NBN chief strategy officer JB Rousselot has used a keynote address to the Global Broadband Futures conference in Sydney to highlight the company’s upgrade options across each of its fixed network technologies.
He said there was no dispute that fibre all the way into the home was the end game for all operators, however he reiterated previous arguments that currently the demand and willingness to pay are not there yet.
“With the few exceptions of maybe Singapore and Qatar there is nobody advocating a direct jump into full FTTP – we all agree that there is a pathway to get to it and the question for us is what is the pathway,” he said.
With the NBN rollout passed the half-way mark and with 3 million activations now reached, more than 80% of its customers are still on a 25Mbps or lower speed tier – despite most of those connections being able to connect at higher speeds.
NBN has now trialled upgrade options for all of its fixed network technologies. For FTTP connections it has tested NG-PON, which is expected to deliver 10Gbps speeds.
For the HFC portion of the network, Rousselot said that it is committed to a full rollout of DOCSIS 3.1 next year, which will deliver speeds over 100Mbps. However, he said it will also result in more reliable connections.
“DOCSIS 3.1 will not only help us deliver faster speeds on the HFC . . . also it allows us to deliver better customer experience because through that technology we’re able to better monitor, diagnose and fix the network, which is also a critical thing for us,” he said.
And on the copper network, he noted that field trials of fibre to the curb were well under way, with a launch expected in the first half of 2018. He said the speed of the FTTC developments had been impressive.
“It’s very exciting to see how that technology has gone from a concept to something that is now network-ready. It’s moved so quickly that we’ve been able to actually make it part of our initial rollout and we’ve now committed about 1 million premises,” he said.
“And it’s something that we’ve been able to do without jeopardising our 2020 mandate for the rollout of the network and without materially changing the economics of the project,” he added.
More recently, NBN announced at the recent Broadband World Forum in Berlin that it will launch G.fast in its FTTC and FTTB networks in the second half of 2018.
As well as the fixed network, Rousselot noted at the event in Sydney yesterday that NBN was committed to rolling out 100Mbps fixed wireless connections later this year.
Geoff Long