Australia to jump to number eight in the fibre-enable countries list

According the analyst company, Strategic Analytics, 2013 could see Australia rising to eighth position in the list of the most fibre-enable countries in the world and all because of the National Broadband Network (NBN), which will cost around $31 billion to build.

The National Broadband Network (NBN) project was announced earlier in the year by the Federal Government and will be rolled out over the next eight years. Its goal is to provide 90 percent of the Australian population including businesses, schools and household with broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps using Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based solution, which is backed by the Federal Government.

A director at Strategic Analytics, Ben Piper advised “The future of broadband is clearly in fibre. The existing Telco xDSL infrastructure is reaching the end of its useful life. Soon it will no longer be able to support increasingly bandwidth-heavy consumer applications.”

Eight of the top ten companies in the world are base in either Eastern Europe or Asia according to the latest rankings that have been released by Strategic Analytics. The most fibre connected country in the world by the end of 2009 will be South Korea, which will have a total of 51 percent of its population connected over fibre-optic broadband connections. The remaining countries in the top five listing from the company are currently Japan, Hong Kong, Lithuania and Taiwan.

The company did, however, advise that by 2013 Singapore will take South Korea off the top global position. The building of a 1Gbps FTTP fibre-based broadband network, which is currently under construction and is expected to cover 100 percent of the population by the beginning of 2013, is part of the “iN2015” initiative that has been announced by the Singaporean Government.

Source – Electronics News