NBN Co reveals product roadmap and Telstra planning deal

Hybrid fibre-coax trials to commence in late 2015

NBN Co has updated its product roadmap and Telstra has revealed it will help the company to plan future deployments.

The highlights of the new roadmap (PDF) are: A guesstimate that trials of a broadband service delivered over hybrid fibre-coax (HFC) cable (Pay TV cables) will start in Q4 of 2015; A second guesstimate that a launch of that HFC service will happen in 2016's first quarter; Confirmation that the company remains on track to deliver a fibre-to-the-basement (FTTB) service in 2015's first quarter; A Q3 2015 likely delivery date for fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) services.

The company's also revealed a FTTB trial “in inner-city Melbourne with around 45 end users currently experiencing average download peak speeds of 89 Mbps and average upload speeds of 36 Mbps.”

Another update concerns the FTTN trial in the New South Wales town of Umina, where “50 end users on our end user pilot … are currently experiencing average download peak speeds of 90 Mbps and average upload speeds of 36 Mbps.” The 200,000-premises FTTN “large-scale construction trial” for 200,000 premises in New South Wales and parts of Queensland is “continuing”.

Telstra's helping out with that trial and will also assist NBN Co under a new contract – valued at up to AU$390 million – that will see it “prepare network plans and designs to support NBN Co’s multi-technology mix NBN rollout, including fibre to the node, fibre to the basement and fibre to the premises.”

News that NBN Co has a timeline for HFC rollout is good news for it and the government, because the latter's multi-technology and “faster, cheaper” mantra plan relies in part on the use of this existing infrastructure.

Still unanswered is under what circumstances NBN Co will consider the new, faster, DOCSIS 3.1 instead of the DOCSIS 3.0 currently deployed – with varying quality – across the networks built by Telstra and Optus. NBN Co executives were not convincing or consistent on the topic of the two DOCSIS versions at a hearing of the NBN Select Committee in early December (see pages 17 and 18 of this PDF transcript). Nor is NBN Co talking about how VDSL successor G.fast, signed off recently, fits into its future plans. ®