Just a few hours after releasing its Broadband Index showing the latest stats and figures on how well it is doing with the rollout of the National Broadband Network, NBN Co has reported that nearly three quarters of a million Australian premises can now sign up for an Fibre-to-the Node (FTTN) service one year after it commercially launched FTTN services.
Following release of its Broadband Index, as reported by iTWire, and keen to keep up a barrage of positive news about the NBN rollout in the face of, at times, criticism of its performance and questioning of the mix of technology underpinning the network, NBN Co said on Tuesday that around a quarter of a million premises are also now activated via FTTN.
And, according to NBN Co, if you include the figures from its Fibre-to-the-Building (FTTB) deployment, then it has a total of 854,000 premises Ready for Service (RFS) across FTTN and FTTB combined.
NBN Co launched its first commercial FTTN services in Belmont, NSW, followed by Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania, and the company reported on Tuesday that over the last three months it has made more than 100,000 FTTN premises Ready for Service (RFS) every month.
{loadposition peter}And, in the June-August period, NBN Co says it has activated an average of 40,000 FTTN premises per month – with nearly 60,000 FTTN premise activated in August alone.
In this latest statement, NBN Co says that FTTN will play a “crucial role” in the deployment of the network with the latest corporate plan showing that the FTTx technologies - including Fibre to the Node, Fibre to the Building and Fibre to the Distribution Point - could serve as many as 6.4 million premises on the NBN, representing up to 54% of all premises covered by the network.
Peter Ryan, Chief Network Engineering Officer said, “We are delighted with the progress that we have made in the first year of our FTTN deployment”.
“To have nearly 750,000 premises Ready for Service is an outstanding achievement and is a testament to the huge effort made by our team.
“We knew that FTTN would help us get the NBN deployed much faster and get people connected sooner and with far less inconvenience – and that is exactly what is happening.
“There is still a long way to go but our great first year with FTTN gives us confidence that we can complete our mission of connecting 8 million homes and businesses by 2020.”