NBN Co will expand FTTC to 1 million premises

NBN Co will bring fibre-to-the-curb technology to an extra 300,000 premises, expanding its FTTC footprint to 1 million homes and businesses.

Chief network engineering officer Peter Ryan today confirmed the expected expansion to the CommsDay Summit in Sydney.

Recent analysis by iTnews indicated NBN Co was starting to abandon future deployments of fibre-to-the-node technology in favour of the more appealing FTTC. 

"Having a technology as flexible as FTTC in our suite of network tools allows us to be agile with the build," Ryan said.

"Premises in the expanded FTTC footprint will be delivered more efficiently from a cost and time perspective."

The extra 300,000 premises span Victoria, NSW, Queensland, Western Australia, and South Australia, he said.

But before NBN Co scales up the FTTC rollout, it will first pilot its deployment and test its processes, systems, and operations of the distribution point units that house the FTTC equipment in the street.

It will do so with a "first time application release" of 120 homes and 12 DPUs in North Coburg, Victoria.

Despite its new FTTC expansion plans, NBN Co has previously said any major upgrade of FTTN to FTTC would be reliant on the network builder meeting its 2020 revenue and deployment targets.

FTTC - also known as fibre-to-the-distribution point (FTTdp) - uses less copper and more fibre to service the connection.

It costs about $2800 per premises to deploy FTTC, compared to between $2100 - $2300 for FTTN.