The future of fibre broadband in Australia

Whether the Federal Governments Fibre National Broadband Network (NBN) will be out of date by the time it has been build is currently one of the most asked technical question following its recent announcements.

With the current trend around the world of mobile phones being replaced every twelve months, rafts of new applications consuming almost every bit of new bandwidth there is and the technology of wireless broadband being upgraded every six month this kind of question is not an unreasonable one.

The main question is how future proof a broadband delivery system that was conceived in 2008 and is due to be completed in 2018 will be.

Following advice from a panel of experts it would appear that one of the most dynamic broadband technologies in the world has been chosen by Stephen Conroy and Kevin Rudd.

The rejection of the fibre-to-the-node or FTTN choice by the expert advisory panel for the Government was consider by many industry experts as definitely the right choice to make. The sacrificing of technological flexibility, simplicity and internet speed with no obvious benefit would just have been a messy compromise. It would have cost $20 billion in compensation for the copper cut over to Telstra and would have left the broadband assets of Telstra’s competitors stranded if FTTN had been implemented.

Compared to any other fixed line broadband connection that is currently offered at the moment FTTH or Fibre-to-the-home is way ahead in terms of the speed of downloads and uploads, also as the technology evolves it will have the capacity to provide a huge jump in the amount of bandwidth that will be available.

The fact that FTTH “is the end game” has even been admitted by Hugh Bradlow, the chief technology officer for Telstra, which was a quote that was used in the official promotional material for the new NBN by Conroy.

Over one percent of internet connection in 20 countries is now accounted for by FTTH. The deployment of FTTH has proved perfect for densely populated cities, which is why it has been well taken by areas like Asia. Korea has an FTTH penetration rate of 44 percent, 28 percent in Hong Kong, 27 percent in Japan and 12 percent in Taiwan.