ACCC advise that it may be more expensive to roll out an FTTN NBN

With the distinct possibility that the National Broadband Network will be upgraded to a fibre to the premises network the competition watchdog, the ACCC has advised that rolling out a cable broadband network to the node would be an expensive waste of money.

The deployment of a fibre-to-the-node network would be a costly and pointless exercise if changes were made to broadband policy in the future according to Mark Pearson, the deputy chief executive of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) when he spoke to a parliamentary hearing on the National Broadband Network (NBN).

As much as 93 percent of businesses, schools, hospitals and homes throughout Australia are expected to be connected directly to the NBN Co network over a fibre-to-the-premises network by 2021 at a cost of $35.9 billion, although the Labor government’s network company had originally been looking at an FTTN network.

Satellite and fixed wireless technology is expected to make up the remaining 7 percent of the businesses and homes in the regional and rural parts of Australia that will be missed by the NBN Co network.

A number of alternatives that will offer download speeds that are similar to the 100MBps offered by the NBN Co network have been proposed by the federal opposition. One such technology is hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) cabling, which is used by pay-television network and cover around 28 percent of premises in Australia.

Pearson advised that although the initial financial outlay of an FTTN would be a lower as it would be a smaller network the cost to upgrade to an FTTP network in the future would make it substantially greater. Whilst speaking to the Joint Committee in Sydney on the NBN he advised “It is an important policy consideration that you really need to take into account if you are going to build a fibre-to-the-node network.”