NBN Co chief network and operations officer JB Rousselot has told the Broadband World Forum in London that the company needs to move faster in rolling out the broadband network and activating premises.
In a keynote address to the forum on Thursday, Rousselot said that while the company had gone from activating 200 premises per hour to more than 550 per hour, it still had to move faster “because by June 2017 we will need to be activating around 6700 end-user premises per business day — that’s more than 800 per hour — to meet our targets”.
He told his London audience that NBN Co was already activating end-user premises “faster than ever” and in the past week had activated 23,000 net new premises – taking total activations to 1.4 million.
{loadposition peter}Rousselot reeled-off a few key stats on the broadband network rollout for his London audience, including:
• The NBN Co is now activating 2.5 times more end-user premises per business day than it was in 2015;
• In 2015 NBN Co averaged 1800 activations/day – this is now 4600 per day;
• NBN Co is now connecting around 500 premises per hour – compared to 200 per hour in 2015; and
• From September 2014-September 2015 NBN Co increased the number of premises Ready for Service by 91%.
And on the much-discussed and criticised NBN Co mixed-technology model for the network, Rousselot said the company was “technology agnostic”.
“We need to get everyone in the country connected to the NBN by 2020 which makes using existing copper via FttN and upgrading existing HFC networks great solutions.
“NBN Co is a company that is technology agnostic, we are not fixed to any technology, we look to use the most cost-effective and time-efficient technology across the network.
“That is why just last month we announced that we would be delivering Fibre-to-the-Curb (FttC) technology to an initial 700,000 premises.”