take them to market.
As a validation, we recently, at Digital Transformation World in Copenhagen, we were awarded and recognized for our new, for our Telstra reference architecture model, as being compliant to the now industry-leading Open Digital Architecture standard. And we were also presented with the IT Excellence Award for IT agility. So, you know, we're pretty proud of that. And so we're going to continue to innovate and use AI. And I just want to give you three quick examples. So, firstly, we are applying AI and machine learning to massive sets of alarm data and telemetry.
What that does, and this is in our fixed network today, and what that does is it allows us to quickly detect any anomalous events in our network, and then do proactive and predictive analytics to reduce the resolution time, and to then potentially prevent network and security-related customer issues. The next phase of this is to expand this to our mobile network. We're already doing real-time tuning of our wireless network, and in the next phase we're going to bring in AI and machine learning to make it much more real time. We are currently working on improving the optimization of energy use in our 4G and 5G networks, and this is a collaboration with our vendors, and we are working right up the stack.
We are, we've already introduced improvements in silicon and in network features, and in the next step, we're going to bring AI and machine learning to, again, make it a more real-time experience to get that combination of the most efficient use of energy, combined with the best customer experience. We are one of the world leaders on this. So bringing that all together, ultimately, a key aim of our investment when we bring this together, is advanced network features, network resilience, and security, combined with AI-driven, autonomous management. What we want to do is to then deliver an always-on, consistent, and reliable experience for our customers. This consistent and reliable experience is about delivering performance suitable for our customers' needs, whether they're commuting, they're walking, indoors, at home, in the office, or in a shopping mall, or at a stadium.
We will aim to tailor the capacity and speed across the places our customers travel, live, work, and play. Thank you. With that, I'll hand over to Brendon.
Thanks very much, Channa, and good morning, everyone, wherever you are. I wanted to talk a little bit about demand, our world-class assets, and how we're looking at opportunities in digital infrastructure, and how we're set to capture some of those. Vicki's already covered the fact that we've got amazing demand already before us, and I like to think of it in layers. That's typically how the industry's talking about it. The everyday use layer, which is probably that first one, all of our businesses, government applications, all of the use we use through mobile phones and all of those networks, and then we're starting to see a large additional workload layer come through AI, and an additional one on top of that with sovereignty and data security.
As you look at what's happening around the world, what's interesting, if we look at data, at the data center to start with, and in terms of all of the interactions I've had in the last few months, in the U.S. and other markets, most data center capacity has been sold. There's strong bookings for capacity that's being built, and there's been a rapid acceleration of data center sales here in Australia in the last few months, along a similar trend. That's gonna require backhaul fiber connectivity, just the data center workload alone. And when we think of all of those workloads on that backhaul fiber opportunity in Australia, we see that as a AUD 1.7 billion opportunity by 2033. Data centers are not islands. They must be interconnected and interconnected by fiber.
We've got the international and domestic side on how we do that. You've heard Channa talk about satellite. That's probably a, you know, a new load that needs to come in, in some form on fiber as well. But when we look at the assets and the capabilities Telstra has, it's pretty amazing. Internationally, 400,000 kilometers of subsea cables, 36 landing stations, 2,000 POPs, and then once you've traversed the seas and the different points, and you land in Australia, then we've got amazing duct fiber capabilities and connectivity to all data centers and NBN points of interconnect. We're an at-scale global provider, and we have an excellent reputation, in terms of being a trusted partner, on-time delivery and customer service excellence, and the advanced nature of our technology solutions.
InfraCo's just celebrated its fifth birthday, and it's been an amazing journey so far. From its creation through to the establishment of Amplitel and the monetization of the towers business, we've been through the corporate restructure. There was a huge amount of work we did to get ready for monetization on the fixed side, if we had have chosen to go down that path, and I think we've just become more mature and more relevant to the industry here in Australia. I just want to say the execution continues, but we've needed to make, I think, some appropriate adjustments to what we're focused on. And that's a shift away, probably from those asset verticals, which was the initial heavy focus, to being an integrated solutions provider, and we're doing that because that's what the market is buying. They're buying integrated digital solutions.
We're moving to customer success teams. Again, the market is looking to have a completely integrated set of capabilities before them as they're looking to do major digital infrastructure transactions. Safety remains a critical priority, just given the breadth and depth of our facilities. Driving our operating efficiency, which I'll talk about in a moment, continuing to extend the utilization of our assets, and obviously, you know, being responsible in terms of how we operate that. So very, very excited about the changes that we've made in a series of announcements just after full year results to continue to drive the evolution and execution of this amazing business.
I'd like to now move to talk about Intercity Fibre, and hopefully you've had a chance, if you're here in the room, to stop by the booth in the foyer to look at some of the fiber samples and talk to some of the team. As I said before, we see this as an AUD 1.7 billion opportunity over the next 10 years. We're building a set of all-new fiber paths with a dual fiber approach, the pink fiber and the blue fiber. The pink fiber is our ultra-fast, ultra-low loss fiber. It's really designed for those high workload, point-to-point solutions such as data center. The blue fiber is also incredibly fast. That's been designed to facilitate over 250 on-ramps and off-ramps into regional centers across the country.
On this ULL, the transmission rates per channel are 650 gigabits a second. That's about six times faster than anything available today. We've done a trial with Infinera. They took a 1,000 kilometer section of this fiber, and they delivered data capacity transmissions of 61.3 terabits a second per fiber pair, and that's seven times faster than anything that's available. We're working on quantum key distribution encryption also with Ciena. That's gonna be very, very important for ongoing security in the fiber world. So ladies and gentlemen, soon we will have operational the world's leading terrestrial fiber solution. It's made in Australia, in fact, here in New South Wales at Dee Why, with our partner, Prysmian.
It's engineered to roll continuously to minimize joins, to maximize performance, and it's engineered to withstand the weather and the wildlife of Australia. What was interesting in approaching Investor Day is, one of the team uncovered a newspaper article from 1988. It was, in fact, the 31st of August, 1988, almost to the day we're here, and this was about the Intercity Fibre of the day that Telecom was building, a 2,700-kilometer link, across the Nullarbor. The use case, which is quoted, was being able to send 8,000 fact sheets across Australia in two seconds. It spoke about being able to carry 190,000 concurrent telephone calls by the mid-1990s. If we roll forward a little bit, what might be a more realistic hypothetical use case today?
Let's say we wanted to transmit the Google search index across the country. That's 100 petabytes. That's 100 million gigabytes. We think that would take around about four hours. If I go back to the fax use case, in four hours, back in 1988, we would've been able to transmit 5.7 GB. 5.7 GB to 100 million gigabytes in four hours, just to give you a dimension of how things are advancing and rolling. These are the existing routes that are under construction, about 9,000 km. You'll see the Perth-Sydney inland route, and then you'll also see routes that connect Perth to Adelaide and then other routes up the East Coast. We're starting with these because we need to build more capacity.
We are very low, and the nation is low on capacity on a number of these routes. And there's also very, very strong demand on these routes. And then what we've announced today is an additional 5,000 kilometers, and you can see the new routes highlighted. In particular, I wanna focus on the Adelaide-Darwin route. We think this is a very, very important route, particularly to connect to the sub-sea cable infrastructure of Asia. We think that's also a very, very important route for data center use cases in solar-rich areas, and it's also very, very important for redundancy and resiliency for the nation. I'll talk about the Pilbara work that we're doing in a moment. Now, I wanted to talk about how we're developing and monetizing the Intercity Fibre offering.
And last week, I was doing a tour of one of the leading data centers in the country at Eastern Creek. And I can honestly say, having toured that data center, that's as good as you'll see anything in the world from a data center's perspective, and I think Australia's building amazing digital infrastructure. But it occurred to me, as an investor, if you're going through that facility, it's very obvious how things are gonna be monetized. And it's, it's, it's something you can physically see. You can see all the power grids coming in. You can see fire suppression systems. You can see the air conditioning, the power. You can see where the workloads, the different workloads that sit across the floor, from enterprise and government to the hyperscaler cloud providers.
You can even stand on the roof and see where the next section or part of the data center is going to be built. It's a little bit harder to visualize how we might monetize something that's this big, that's buried in the ground and requires specialist equipment to operate. So I've put this slide together, and I wanna talk about a few key attributes from a customer perspective. Firstly, the customer needs to decide, are they going to manage the fiber solution themselves, or is Telstra gonna manage it for them? The second is, is the solution gonna be lit or dark? Lit simply means we have electronic equipment at each end of the fiber and along the fiber that's responsible for transmitting the data. And then lastly, the capacity and speed that's gonna be required.
The first workload is a wavelength service, and this is a traditional lit service that we would manage. It's medium in terms of capacity, and the way the commercials work is it's typically a service charge per month, per kilometer. We have 100 gig and 400 gig today, and we have increasing speeds, such as 600 gig, to come. You then progress to a spectrum service, and essentially, this is a customer leasing part of a fiber pair, which is the FP. That can be customer-managed or Telstra-managed. Generally bigger capacity and generally medium to long term. And the way the commercials work is through upfront IRU payments, that's like capital contributions, and then a trailing service level charge. And then we move to the new emerging use case of dark fiber.
This is customer-managed, leveraging the customer's technology solution. They are very long-term arrangements, and we're talking about massive capacities. And very much suited to that hyperscaler data center to data center workload. These are IRUs and trailing service charges. What's the connection between all three? You may want to start with a wavelength service. That gets you off and away pretty quickly, and then you can move to a spectrum service and eventually or straight away to a dark fiber service. The key point here, similar to a data center, is we have 20 years -30 years of capacity through the fiber. What do you need from a customer perspective? You need long-term certainty and tenure. You're going to be able to continually upgrade and drive capacity to suit your needs.
So hopefully that gives a little bit more color to how we're driving the productization and monetization of Intercity Fibre. And I'd just like to say, we're very excited by the demand we're seeing, and we are seeing all of these use cases play out as I've just described them. In terms of the construction update, as Vicki mentioned before, we're over 400 km constructed. We will have around 2,000 km completed by the end of the financial year. We've commenced on the fiber routes, and we will commence planning and work on the others. We have great construction partners in place. They're long-term arrangements. We believe we've got very, very good cost and delivery certainty.
For the Dark Fiber solution, we have to develop about 250 micro edge sites along the route to support the active equipment from our customers that'll be required. We're heavily engaged with traditional landowners, national parks, and the state and federal government agencies. You know, land access is complex these days. It's very important that we get it right, and it's something that we're, you know, very, very focused on. And just last week, we received support and approval from a number of Aboriginal land councils for over 256 km of fiber cleared for building. Vicki mentioned the Pilbara. This is a project that we're working very, very closely with David and his team in Enterprise.
It's a massive economic engine for the country, with billions and billions of planned investment over the next 10 years. We'll be building an additional 165 km of fiber to connect a number of critical sites and facilities across the Pilbara, and there's also a number of other initiatives we have to further augment and uplift our capacity and resiliency. This is going to support a number of use cases, particularly in mining, but also in local government, education, and health. Moving from Intercity Fibre, I'd just like to talk about some of the other opportunities that we're focused on to drive growth in digital infrastructure. The first is back to fiber itself. We, in addition to Intercity Fibre, built 3,500 km for new fiber projects last year.
A good example would be the New South Wales Department of Education, which the enterprise team led, and that involved upgrades to 2,200 schools, and there were 5,600 separate fiber links that needed to be upgraded. Or if you have a holiday home at King Island or you live on King Island, then we've just built 60 km of new fiber across King Island. The mobile infrastructure is also incredibly important, as Channa spoke to.
Amplitel built 96 new towers, and we also work closely with Amplitel and Telstra to connect 500 new small cells, fiber-connected small cells across the country. Dark fiber is launched. It's growing. Very, very happy we're now at over 1,000 services, so volumetrically, from an order book, it's doing well.
We're participating strong in the satellite industry, working with most of the satellite providers, on our, our ground infrastructure capabilities and fiber. Viasat is the one we've spoken about more publicly. We've got a, a, a very, very large, commercial services business, that we run that did 3,500 projects last year. It's about AUD 100 million a year. A, a, a good example would be, the Craigieburn Road upgrade in Victoria, where we had to do about 16 km or 17 km of new infrastructure and relocate existing infrastructure. We stood up a network operations center. That's only...
Not only to drive response to customer management, but that also helps us optimize our maintenance and lifecycle management activities... Going forward, we've got some amazing assets that we're gonna continue to develop in addition to Intercity Fibre. We are in the data center business. We're not in the hyperscaler data center business, but we do have a small number of data centers and a medium number of data center-like sites. We're gonna continue to develop those, such as Wellington Street in Perth, and Woolloongabba in Brisbane. We've got 120 sites we've assessed for Edge, and that's where we've got fiber, power, and space available, as Edge continues to develop. Amplitel has been a really, really strong success story. They've built 200 new towers so far.
There's another 600 under development. And off the back of the strong signings of the past few months, we'll see strong growth both in services and non-Telstra tower lease revenue. If you think of all of our sites, you know, we're a major consumer of energy in Australia. But if we think about those sites a little bit differently, there's about 15,000 which are grid connected. With 28,000 HVAC systems. We generate 300 MVA in generating capacity and 800 MWh with battery capacity.
If we were to think about that a little bit differently, about how we could prevent blackouts, how we could optimize the load to lower bills, not just for ourselves, but for others, how we could, you know, support the transition to greener energy, then that's something that we are actively exploring that would require some modernization to our environment. But a really, really good opportunity and approach. On property, we have a lot happening. We've got some amazing sites, and I wanted to now go to a video on a redevelopment we've done in Perth with one of our major enterprise customers, Fugro.
The remote operations center here, within the Telstra building, enables us to provide assurance to our clients that we are operating on a 24/7 basis, without the risk of losing connectivity, which is the most important thing for us when we're operating remote assets that are totally uncrewed.
Fugro Australia's core business varies from providing geodata to industries such as construction, offshore oil and gas, the renewables market, and we're moving into the space industry as well.
We've worked with Telstra InfraCo for a number of years. Previously, we were based out of the Gnangara Center. We've moved here now into the Telstra Exchange Centre in the center of Perth, which offers a much more accessible location for our staff to be operating the assets remotely.
You're looking at the bridge of the vessel 2,000 km away from where the vessel is actually located on the, on the Northwest Shelf here. So at the moment, all these pictures are all live. We've got approximately 16 channels of video coming in from the, from the vessel. We've got three cameras on board the underwater vehicle, plus the other sensor payload that's on at the moment. Our risk tolerance is as close to zero as possible. The last thing we want to do is lose a vessel, so we're at a facility like this that provides us the redundancy and power and communications and, security, and a central location as well for our staff.
Telstra InfraCo has many buildings across Australia that are ideally suited for the types of tenants that are looking for an office area, a secure data center space. They could be a remote operations center or even a cybersecurity operating center. They have low latency connectivity, they're highly secure, and we have power resilience already in place for our building services.
We didn't look elsewhere. Telstra provided us "yes" answers all along the way. They've been a great partner in the sense that they were the ones that were able to provide us with the, the communications, and no one else has the same facilities and infrastructure.
The benefits, for both Fugro and also Telstra, having us located here in the remote operations center, are already coming to fruition, where you see other government agencies moving into this building, and we're also looking at expanding our operations, given the business need.
As the video said, we do have more activity in that facility with some major government agencies in Western Australia. I just wanted to close out today and talk about something that's very important, which is cost and operating efficiency. That's a major priority. We've got to have the expertise, the agility. It's very, very important we've got a strong supply chain. I think we've got all of those dimensions to InfraCo. There's four priorities we have around this area. The first is having leading asset management. We recently undertook a major technical due diligence of all of our assets with Aurecon. We now have 30-year plans on all dimensions that you would expect to see in a sophisticated, you know, infrastructure environment.
That includes the costs, the maintenance, life cycle management, safety, resiliency, security, all of those things. So leading asset management. An efficient cost structure. That's not just about our cost efficiency, our deployment, our construction costs, our total costs. Having great customer service delivery, that's super important. And then being responsible, you know, having sustainable operations and being environmentally and socially responsible. I wanted to just highlight a few examples of some of the things we're working on to drive our operating efficiency. I want to start in the top left with maintenance.
We've got a lot of facilities and a lot of items that we need to attend to every year, about 440,000 maintenance tasks every year, and we do about 72,000 fixed network site alarm activities as well. Some of the things we've done is to work across the supply chain with our procurement team to get a 20% reduction in our supply and maintenance overheads. On the legacy infrastructure side, we have a big decommissioning program underway with the networks team, with Channa's team. That's switching off equipment. Sometimes in facilities in the past, we've had equipment that's powered on that's not actually being used. Most of that's now gone, fortunately, but we continue that decommissioning. LED lighting, we've done 251 sites with LED lighting.
It sounds like a minor item, but that alone can reduce electricity consumption by 8%-10% on each of those sites. There's a lot of automation that goes with the LED lighting itself. Big focus on batteries, replacing our batteries to support sustainability, reduce alarms, reduce outages. And we're now starting to move to lithium-ion batteries. On the energy savings itself, you can see, we've reduced our consumption by 89 GW since we started InfraCo. We've got another 50 GWh of reduction to go over the next five years, and given the increase in power prices, that's going to be a very, very strong focus. New HVAC systems in a lot of our facilities help with the remote management and load shifting as well.
Copper recovery, it's been a really, strong success story so far. We've extracted 28,000 kilotons. We've got another 50,000 kilotons in plan to 2026, and then as we're able to retire the copper network, then we will continue those plans out to probably the early 2030s. From the property side, we've done a number of major divestments, contributing meaningful EBITDA. That program will continue this financial year, and we've got more sites planned in FY 2025 and 2026. For Amplitel, there was a really, really good example of renegotiating land leases for that business, which has created a AUD 40 million annual saving, as well as increasing the, the WALE. From...
Last thing to touch on, just from an IT perspective, we're continuing to invest in the IT platforms, particularly this year in our fiber asset management system. We're working on AI. A couple of use cases we've got going. One is an AI tool to predict power outages and duration of outages across sites, and that involves weather prediction. We're working with a major university on that one. And then predicting fiber loss three months before we have fiber loss, and that's based, again, on a whole range of different use attributes. I should also lastly touch on the digital twins program we have with Amplitel. We now have 4,000 digital twins. We've got a very, very strong program to have that fully digitized by 2025, and that drives a number of use cases.
As-built accuracy in our documentation, billing, safety, being able to better optimize and schedule the planning of building and deploying new mobile networks. So ladies and gentlemen, infrastructure's an exciting space. I hope you can tell I'm excited. I love this role. It's a, it's a real privilege to lead the business and work with all of my colleagues. I think we've got huge demand coming our way. We've got some amazing assets. Very excited by Intercity Fibre, which is a nation-building project for the country. And we're going to continue to focus on how we can be as efficient and cost effective as possible. That's it from me, and now I'm going to pass over to our Chief Financial Officer, Michael Ackland. Thanks, mate.
Cheers. Good morning, everyone, and thank you, Brendon. That was fantastic. I'm pleased to take you through our financial strategy now, after which all the speakers will return to stage, and we'll take some questions. So at our Investor Day in September 2021, we presented our T25 financial strategy, and we talked about five building blocks to deliver growth and value for shareholders. These remain unchanged and continue to form the foundation of our T25 financial ambitions. These are building financial momentum across the portfolio, delivering net cost reductions, focusing on cash conversion and generation, active portfolio management, and creating shareholder value through our capital management framework. I'd like to take you through how we're seeing each of these, starting with financial momentum. Our FY 2023 results show continued growth in earnings, with overall positive momentum across our key indicators.
Our mobile business remains central to that growth across all segments. ... We've also heard from Brendon today about the opportunities within our infrastructure operations, as well as our international business, which is itself a mobile and infrastructure business. Importantly, these businesses, mobile, infrastructure, and international, have significant competitive advantages and structural demand drivers underpinning continued long-term sustainable growth. In FY23, they were our largest contributor to earnings, comprising over 90% of our EBITDA. With a largely fixed cost, capital-intensive network infrastructure base, they also have strong operating leverage. Of course, this infrastructure also supports our broader offerings, including our fixed line products across consumer, business, and enterprise customers. Finally, our strong cash flow generation allows us to reinvest in maintaining network leadership, customer experience, and in turn, supporting ongoing growth.
Our expectations for business-as-usual CapEx are unchanged at around AUD 3 billion per annum, excluding spectrum and before taking into account Digicel Pacific. In addition, we're investing further in new, longer-term growth with strategic CapEx, including Intercity Fibre project brendon just detailed. Now, turning to our financial momentum in our mobiles business. Our mobiles business is a high-quality asset with strong fundamentals and long-term demand drivers. Mobile usage continues to grow. It is supported by population growth of 1%-2% per annum. It continues to provide increased utility, and we continue to see new products, services, and devices, including array beyond handsets and to wearables, AR, VR, and appliances. In fact, our IoT devices on our network have almost tripled in the last five years to over 7 million.
With that backdrop, we continue to invest heavily in the network technology and services we offer customers. As you heard from Channa, this has supported a differentiated network, underpinned by great digital customer experiences, enable us to capture growth. Our work in onshoring call centers, in sourcing retail stores, digitization, and network security also support our premium proposition. During T22, we moved from 1,800 to 20 simplified Telstra-branded plans with no lock-in contracts and no back book. We introduced the potential to review mobile pricing annually in line with CPI. In addition, we unbundled plans from handset purchases, removed subsidies, and created a loyalty program, which now has more than 5 million members. We recognize that our premium Telstra-branded service may not be the right choice for all customers, but we are committed to building a connected future so everyone can thrive.
Our multi-brand and channel strategy includes a range of differentiated service offerings via Belong, JB Hi-Fi, Boost, and our wholesale MVNOs. This approach helps deliver more choice for customers and optimal value outcomes for shareholders. The compelling fundamentals in mobile give us strong confidence in the outlook for the next decade, as well as our ambition to deliver mid-single-digit CAGR in services revenue to FY25. Turning now to financial momentum, specifically in infrastructure. As you heard from Brendon, there is clearly strong demand and opportunity in digital infrastructure, and Telstra is well placed to capture this. We aim to grow revenues from our world-class infrastructure assets while investing to capture new demand. We will be disciplined and deliberate in when and how we invest, making the best use of our assets.
For example, we're not in hyperscaler data center space, but we are in the business of connecting them. We have high quality, unique assets of national significance with high replacement value. The assets are backed by strong cash flows, including almost AUD 1 billion in EBITDA we receive annually from the government-owned National Broadband Network. This is CPI linked for the next 24 years of the contract, and government guaranteed for the foreseeable future. This includes our international business, which also has a strong market position, as Vicki referenced. We see significant opportunities to leverage this further by investing in strategic growth. Building high quality, future-proof assets with significant long-term upside and demand are examples of where we will seek to invest to capture value.
In 2022, we announced our investment in two major infrastructure projects: the Intercity Fibre project, which will deliver state-of-the-art fiber across nearly 14,000 km of new routes. In addition, the building of the ground infrastructure and fiber for Viasat, which will support the new Viasat-3 terabit-class global satellite system as part of a 16.5-year contract. The cost of the Intercity Fibre project, including the routes announced today, the Pilbara fiber, and the infrastructure for the Viasat project, is projected at AUD 1.6 billion outside of BAU CapEx. This is at the top of the range previously advised of AUD 1.4 billion-AUD 1.6 billion. We have already invested AUD 300 million, and we expect to spend around a further AUD 300 million in FY24, with the remaining investment from FY25 to FY27 inclusive.
The projects are on track to deliver mid-teens IRR or better, nine-year cash payback, and around AUD 200 million in annual income on a run rate basis once all routes become ready for service and contributing. Cash payback and IRR are supported by expected IRU contracts, where a significant proportion of the long-term contract value is received upfront. With respect to the timing of revenue recognition, we have assumed that all IRUs are treated as operating leases. We are bringing all of our experience and discipline to bear in executing these projects, including our long track record of nation building infrastructure projects and governance around managing construction risk and inflation. We have a great set of infrastructure investments, and when similar opportunities arise, we aim to capitalize on these to create value for shareholders.
Together, with our continued strong momentum from our operations, these new investments give us confidence of diversified, sustained growth for the T25 period and beyond. Now, turning to the second block of our financial strategy: delivering net cost reduction. We achieved AUD 2.7 billion cumulative net fixed cost reduction from FY 2016 to FY 2022. Our ambition is for a further AUD 500 million reduction in fixed cost core to FY 2025. In FY 2023, we reduced our fixed cost core by AUD 41 million, despite the onshoring of call centers, inflation, and AUD 45 million of higher energy costs, as well as foreign exchange headwinds. The key productivity areas remain unchanged. However, cost headwinds remain significant and have only continued to increase since the cost reduction ambition was set back in 2021.
For example, despite having driven power reduction and hedged FY25, energy costs are likely to be AUD 100 billion higher versus what we had planned for in the FY21 outlook. The impact of the lower Australian dollar is also not insignificant. As we said at our full year results, cost reduction remains challenged given the stickiness of inflation. We continue to be absolutely focused and disciplined around cost, and we still expect to achieve the large majority of our ambition, with most of this in FY25. Above all, we remain committed to achieving our T25 underlying EBITDA and EPS growth ambitions. Now, turning to the third building block of our financial strategy, a focus on cash conversion and generation. Our business generates strong cash flow with strong EBITDA to cash conversion. In FY23, we delivered free cash flow after leases of AUD 2.8 billion.
If we exclude the AUD 300 million of strategic investment in FY 2023, free cash flow after lease was even stronger at AUD 3.1 billion. Our guidance is for free cash flow after leases in FY 2024 of AUD 2.8 billion-AUD 3.2 billion, including strategic CapEx of approximately AUD 300 million. Our strong cash flow profile helps support the strength of our balance sheet, which is a competitive advantage. Net debt has reduced over recent years, excluding the acquisition of Digicel Pacific, which includes project finance and non-recourse debt. We remain comfortably within our debt servicing comfort zone of 1.5-2 times EBITDA.
Our balance sheet capacity, together with our strong cash flow generation, provides us with flexibility and ability to continue to fund and grow dividends, which is what we have done in recent years, as well as to invest in growth through spectrum, M&A, and strategic CapEx. I'd like to move to the fourth building block of our financial strategy and how active portfolio management helps support growth and unlock value. We have a strong track record of active portfolio management to maintain the strength of our balance sheet, preserve flexibility to invest, and unlock value. We've demonstrated this with over AUD 2 billion of assets monetized during T22, and the sale of 49% stake in Amplitel. The restructure of InfraCo Fixed has created greater transparency and pathway for further efficiency and growth. Importantly, flexibility around InfraCo Fixed in the long term is retained.
Across our portfolio, we will evaluate growth opportunities or exit investments, depending on their alignment with our strategy, the impact on ROIC, flexibility, or the ability to unlock value. We will continue to apply our previously communicated financial criteria for organic and M&A opportunities. Our immediate priority areas are in digital infrastructure domestically, international subsea, and further scale and capabilities in tech services, including cloud and security. As Vicki referenced, our proposed acquisition of Versent is an example of meeting these financial and strategic objectives. We have a long history of partnering, and we will continue to do this to maximize growth and value. When thinking about partnering, we have four priorities we consider. One, support our group capital management framework objectives, including financial strength and flexibility in seeking to grow the dividend. Two, accelerate growth. Three, access other funding options or to optimize cost of capital.
This could include off-balance sheet or non-recourse solutions. And 4, share risk or access capability not otherwise available to us. Now, turning to the 5th building block of our financial strategy, our capital management framework. We continue to apply fiscal discipline and use this framework to manage capital and deliver shareholder value. We're committed to the balance sheet settings consistent with an A-band credit rating. This commitment continues to be important to shareholders and to debt holders. We aim to maximize fully franked dividends and to seek to grow it over time. This reflects the importance of fully franked dividends to shareholders, and our intention to return as much cash via fully franked dividends, which can be sustainably supported by earnings and franking, while also balancing the objectives and principles of the capital management framework.
I've spoken earlier about the importance of our ongoing investment in BAU CapEx to maintain financial momentum. With our strong cash flow, we remain focused on investing for future growth, and in the event of excess cash, delivering additional returns to our shareholders. Finally, I'd like to touch on our debt financing arrangements. The strength of our operating business and disciplined approach to capital management provides continued access to debt markets at attractive rates. We saw this earlier this year, when we proactively issued the equivalent of AUD 1.5 billion in debt at attractive rates across Australia and European public markets. Our debt profile is diversified, with a weighted average maturity of approximately four years and an average borrowing cost of 4.6% in FY 2023. We aim to issue all new debt at the group level.
Our established hedging practices provide more certainty of forward rates. Aligned to our policy, currently, more than 50% of our gross debt is fixed at an average rate of around 4.5%. With the support of our T25 financial strategy, we remain on track to achieve our previously announced financial ambitions, which you can see on the slide. Now, turning to our FY 2024 guidance that we announced in August this year and have reaffirmed today. You can see the ranges, along with the conditions upon which we have provided them. In FY 2024 to date, our mobile business continues to perform strongly. In enterprise, the headwinds in DAC and calling, that we outlined at the full year results, remain broadly in line with expectations.
However, consistent with professional services activity in the market more broadly, our professional services growth and managed service performance will be less than expected. As a result, we do not expect NAS revenue and EBITDA to grow in FY 2024. In terms of phasing, we expect our FY 2024 underlying EBITDA to be second half weighted, given the timing of fixed costs and asset disposals and growth in InfraCo Fixed. So to conclude, we have a strong track record of delivery. We've built financial momentum across our portfolio and laid the foundations for further growth. Our T25 strategy is on track, and we remain focused on delivering our ambitions. We're uniquely placed to continue our track record of network leadership and differentiation. We're excited about our ability to capture demand in digital infrastructure, and we have a strong pipeline of investment opportunities.
We have a strong balance sheet, enabling us to continue to invest and to capture growth, and we remain focused on investing to provide our customers with the best experience possible, as this is what matters most for our growth and value. I'm now gonna hand over to Nathan, to take us through Q&A. Thank you.
Thanks, Michael, and I'll get the rest of the speakers to come and join me on stage. Now, we're gonna start some question-and-answer time. Now, we're only gonna take questions from the room, so I invite people to come to the microphones here. That's probably the easiest way, just to walk down to the microphones, and we'll take some questions. So we'll start over here. Entcho from Evans & Partners.
Thanks, Nathan. Sorry, just trying to get the microphone right. Just too tall.
It's a little bit short for you.
Thank you. Can I ask just a very short-term question around the full year guidance and the comment that it will be second half... EBITDA growth will be second half weighted. So do you expect to see a level of EBITDA growth in the first half, just for the avoidance of doubt, and how do you think about that weighting? I think last year it was 49, 51 weighted. Is there sort of a figure you've got in mind?
Why don't I comment first, and then Michael, you jump in. So, Entcho, as you point out, it's not unusual for us to be a little bit second half weighted in underlying EBITDA, so I think, you know, we're reaffirming guidance today and the ranges. And just wanted to point out that we would expect that slight second half weighting. Michael, I don't know if you want to add any more.
Yeah, so it's typically we've seen costs being higher in the first half than second half, or relatively. We're gonna see that again based on some of the activities we undertook in this first half, so that's not abnormal. In our NAS business, tends to be second half weighted. We expect to see that come through again. The only additional point would be in some of the asset disposals and InfraCo Fixed growth that we expect to be a bit more second half weighted.
So, again, just thinking about the full year guidance, since you presented back in August, have you seen mobile growth actually stronger than what you expected? Is that offsetting some of the NAS weakness? And I mean, we've obviously seen what's happening with all the MVNO repricing as well. So are you seeing an additional benefit coming through on the wholesale side as well?
The thing I'd say, Entcho, I mean, when we did results in August, I mean, at that stage, you know, we're very happy with mobile. It continues to perform strongly. And as is always the way with our business, there's going to be elements that are performing really well. There's some areas that are challenged, and yeah, NAS is one of those areas. We have seen that weakness, and I don't think that's unique from conversations in the market at the moment. It feels like professional services activity has pulled back a little bit more broadly. So mobile continues to perform strongly for us. Yeah.
And maybe a longer-term question, just obviously a lot of detail around the Intercity Fibre project. Can you talk to what percentage of the construction costs are locked in under that project? Because, I mean, obviously there's... We see all sorts of reports of pressure on construction costs, and I guess I'm interested in how you think about the risk to the longer-term IRR targets, so the mid-teens IRR target, and whether that's potentially at risk if construction costs keep going up.
... I think, first comment I'd make, and then Brendan or Michael might want to jump in. So, in short, on those mid-teens or better IRRs, we're very confident in those. So as I spoke about, I mean, the structural demand that's out there for fiber is enormous in the country. So very confident in those. And obviously, as we've thought about the investment and we've done our scenarios and modeling, a lot of focus on construction in terms of what might happen on cost there. But Brendan, I don't know if you want to jump in and talk a little bit more.
Yeah, I mean, I think, on the existing routes we're building, we've got very, very good long-term arrangements in place. So I think we're very confident on those costs, and I think we can, you know, on the four, four hundred kilometers to date, I think, you know, we're very happy with where things are at. Land access has proved a little bit more complicated than perhaps we initially thought it would be. But we're starting to make some really good, you know, progress there. So that would be probably the two messages I'd leave you with on that.
Okay.
Can I sneak the very last one in, or should I-
No, you've had 3. We'll go... Yeah.
All right. Thanks.
Annabel from Goldman Sachs.
Morning, guys. Just to follow up on the mobile business. In terms of it performing strongly, should we read that as tracking ahead of the mid-single digit service revenue growth target? And, does that suggest also that the churn from the price rise has finished?
So firstly, there's no change in the mid-single digit mobile service revenue ambition. So to be very clear on that, so mobile continues to perform strongly as we expected. We're now on the other side of, obviously, we did our annual price review and made the decision to put prices up. As we spoke about our results, yes, we, as anticipated, saw some uplift in churn through that period and some softening of acquisition. We're now on the other side of that and seeing trading return to normal.
Thanks, Vicki. And just on the CapEx program, you originally spoke about the AUD 200 million EBITDA from AUD 1.4 billion-AUD 1.6 billion CapEx, but now at the top end, but the run rate income is still the same. Does this imply that returns have come down? Just trying to understand a bit of the returns on this incremental spend a bit more.
Yeah. Why don't I answer that? No, it doesn't imply that returns have come down. As Brendon talked about, and I talked about as well, we will have a mix of what we sell onto these fibers, of which we've made a set of assumptions between leases and IRUs and different lengths of time for IRUs. We've made the assumption that the IRUs will be accounted for as operating leases. So, we've made the assumption that it will still be around that AUD 200 million mark as we go forward.
But the IRUs, the IRRs are still strong, and I would focus for these projects, like you would for a data center project, to look at IRR and cash returns, which is where we're focused.
Thank you. Can I just have one more on the NAS business? Just given those cautious comments around the full year revenue and earnings, are you able to comment on how we should think about the first half performance, given its typical seasonality? I suppose, what gave you the confidence to acquire Versent, given the challenges NAS has been facing?
I don't think we're going to go into a first half, second half on NAS, but it's normally-
No.
It's normally second half weighted. Just in terms of the Versent proposed acquisition, I would just say, we see it as an excellent and complementary acquisition. As I spoke about, as you look at its customer portfolio, it does have a lot of blue chip customers. We're in there providing the connectivity. We're not doing the digital transformation services for those customers today, Versent are. Equally, we see opportunity, assuming the proposed acquisition goes ahead, obviously, our ability with our customer base to bring what Versent can provide, into those customers, we see as a great opportunity. So it really helps step change that market-leading cloud practice ambition we have for Telstra Purple.
And with that acquisition, it's a team of around 500 people, very talented, deep capability and, you know, excited, assuming it goes ahead, to have them, be part of the Telstra team. So still very confident. Obviously, what we're seeing in the market activity right now on professional services is shorter term. And we're still very confident that demand and shift to the cloud, here in Australia, there's still a long way to go. So we can see, you know, as we look medium to long run, absolutely, it's important we have this capability, and we're able to provide those, services to our customers.
Thank you.
Eric, we'll go over here from Barrenjoey.
Thanks, Nathan. I might go with three as well. Annabel pointed out that AUD 200 million of net income hasn't really changed from February 2022, but obviously we've had this whole GenAI thing come along. So I'm just wondering, is there a bit of conservatism in there? Like, just thinking about what Brendon's saying, there's a lot of likenesses to the DCs, and the way that they can kind of contract out their capacity is you might have 15-year initial term, and then you've got some options. So you guys just factoring the initial terms in there, is like any optionality or upside that you're not factoring? That's question one. Sorry.
... So I'd just say again, I mean, firstly, we're very confident on those IRRs, the mid-teens or better. When we did announce it, Eric, just to clarify as well, when we announced the Intercity Fibre project, initially, we were looking at the full project. We've obviously announced and started building the two separate tranches of routes. But when we were looking at it upfront, and I guess as we've got further into it, just the confidence in the demand, Brendon might want to touch on the sorts of conversations he's in. So we're very confident in those IRRs, and progressing those discussions, Brendon.
Yeah, I mean, we've got great conversations going in the enterprise government space, major technology services companies, cloud providers, data center providers, hyperscalers. You know, there's really, really strong interest in... Yeah, I mean, getting it built and operational, you know, that's, that's the next step, and get that done and really try and do everything we possibly can from a management perspective to, to you know, to exceed that. But I think right now, that's, that's where we see things.
Just second question, maybe tack a bit. In hindsight, it kind of seemed obvious why you're holding the assets till the medium term. I'm just thinking about that AUD 200 million, and if you kind of put that on a mid-teen EBITDA multiple, that's potentially, you know, AUD 2 billion-AUD 3 billion of value. Granted, there's still CapEx to be spent that's not being captured. So my question is, when you guys were sort of canvassing third parties, were they giving you the value for these future projects? And if not, does that mean that once these projects are finished, that's a potential juncture for you guys to reconsider monetization of InfraCo?
Well, Eric, I'd go back to, I mean, our decision on InfraCo Fixed and retaining the current ownership structure. As we've said a few times, it's we absolutely see that as the right choice for the medium term. Of course, the optionality still exists over the medium to long run. And that's really I mean, the Intercity Fibre project is one example of the demand that's out there, and obviously, we've made the choice and we're investing the money to build that. But as Brendon spoke to today, there are many opportunities out there in the digital infrastructure space, and absolutely having that flexibility to meet the customer needs. I think a few of the things Brendon really drilled a bit further into today are incredibly important. That flexibility across fully managed lit services all the way through to big dark fiber solutions.
You know, Brendon now having his wholesale teams and his InfraCo teams brought together, being able to be flexible enough to meet the demands of customers and evolve. So, as we said, we see real opportunity in InfraCo Fixed. Hopefully, that structural demand and those trends that we shared today are pretty clear. So I would go back to that broader context rather than just project by project.
Can I do a last one for Michael, just on guidance? Like, if you think about second half 2023, the DAR was 4.055, and sorry to be specific, but if you think about, you know, your, your guidance range of 8.2-8.4, at the bottom end of that, if there's a second half skew, there's a chance first half FY 2024 EBITDA might be nominally below second half of 2023. And then, I guess, I guess most, you know, a lot of investors care about the dividend, and so if you think about last year, like, the EPS was already under-indexing the dividend, but you were prepared to look through it. In that scenario I just outlined, would you just look through it again and, and kind of look at the full year EPS for DPS?
Well, I think we're reaffirming we're gonna be within those guidance ranges, Eric, and we don't guide on dividend, but yeah, we're reaffirming guidance.
Thanks very much.
Okay, we'll move back over here with Lucy Huang from UBS.
Thanks, Tim. I've got three questions as well. Just to follow on from InfraCo. I mean, are you able to give us some more color in terms of, I guess, how many customers have made at least, like, a verbal commitment to maybe take on some capacity when it is ready, or whether you are open to maybe taking some pre-commitments ahead of, say, FY 2027, just to, I guess, give us some visibility into the line of sight for demand?
Yeah. No, thanks, Lucy. Let me comment and then Brendon, I'm sure, will give a lot more color. I think the important thing to take into account with projects of this nature, it's very common that you can see strong demand. You're in lots of discussions, but often you don't see firm commitment until services are built and ready to go. So I certainly stepping back and looking at the Intercity Fibre project relative to previous builds and other projects around the world, I don't think that's unusual at all. There are lots of conversations going on, Brendon, so I don't know if you want to give a flavor of it a bit further.
Yeah, I mean, as I sort of mentioned a little bit before in the last answer, a broad-based set of conversations, you know, right across the different use cases, and clearly, we want to get things, get deals signed sooner rather than later, and very much to get deals signed before construction is built. If you think of the customer needs and the long-term planning that goes into data center or this backhaul fiber, for many organizations, that will need to happen. So that's our job, and I'm, you know, looking forward to coming in and updating you all with more news on that. I mean, we have made an announcement about the strategic partnership we have with Microsoft.
That's one that is a little bit more in the public domain, and obviously we're, you know, we're working closely with Microsoft and progressing discussions there.
... and then just one on mobile CapEx. I think you mentioned you want to maintain your 1 million sq km network lead coverage versus your peers. I guess with heightened government scrutiny on, network resilience, do you see risk to that kind of AUD 3 billion BAU CapEx moving forward? Or do you think mobile, investment can still be well contained in this environment?
Yeah, Lucy, I mean, it's a fundamental in terms of the CapEx we invest, and it goes for all of our network investments. But obviously, our mobile network, we invest—we're investing in extending the coverage further. So yes, we've got around 1 million sq km today. As Channa said, under T25, we're adding 100,000, already 80% of the way through that. But fundamental to how we prioritize CapEx and where we put it is absolutely into capacity and resilience, along with coverage. So, you know, it, it's foundational to the investment we make. And, you know, we've gone through sort of—we're through the bulk of the 5G rollout. We're really now adding the capacity, and of course, resilience is always there as a foundational piece of our investment.
At this stage, I wouldn't see any major shift in that.
Yeah. And just one last one, I think with the AUD 500 million cost out target by T20... by 2025. Feels like the biggest swing factor at this point is energy cost, and I think you had a target to reduce usage by 50 GW over the next five years. How much are you expecting to save from that reduction in usage? And let's say energy costs keep going higher, is there scope to pull forward that target or to do more, I guess, reduction?
Yeah, well, I can start and then Brendon could comment if you want as well, and maybe Channa. So I think the team's done a wonderful job at reducing energy costs. You can imagine as energy prices go up, the business case for the next energy reduction investment changes slightly. So we've certainly been doing that, and it has accelerated some of our focus on removing legacy infrastructure, for example, as that business case changes. But as we said, we still expect, with the plans we have for energy reduction, that versus what we had forecast in FY 21, energy will be around AUD 100 million higher, and that includes the hedging that we have in for FY 25.
But it's a constant focus, sort of site by site, and the price of energy definitely changes those business cases pretty rapidly.
Thanks, Lucy. We'll go over-
Quick comment.
Yeah.
Yeah. I'll just make a quick comment about, I mean, for example, we're saying we're shutting down our 3G network, and, you know, the 3G network covers 2.7 million square kilometers. It's 11,000 now towers. So when we shut that down, it's, it's 18-19-year-old technology. 4G and 5G are so much more energy efficient. So that's an example of, you know, the decommissioning of legacy equipment, which will really help us reduce the, energy consumption.
And the only thing I would add, Lucy, is I said in the presentation, we are focused on all of the grid connected assets and how we look at those. And is there an opportunity for us to look at more of a, an energy operating model, like play, there with some investment in new infrastructure? And yeah, so that's an opportunity that, you know, is actively on the block, in addition to all the other initiatives.
Thank you.
Great. We'll go over here to Tom Beadle
Oh, thank you, Nathan. Look, just one question from me on portfolio management. Michael, you mentioned you could access funding options off your balance sheet or non-recourse solutions. Could you just explain what this could mean? Like, what are the types of assets or projects that you could do this for? And would this involve just, you know, maybe levering up these projects or assets, or could you also bring in other equity investors?
Yeah, no, it's a great question, and I think all things are on the table on a sort of a project opportunity by opportunity basis. But I guess I'd probably point to two examples. One is the way that Digicel is funded. So Digicel is, you know, inherently levered at a different level to the rest of the business. It's got non-recourse funding and, in effect, project financing in there that gives us different leverage and a different cost of capital and access to different funds. And then the other one would be sort of all the various long-term partnerships we've had in our international subsea business, where we're equity holders.
We're leveraged at different levels for things like the, the Southern Cross network or the, going back, the Australia-Japan cable and, and, and other things. So we've got a lot of experience in how to do this, and we're open to, to, to all of those things. I mean, I think the, the main point would be, you know, the asset needs to be able to be defined and have a revenue stream and all of those things that are important to be able to do those. But, they're, they're two examples.
Yeah. I guess, just as a follow-up, you know, if you were to sort of go down this path, would you need to change your capital management framework before you did that?
Well, I think we've done a lot of these partnerships within the construct of our capital management framework, and in fact, in service of it, to maintain the A-rated balance sheet, but to also access other funding and to give us the flexibility to continue to have that balance sheet setting.
Great. Thank you.
Okay. Darren Leung from Macquarie.
Thanks. Thanks, guys. I just had three questions, please. And I might start with the first one, just in relation to the mobile business. We've talked about the network strength and the coverage, but obviously one of your key competitors has had a bit of a PR mishap, for lack of another term. Can you talk a little bit about the trading updates or just how subscriber growth has gone on that regard, please? And then maybe as an extension of that, how should we think about the pricing strategy, particularly in relation to inflation-linked price increases into the medium term?
Thanks, Darren. I mean, the first comment I just wanna make is, I just wanna be clear, I take, and we take, 0 pleasure in seeing any competitor or operator experience major outages. So, in terms of what we've seen post last week's outage, as you might anticipate, yes, we've seen some increase in acquisition of customers. I know there's been some speculation about how large that could be, and I guess I would just, go back to the cyber breach last year that occurred in the market. You know, as we spoke about post that, we saw some elevated acquisition levels for around a 6-week period, but at the end of the day, there wasn't a significant shift in share in the market. So look, it is early days.
We are continuing to see some elevated levels of acquisition at the moment. But again, I just think you've got to put it in context of what we saw last year. You know, at this stage, I wouldn't anticipate major shifts in share. I mean, in terms of pricing, look, what I can talk to is we've been very clear about the change to our terms and conditions we've put in place, where we give our customers the certainty of an annual pricing review. As you saw in the most recent review, we take into account CPI, and we did make the decision to increase our price in line with CPI. In terms of moving forward, obviously, it's not appropriate to comment on future pricing decisions.
Got it. Thank you. Perhaps in relation to the outage and how we're thinking about the fiber assets, how have the initial discussions gone in terms of enterprise customers, and has your pipeline increased as a result?
Is that, Darren, in respect of the fiber project, or?
No, it's in relation to your competitor.
Right. Okay. Well, again, I mean, we're, we're less than a week post the outage. I think what it has reinforced for customers, and particularly some of those larger government and enterprise customers, is, is probably a look at resilience. What sort of resilience have they got in place for their communications needs? And so I know, you know, David and the team obviously are, are in pretty regular contact with our major customers. And, you know, top of that list is usually the resilience of services that we can provide. I think probably last week has been, has brought that to the top of the list for many organizations in the country.
Got it. Thank you. And maybe just one on the enterprise EBITDA guidance. I just wanted to make sure I heard correctly, Vicki. Did you say enterprise EBITDA will be flat? And it sounds like NAS EBITDA will decline as well. Does that mean DAC might be up?
Well, no. What we said was, the DAC and the calling headwinds were in line with what we expected.
Mm-hmm.
We also spoke to the strength of mobility, and we said that NAS, we now do not believe that NAS revenue or EBITDA will grow in 2024.
Understood. Thank you.
Okay, we'll go over here. Mark Bucatel from JP Morgan.
Hi. You guys put up a chart with data consumption going forward. It was, I think, 24%-33% CAGR in growth going forward. And I dare say in most other sectors, you would, you would expect that to be a hugely positive scenario. But if you look backwards, you've seen similar sort of data consumption growth rates for probably the last 10 years , 20 years. And over that period, there's been this growing expectation that all of that data consumption comes for free from consumers. You've also spent an enormous amount of CapEx, and we've seen returns diminish. So can you, can you help us understand how you're thinking about safeguarding the business going forward to better monetize that growth in data consumption?
Yeah. So thanks, Mark. And you're right, we've seen data consumption grow historically as well. And that data consumption, yes, is happening on the mobile network. As we spoke about, we're seeing it in undersea cable. And we expect that demand on fiber as well to be huge as we look forward, as Brendon spoke to. So a few things. Obviously, we've had a very big focus on making sure that we can continue to invest in a sustainable way in all of the capacity and the networks that we provide. And there is no doubt customers continue to rely on that more and more and demand very high quality connectivity. And so to do that, that has meant things like making choices around, historically, our annual pricing that we put in the market across our mobile and fixed broadband businesses.
That's been part of that. Obviously, running the business as efficiently as possible, so taking net cost out of the business as well to make sure, again, as we look at driving growth, value, and ultimately returns on what we're investing, is absolutely critical. We've invested in providing, you know, for our Telstra brand, that very premium experience through onshoring call centers, through acquisition of our stores to bring them back under ownership. You know, you put that all together, we're holistically looking at that overall return on invested capital.
We've got to be delivering the experience at the level expected for the Telstra brand, using our multi-brand portfolio in consumer and small business, obviously then growing our infrastructure business as that demand grows, and ensuring in the enterprise space we're set up to be able to help drive digital transformation and be able to provide connectivity and some of those technology services. So all pieces of that come into play as we think about driving the right outcomes for customers, but also generating the right returns.
Can I add a point to that I think is important, the way that Brendon described those different elements of monetizing fiber. And I think what's interesting around this wave of investment is particularly the diversification of the customers who are buying infrastructure and buying access to infrastructure. You know, with the hyperscalers, the data center providers, all of that drive, they're now having to invest much more directly in buying access to that capacity. And I think that's that diversification of the customer base, rather than it just all being end-user driven and then infrastructure provider driven, is a changing dynamic that we have to make sure we're very focused on how we capture it. Which is why I think that breakdown of how we're monetizing those fiber investments is incredibly important.
Is that a way to break the link about getting all of this data consumption for free?
Well, we hope so. We hope it's a way to make sure that... Because unless digital infrastructure investors are getting the kind of returns they need to get, then we can't keep investing in that infrastructure, and the economy needs that infrastructure, businesses need that infrastructure, and people need that infrastructure. So, you know, I think it is an evolution that's sort of changed, and those different layers of demand that Brendon had both in the start and the end of his presentation, I think are really important for us to focus on.
Just secondly, and my last question. Just in terms of the balance sheet, so 1.5x-2 x net debt to EBITDA, you're not selling InfraCo, but clearly assets like that can hold a significantly larger proportion of debt. Is it possible to put more debt within InfraCo as a separate entity now that you've separated it, but you're not selling it?
Well, so at the moment, our intention is to put all debt at the group level. But we are open to exploring partnerships that would include options such as off-balance sheet funding or non-recourse or project finance debt, which would have the effect of doing what you said.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks, Mark. Roger Samuel from Jefferies.
Yeah, so maybe a question for Brendon. You've got this map on the slide deck showing a dotted line of some of the routes between Perth and Darwin, and Brisbane and Darwin, subject to demand. So does it mean that there's potentially upside risk to the AUD 1.4 billion-AUD 1.6 billion in CapEx? And, if you build those routes, would you still get the mid-teens IRR?
Thanks, Roger. We did a design for, you know, all routes and all locations. So that's... On that map is all of the routes potentially you could have on an Intercity Fibre solution. You know, it would be good, you know, at some point to look at those. But the financials that we've laid out do not include those additional routes, either the cost or revenue or EBITDA derived from those dotted routes.
All right, got it. Second question. In terms of your guidance commentary, you mentioned about the second half, weighted for EBITDA, and, there's a comment there about asset disposal. So what exactly are you planning to dispose of? And, also, the other part of the question is, if I look at the interim report, there's another 2,500 mobile towers that are still kept within the Telstra entity and not part of Amplitel. Just wondering, what are your plans on those assets?
Do you want to talk to the-
Well-
Asset disposals?
Yeah. So the... I mean, as part of our, particularly as part of our InfraCo business, we talked about both property and copper legacy asset disposal. The copper is probably a little more even, but some of the property disposals tend to be a bit lumpy, so it's, it's property disposal in-
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and on the mobile towers, I think there's most of the ones you're talking about that Telstra Limited continues to own. So, for example, there's towers that support the 3G network in remote areas that are really just dedicated for Telstra sole use. So, we don't foresee any you know major change to the tower split that's been done.
All right. Thank you.
Okay, back over here. Ian Martin.
Thank you. Just a couple of kind of thematic questions, if I could. Going to the comments around the enterprise and government sector, I think you indicated that the traditional product set, access, connectivity, and so on, relatively stable, is that right? And the bulk of the issues relate to NAS, Network Applications and Services. Previously, when you've talked about that, you've indicated an expectation of return to growth in that area, but I didn't really pick that up today, whether you expect that to happen. And my question is whether there's a recognition of a major structural change that's going on in that ENG sector, where your larger clients now are able to buy a kit directly themselves, buy product, kind of branded products, if you like, and do a lot of that network stuff themselves.
Is that a structural change that we're seeing, that you now recognize? And I guess extending from that, could that change then start to impact the wider business services? They may lack scale themselves, but there's plenty of intermediaries that are able to pull that together. When I look at what's happening with unified comms, huge growth area, with a lot of different companies contesting that, are we going to see what's happening in enterprise and government happen more widely across, particularly the fixed line sector?
Okay, thanks, Ian. Let me have a go and make sure... There's quite a few parts to that. So just to clarify the comments we made on enterprise today. So on data and connectivity and calling, those trends are broadly in line with what we expected, and as we spoke about at full year results, data and connectivity and calling continue to decline. So what we said today is reinforcing, it's in line with our expectation. What has changed is we now don't expect NAS to grow revenue and EBITDA in FY 2024, whereas in August, we had anticipated that, and that's due to really a bit of a pullback in professional services activity that we're seeing. So I hope that helps just clarify on the-
So, just on NAS, calling is in NAS?
Yeah.
So, DAC isn't, but calling is in NAS, as is professional and managed services. Calling's declining in line with our expectation. NAS, the rest of NAS, sorry, the professional and managed services, is underperforming our expectation, and the net result is overall NAS not growing.
That's just a current year effect, or are we seeing something that's going to continue on?
It's probably a little bit too early to say, I'd say, Ian, at the moment. So that's, I mean, we don't, we're not giving guidance beyond 2024.
Sure.
So in 2024, that, that's what we're seeing and what we expect-
The point is, there is a structural change that's going on there that's going to have a long-term impact, isn't it?
Yeah. So just in terms of a structural change that you refer to, I mean, we've been seeing for many years now some, you know, changes, whether it's technology changes with SD-WAN, whether it be... Yes, some customers choosing to bring in-house some of those capabilities you talk about, but when you refer to Brendon's business and some of those things that he spoke about, it's not a huge number of enterprise customers that are looking at things like, for example, dark fiber. Because obviously once you go down that path, you need fairly heavy expertise internally to be able to manage and run those networks. So we have, you know, in some limited circumstances, you might see some customers do that, some remote mines, various things.
What we are seeing is, as we talked about, as customers look at how they're thinking about their connectivity and their digital transformation, those conversations go much more into how do they do the migration to the cloud. As they make those changes in their business from a technology point of view, how do they ensure they've got the security sitting around those services? We've been seeing those trends for a little while. I don't think we've seen any big step change in terms of customers wanting to, for example, as an enterprise, buy dark fiber and run their own electronics. We've seen some who've worked with other providers who bring all of the pieces together, but again, I don't see a really significant change from the trends we've been seeing for a little while now.
The possibility of intermediaries being able to, in a sense, disintermediate telcos and Telstra in that wider business market, not a big factor at this point?
In terms of the wider business market, I think once you get to, you know, the medium and small end, I think for those customers, what they're looking for is actually a trusted partner that can provide a lot of those services. As you'd expect, a lot of those businesses don't have the time, nor have they got the capabilities, to be able to go after some of those more sophisticated solutions. They're looking for them to be provided on a managed service basis. So we definitely see opportunity there. That's why we've created Telstra Business, and we see really a real opportunity to unlock that, but that's much more a managed service approach to those customers.
Okay, thanks.
Thanks, Ian. Fraser, MST.
Thanks. Yeah, just one. Just so with the full monetization of InfraCo Fixed off the table, just wondering if there's any thoughts on revisiting the, the option to maybe monetize those NBN cash flows, where a lot of the value is and, you know, maybe they're not as strategic as the, as the assets, you know, like you looked at with the securitization proposal a few years ago?
Thanks, Fraser. I know it's a question that often gets asked, and obviously, you know, they're very significant cash flows for us. They're a very important part of the overall cash flow of the business. And again, to be clear, if we did want to go down the path and do that, that does require NBN consent. Again, just to be clear, we don't have the right unilaterally to do that. At the moment, we see them as a core part, as I said, of InfraCo Fixed, and we've talked more broadly about the capital management framework, where we have, obviously, as part of that, a focus on ensuring we can, you know, seek to maximize and grow our fully franked dividends, and so those recurring payments are obviously a core part of our overall earnings.
Thanks, Fraser. I'll check if there's any more questions in the room. Welcome back to the microphone.
He wants to get to the third question. Nathan, might kick me out if I ask too many. I mean, I'm conscious of the announcement yesterday by TPG that they're no longer pursuing the Vocus deal. Is there any appetite for you to reexamine a network sharing arrangement with them? And I guess politically, is it a better environment post the Optus outage? I mean, is there a way to play this and say, "You know what? It's if you want resiliency, network resiliency, ability to invest, better coverage, you need network sharing and improved returns." So do you think anything has changed, and is there much appetite to pursue that deal?
So the first thing I'd say, Entcho, is, obviously we put forward the network sharing, the MOCN deal with TPG. It obviously didn't get approved. But we do believe that commercial sharing arrangements, particularly for regional Australia, we think they are needed in the country when you think about the reliance on mobile networks, the investment that needs to go into regional areas. So, I think we demonstrated we're open to innovative ways to come up with commercial sharing solutions. You know, it's less than a week since the outage last week. I'm sure, you know, like other players in the market, we're very keen to make sure any learnings out of that are picked up across the industry. And, you know, as the government has spoken to, there's a number of reviews underway.
But I, again, I would just reinforce, I think commercial-based sharing, particularly in regional Australia on mobile infrastructure, we think as we look over the longer run, would be a net positive.
Then maybe just the very final one on satellite to handset. I think you mentioned that you were going to offer a product in market. Are you able to say who your partner is?
We're not able to at this point, no.
Okay. And is... Do you know if Starlink is exclusive to Optus?
I think those terms are, I would expect, commercially confidential, so I'm unsure.
Okay. All right, thanks.
Thanks, Entcho. We'll come back over here for Darren from Macquarie again.
Thanks, Nathan. I just had a very quick one in terms of the enterprise guidance again, please. There's obviously the Versent acquisition, which is obviously not in the numbers today, but I'm keen to understand, does your guidance comment include that acquisition, or does it exclude altogether?
No, it doesn't include. Versent obviously is a proposed acquisition. It's not complete. We issued guidance without that, and our comments today are excluding Versent.
Understand. Thank you.
Okay. We have no more questions, so we'll shortly move to the foyer. There is some demos, which Brendon re-mentioned, which I'd invite you to take the opportunity to see. There's also some other of our key management here in the room, including Brad Whitcomb, who runs our consumer business, Kim Krogh Andersen , our head of products, David Burns, who runs our enterprise business, and Roary. Roary's at the back, who runs Telstra International. So if you-
And Amanda.
Amanda.
Oh, and Amanda Hutton, who runs our business, Telstra Business, is also here. So, Vicki, do you have any final comments before we close?
No, just a final thank you, Nathan. Again, to everyone who's joined us in the room or joining virtually, we do appreciate you making the time today. As we said right through the presentation, we're very pleased and on track with our T25 ambitions, and very confident that the choices we're making today also set us up for that long-term sustainable growth. Thanks again for joining us.