COMPANY NEWS: Commpete has welcomed the Australian Government’s decision this week to invest $3BN to upgrade fibre connections, but cautioned on the ambitious timeline and budget, and danger of missing out on alternative technologies as they advance.
Australian government owned fibre network wholesaler NBN Co will upgrade the remaining FTTN (fibre to the node) network across Australia, using A$800 million of its own funds plus a commitment of up to A$3 billion from the government.
NBN Co has launched a proposal to provide download speeds five times faster than present, on its nbn Home Fast product. This would see wholesale download speeds accelerate from 100/20 Mbps to 500/50 Mbps at no extra wholesale cost to retailers.
Australian telco TPG claims a "sizeable number" of Internet users are suffering from connectivity problems and feel "a real need for speed".
Broadband operator NBN Co plans to create an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered "intelligent, self-healing network", expand its workforce, and deliver more network upgrades across Australia, according to its first annual service improvement plan (ASIP).
The NBN Co, the company rolling out Australia's national broadband network, has again reported a loss for the 12 months ending in June, this time of $1.12 billion, an improvement of 24% or $346 million from FY22, the company said on Thursday.
The Federal Court has ordered that the largest internet service providers—Telstra, Optus, and TPG Telecom—need to pay penalties amounting to $33.5 million after each companies admitted false and misleading representations when promoting certain NBN internet plans, according to the ACCC.
The Federal Government says it will provide a $2.4 billion equity investment over four years to the NBN Co so that an additional 1.5 million premises can be upgraded from copper connections to fibre by 2025. The money will be formally announced in its budget update on 25 October.
The NBN has made available the latest list of suburbs and towns where an additional 300,000 homes and businesses currently served by fibre to the node will benefit from the extension of fibre deeper into communities.
Australians who get their broadband through NBN fixed-line connections experienced slightly faster download speeds in May 2022 than they did in February 2022, according to the ACCC’s latest quarterly Measuring Broadband Australia report.
Aussie Broadband has announced that it will participate in NBN’s new Fibre Connect program, which offers upgrades from fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) or fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC) technologies to full fibre for eligible customers.
A well-known telecommunications consultant has thrown his support behind a call by ACCC chairman Rod Sims for the government to treat the costs of the NBN as sunk and focus on getting the best use out of the network.
Labor's announcement that it would provide $2.4 billion for an additional 1.5 million homes to be provided with fibre if it were elected to office has been dismissed as "a continuation of the muddling-on process seen over the last decade."
The final cost of the NBN is likely to end up being in the $90-billion range, a figure that was once claimed in 2013 by Malcolm Turnbull as what it would cost if Labor continued with its plan, a well-known independent telecommunications analyst says.
Malcolm Turnbull has some explaining to do about the costs of the NBN this morning, after Guardian Australia reported figures hidden in a report commissioned by him showed a full-fibre NBN or a multi-technology mix would have cost about the same.
NBN Co has awarded around $1.1 million worth of construction contracts as part of the $2.9 billion plan to upgrade large parts of the fibre to the node (FTTN) network to fibre to the premises (FTTP).
Not all non connections are capable of delivering the maximum speeds of higher speed NBN plans, and Telstra has apologised for not communicating this properly in the past, and said "we have made significant improvements to how we manage communicating nbn speed information to our customers", so what else does Telstra's California-based global connectivity and platforms exec, Sanjay Nayak have to say about it all?
The ACT, NT and Tasmania finally join the list where suburbs will be upgrade to a fibre connection, with 1.1 million homes now announced and 2 million homes to be passed by 2023, leading to a total of 3.5 million premises to be able to access the nbn Home Ultrafast wholesale speed tier with download speeds of 500 Mbps to close to 1 Gbps.
The options offered by the NBN Co in its latest pricing review consultation will lead to a price rise of $2 per customer no matter which option a retail service provider chooses, well-known independent telecommunications analyst Paul Budde says.
One of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's contributions to the national broadband network, the HFC network, has been termed a dog's breakfast by a retail service provider.