Fibre as the way forward
When NBN Co, the operator of Australia’s largest access network, announced a proposal in March to provide five times faster download speeds on its Home Fast product, at no extra wholesale cost to retailers, retail service providers (RSPs) were left with no doubt the wholesaler was intent on boosting full fibre uptake. The change would see download speeds accelerate from 100/20Mbps to 500/50Mbps and comes at a time when NBN is allocating capital to enable more than 10 million premises – or up to 90 per cent of the fixed line network – to access close to gigabit speeds by December 2025.
The new turbo-charged speed tiers will be available across the company’s hybrid fibre coax (HFC) and fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) networks with customers in eligible fibre to the node (FTTN) and fibre to the curb (FTTC) locations that will be able to access the proposed speed tiers by upgrading to FTTP.
Last month, NBN Co brought forward its consultation on introducing 2Gbps download speeds, following feedback from RSPs. This, coupled with its decision to turbo-charge three of its highest residential speed tiers on FTTP and HFC technology, shows the operator is getting on with its priority to make fibre available for 5 million premises on FTTC and FTTN – now already available to more than 70% of premises.
W.Media caught up with NBN Co’s head of customer strategy and innovation Dr Robert Joyce to explain why fibre makes sense for customers and the operator – including some that have not been connected to NBN copper at all.
Fibre results in lower fault rates, fewer dropouts and greater speed predictability, and improves customer experience. Joyce emphasised that by pushing more energy-efficient fibre deeper into communities, NBN Co is also enabling long-term reductions in network power demand and ensuring the network is future-ready and available for consumers when they need it.
“Fibre technology offers significant advantages over legacy technologies in terms of operational expenditure, ease of management, restoration, and power efficiency,” Joyce told W.Media. “The lessons learned from the rollout have been invaluable in understanding the scalability and sustainability of fibre networks. For example, our network stats show that FTTP is 7.6 times more reliable than FTTN and 8.9 time more reliable than FTTC.”
Joyce also busted the myth that Australia’s most popular speed tier (50Mbps) is indiscernible from a 100Mbps service. “In terms of the customer benefits of our higher speed tiers, offering download speeds of 100Mbps and above, customers can experience reduced latency, smoother streaming, and better overall performance compared to 50Mbps plans,” he said. “For example, we’re now seeing that many popular streaming services on our higher speed plans will burst data at over 100Mbps in order to reduce buffering time when you hit play or scroll though the movie.”
He added: “This means it’s not just hard core gamers that benefit from being on our higher speed plans for rapid game updates (these can take hours at 50Mbps and mere minutes on our higher speed plans), anyone who streams video will also get a much better experience at 100Mbps and above.”
Passive future
“The future of fibre is indeed passive,” said Joyce. “Our network is PON-based and this means there are no active components between the exchange, or Point of Interconnect (PoI), and the users’ premises and we don’t see this changing in the future.”
“In order to move customers to higher speeds in the future on a PON network the only things we need to replace or upgrade are the Optical Line Termination unit in the exchange and the Network Termination Device in the users’ premises,” he added.
Nokia is a key partner for NBN in fibre access, just as others like Ericsson are key in its fixed wireless access (FWA) network. “NBN already uses its PON-based fibre network to offer both residential and business fibre services, with the latest consultation proposing business fibre services offering wholesale download speeds of up to 2Gbps and uploads of up to 500Mbps using NBN’s PON fibre network,” said Joyce.
“Regarding residential speeds of 1Gbps or more, there are already clear use cases in moments that matter such as game downloads, movie downloads before jumping in a taxi to the airport, where 1Gbps and higher speeds, really do make a difference,” he added.
What about Australia’s capitals?
NBN Co acquired large HFC cable networks in many of Australia’s capitals and the operator has migrated the cable technology to DOCSIS 3.1, in both downstream and upstream. However, the question remains whether, longer term, fibre is inevitable? Virgin Media in the UK, for example, is in the process of upgrading millions of its HFC powered lines to support XGS-PON in a process it said it will complete by 2028. In contrast, US cables seem content to stick with DOCSIS.
“We are exploring all options, including DOCSIS 4, while also considering the eventual transition to full fibre for its undeniable benefits in flexibility, scalability and reliability,” said Joyce. “The key questions here is: when will users want speeds greater than those that HFC can deliver? We still think this is many years away, but we’re not standing still on this one as we roll fibre deeper into the HFC network through our Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) program.”
DAA distributes select network functions closer to end-users, to digital fibre nodes in the field and that in effect gives NBN Co options. It can go “fibre-forward” and push the various PON flavours deeper into its cable footprint or it can sweat DOCSIS 3.1 with a glide path to DOCSIS 4.0 and still achieving 10Gbps with a theoretical potential – with plenty of caveats – of even reaching 25Gbps in the longer term.
Inevitable traffic growth
NBN expects Australia’s data demands to double once again in the next five years and while the access network will probably not see all of that – data centre to data centre traffic dominates today – the operator is already planning for new types of traffic flows and new types of services emerging.
“AI is certainly a buzz word at the moment, but currently much of the AI traffic on the NBN network is text-based (Chat GPT), or image-based (Bing Image Creator),” said Joyce. “With over 50% of NBN’s traffic being generated by video on-demand services, AI only starts to have an impact when it generates additional (not substitutional) video content in the uplink or the downlink.”
“We think this may come when we move to AI-enhanced holographic telepresence, and while we are starting to demonstrate holograms in the NBN Discovery Centre, we think holographic telepresence is some way off – potentially five years or more – due to AR device limitations,” he said.
“But AI is moving at pace, and we are now exploring alternative scenarios to our current network traffic forecast, that takes into account alternative assumptions regarding take up of AI-created services such as holographic telepresence, or virtual call centre agents as two examples,” he said.
This interview is the first part of a wider interview with NBN Co. The second part will cover fixed wireless innovation, LEOsat threats and opportunities, plus telecom sustainability in a power-hungry world.
NBN Co head of customer strategy and innovation Dr Robert Joyce will be delivering the keynote address at Interconnect World Sydney at the Hilton Hotel on 7 August 2024. The inaugural event brings together the industry’s leading telcos, ISPs, IXs, TMT investors, government agencies along with key enterprise decision makers. These stakeholders will consider key technology and investment trends and address best practices in terms of the connectivity of digital infrastructure. For further information and registration, visit: https://interconnectworld.com/events/sydney-interconnect-world-2024/
[Author: Simon Dux]