Speaking before a parliamentary joint committee on the NBN in Sydney, ACCAN chief executive, Teresa Corbin, said that under the scheme, ACCAN would like to see NBN Co providing discount wholesale prices for retail service providers such as Infoexchange, which could than provide cheap internet services for low income consumers.

"That would mean people with a healthcare card should be able to access these services if they chose to," she said. "This is becoming important because we have entered an age where internet access is important in daily life." Another proposal is setting up more public internet kiosks across Australia in addition to current services provided by libraries and high schools.

"At present, a lot of these public access programs are state based but there needs to be a national approach taken to this by the government and NBN Co," she said.

"Another proposal would be to turn every public telephone box into a Wi-Fi access spot which they currently do in Hong Kong as a free service."

The genesis of ACCAN's broadband low income measures proposal was research into the conducted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) earlier this year. It found that 2.6 million Australians did not have access to the internet via mobile or a fixed line service and that this was unlikely to change even after the NBN was rolled out due to broadband costs.