NBN rollout to test sites "early in the second half"

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 09 February 2010 13:04

Business IT - Networking

The FTTH component of the National Broadband Network will start rolling out later this year to a series of selected test sites chosen to be representative of the different types of dwellings and urban and natural environments likely to be encountered in the full scale rollout.

NBN Co executive chairman, Mike Quigley, told a Senate Estimates Committee hearing on 8 February: "In preparation for the start of our volume rollout, NBN Co will select a number of locations for initial rollout and trial of our high-speed broadband network - these will be what we are calling our 'first release' sites. The aim is to validate the network design and qualify the total end-to-end system...

"The first-release rollout will also allow us to test different construction techniques. Therefore the NBN first-release sites will be selected to represent the diversity of situations we will be presented with across Australia in the volume rollout."

He added: "We are looking to select a suburban area where we will need to serve semi-detached houses, detached houses and multi-dwelling units...We will also select a smaller rural town with more dispersed housing, and other places in between with different geology, local infrastructure and housing types."

He said the installations would seek to answer several questions: "The actual differences in cost between cabling underground and using the existing overhead power infrastructure, in what circumstances we may need to put our access points (ONTs) inside houses or on the outside, the difference connecting a wooden house from a double brick, and so on."

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