"Australia - The National Broadband Network - Moving into 2016" Published

Between 2009 and 2012, the NBN company designed the architecture for a national FttH network. Legislation and contracts were completed in 2012 and shortly afterwards the rollout started, based on a 'rolling' three year plan. The election of the Coalition government in 2013 resulted in a political review. As a result the FttH plan was abandoned and instead a so-called multi-mix technology (MTM) solution was introduced. This will see the continuing use of both the copper and the HFC networks.

However the government had to honour existing contracts that had been signed under the previous government, including the initial three years of the FttH rollout. It is this rollout that is saving the NBN at the moment as it is the only part of the project that is in full swing.

Under the new scheme, FttH will connect 26% of premises by 2020, while a further 44% will be served by FttN and the remaining 30% of it will receive services via existing HFC networks. Using this approach, the government anticipated that 91% of premises connected to fixed-line infrastructure would receive 50Mb/s by 2020.

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This means a lot of hard work for the NBN company (their official name changed to NBN in 2015 but for practical reasons we will refer to them as NBN Co) as the rest of the project has hardly started. As we predicted when the government changed the plans for the NBN, this would take, not the six months indicated by the minister, but at least 2-3 years. So in all we have lost at least another two years. During that time the OPEX costs of the company continued, as well as significant extra costs in political reviews, consultancy reports, new designs, pilots and so on - all of these costs eating into a limited budget that, in the case of government funds, will start to run out in 18 months' time.

On top of that NBN Co also faces a skill shortage, so it has plenty of headaches ahead.

In April 2014 the government formally opted for the NBN to provide a multi-technology mix rather than be predominantly FttH. Under the new scheme, FttH will connect 26% of premises by 2020, while a further 44% will be served by FttN - using the VDSL technology - and the remaining 30% of will receive services via existing HFC networks. Using this approach, the government anticipated that 91% of premises connected to fixed-line infrastructure would receive 50Mb/s by 2020. The capital cost was put at $29.5 billion (US$27.4 billion).

NBN Co was also instructed to focus on serviceable premises as a performance metric, as opposed to the number of premises passed, according to which a large number of premises had been passed by fibre but could not in practice receive services. NBN Co was serving 6,000 brownfield premises per week by mid-2014.

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