The chart shows NBN Co’s first detailed estimates for its fibre to the node (FTTN) installations, which will be made available to retail Internet Service Provider (ISPs) in the third quarter of 2015 – nine to 12 months from now.
Releasing the roadmap, NBN Co’s chief customer officer John Simon, said: “The current FTTN construction trial of 1,000 nodes in NSW and Queensland is likely to grow into a ‘customer experience trial’ which will run in the first half of 2015.
“We also plan extend our FTTN trials through to our anticipated commercial launch in 2015. This means around 250,000 additional homes and businesses should to be able to connect to the network within the next 12 months – subject to the necessary agreements being finalised with Telstra.
“Our FTTN end-user pilot continues in Umina on the Central Coast of NSW, with around 40 participants now connected. Early results have been positive with some of our first end-users receiving average download speeds of up to 96 Mbps and average upload speeds of up to 30 Mbps in August 2014.”
Simon said construction work on an additional FTTN end-user pilot in the North Melbourne suburb of Epping has now started. “We will be working closely with a number of service providers over the coming months to run the pilot. ISPs will be engaging directly with their end users to select participants.”
The roadmap also contains a fibre to the-building (FTTB) update. “Our FTTB pilot in inner-city Melbourne suburbs continues and we are currently in the process of measuring and recording the customer experience of the homes and businesses which have signed up.
“We will be working with our industry partners and ISPs over the next few months to ensure the FTTB product has been tested and is ready for our scheduled commercial launch in the first quarter of 2015. Preliminary tests of the technology last December produced download speeds of more than 100 Mbps and upload speeds of more than 40 Mbps.”
Simon said NBN Co will produce an update to the roadmap each quarter, as part of its Special Access Undertaking (SAU) with the ACCC.
The multi-coloured roadmap, which makes an attractive wall chart, is available here (PDF).
