The announcement to extend the FttDP coverage follows NBN Co’s announcement, also today, that between now and the end of June it will make 1 million premises ready for service (RFS) as it ramps up the network rollout.

“Across our MTM (multi technology mix) suite we are very much scaling the build at a rapid rate. We are now at over 4.3 million premises ready for service and will be half way built by mid-year,” Peter Ryan, NBN Co chief network engineering officer said.

On the FttDP footprint, Ryan says around 400,000 of the premises are in the former Optus HFC footprint.

“These premises in the expanded footprint will now be delivered more efficiently from a cost and time perspective – a great outcome for these homes.”

With the ramping up of the NBN rollout, Ryan says it is a demonstration of the “MTM machine really moving into full gear”.

“The reality is the only way you make 1 million FttP RFS in three months in Australia – is to leverage existing network assets.

“We are ensuring we have a pipeline of big innovations required to meet future demand for fast broadband as new use cases hit our households such as augmented reality and 4K video content.

“With this in mind we have been trialling new NG-PON2 technology that leverages improvements in size and cost of high-speed optics to add more wavelengths to the same street fibre already deployed in the NBN.”

According to Ryan, as demand steadily rises over the next decade, technologies like NG-PON2 will allow NBN to access significant new capacity from the NBN network.

“In that vein, each of our access technologies has their own evolutionary path toward delivering the expanded speeds and capacity that end users will demand in the future.

“The FttP product is already on the path toward multi-gigabit speeds and beyond and FttDP and FttB also have an evolution to gigabit speeds via technologies like G.fast and XG.FAST.

“With HFC we are already looking around the evolution bend on the road to gigabit speeds via DOCSIS 3.1 and on Fixed Wireless we recently announced a new 100/40Mbps product and we have the potential to offer even higher speeds.”