Press Release
In her Keynote address at the Gigabit Access conference in Cologne, Germany, NetComm Director of Technology Strategy on Tuesday Els Baert told international broadband executives they should take key lessons from the National Broadband Network (NBN) deployment in Australia when attempting to build their own nationwide ultra-fast networks.
NBN is the first project in the world where an operator has had to deliver high-speed broadband to every home and business in the country and this has brought many complex challenges to the surface.
The NBN deployment has proven you simply cannot take fibre into every single home or business via Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH), it is just not possible within a reasonable time and cost envelope.
That’s why we have seen NBN Co take a flexible approach and develop a Fibre-to-the-Distribution Point (FTTdP) solution that will connect nearly 1.5 million homes and businesses by the end of next year.
FTTdP has already resolved the first key challenge for NBN Co., that of connecting Single Dwelling Units with 100/40Mbps broadband – with upgrades to 1Gbps possible – without having to run new fibre to every premises or supplying mains power to thousands of nodes.
The second part of the FTTdP challenge for NBN Co. will come over the next year when it starts to ramp up the usage of FTTdP to connect Multi-Dwelling Units (MDUs) – apartment buildings – which are extremely difficult to serve with new fibre to every individual premises.
Using 8-port and 16-port reverse-powered Distribution Point Units enabled with Gfast technology NBN Co will be able to connect even the most challenging MDUs to Gigabit capable broadband without even having to enter the building.
Fibre is clearly the best technology for the future of broadband, but that doesn’t mean there is no role at all for some of the copper that has already been deployed by network operators.
We need to see the global industry really embrace new solutions like FTTdP along wityh Gfast which can deliver identical services to FTTH and is the fastest and easiest way to delivering Gigabit speeds to end-users.”
Gigabit Access is organised by Total Telecom – for more information visit www.totaltele.com/access
