NBN Co turns to G.fast to entice business

NBN Co is planning to deliver its first deployments of G.fast technology in the second half of 2018, but the services will initially only be available for business users.

G.fast has previously been touted by NBN Co as an “upgrade path” technology for fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC) and fibre-to-the-basement (FTTB) users, pushing their theoretical speeds above 100Mbps.

“G.fast is the latest standardised evolution of DSL connections and can deliver fibre-like bandwidth of trial wholesale download speeds of up to 1Gbps over 100m of existing copper cabling and trial wholesale speeds of up to 400Mbps over 300m,” the company said in a blog post in June.

Overnight, coinciding with an appearance at the Broadband World Forum, chief strategy officer JB Rousselot said G.fast was being “added to the toolkit for the FTTC and FTTB networks”.

Fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) users will have to wait for an upgrade to FTTC before they can take advantage of G.Fast.

There was sparse detail offered on how much of the NBN network would be offered G.fast.

It is understood that initial deployments will be limited to areas with an identified demand for “ultra-fast speeds”, and that those are likely to be commercial end-users in FTTC/B areas.

While there was no specific reason G.fast could not be offered also to residential users, it is understood they are not the target of the initial rollout.

NBN Co is betting on a foray into the business and enterprise market to improve its financial position; the ability to offer higher-speed services could allow the NBN to more effectively compete as a new entrant in the space.

The network builder hopes 15-20 percent of its total revenue will come from the business sector in future.