NBN Co today announced that it will expand the Fibre to the Curb (FTTC) footprint with an additional 440,000 premises, which will bring the total number of home and businesses using the new technology to connect to just under 1.5 million.
Many of the premises that will now be connected to the National Broadband Network through FTTC were previously slated to connect using the HFC portion network, although some were set to served be by Fibre to the Node (FTTN) connections. It is expected that the majority of these premises will be in metro areas.
NBN Co says the HFC premises being converted to FTTC are "inside or adjacent" existing Telstra HFC network coverage, but not able to connect to the network. Since these places aren't connected to the existing Telstra HFC network, NBN will use existing copper lead-ins to connect the properties to FTTC, claiming it to be both more cost-effective and time-efficient.
Given that NBN Co froze all new HFC connections amid quality and reliability concerns last year, we'd say this is a positive development. Today's news does however coincide with NBN Co "relaunching" the HFC network following "considerable work" to improve stability and performance.
HFC sales will resume from April 27, with NBN Co initially making 1,000 new HFC connections available across Melbourne and Sydney. 38,000 new connections are set to be available across Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth by the end of June. From July onward, NBN Co will release 100,000 premises per month.
"We are pleased with the improvements seen from the additional work undertaken while sales have been paused on the HFC network," said NBN Co CEO Bill Morrow. "We expect to see an uplift in customer experience as a result of these improvements."
NBN Co's announcements follow the launch the official launch of the FTTC network about a week ago, with the first 1,000 homes and businesses in Coburg, Victoria and Miranda, NSW now able to connect to the NBN through the new tech.
What is FTTC?
FTTC is a new NBN connection technology where high speed fibre optic cable is laid directly to your property's kerb or driveway (a distribution point), and the final connection to your house or business is made with your existing copper phone line.
Since there is only a short distance of copper is required to connect your house to the distribution point, you won't lose any speed over FTTC. Using large lengths of copper to deliver internet access can result in serious speed degradation; the longer the copper, the slower the internet.
The short length of copper means that if you're connecting to the NBN over FTTC, you should comfortable be able to be able to achieve speeds of 100Mbps. In the future, FTTC connections will be able to deliver speeds as fast as 1Gbps.
Alex Choros
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