In the last two weeks, the Federal Government has confirmed plans to roll out fibre to the node (FTTN) broadband network across the country.
This means people will be able to access their favourite services over the internet as they go about their daily lives.
The NBN is an expensive proposition, but it is being rolled out as quickly as it can.
It has been described by analysts as the fastest broadband network ever built, and the Government’s $8.5 billion NBN rollout is the first to be fully operational.
There is now talk of the NBN being able to be rolled out to as many as 40 per cent of homes in Australia by 2021.
As part of the rollout, more than $1 billion in funding is being allocated to the Federal government to help deliver the infrastructure.
That means that the Government is hoping to roll it out to every household in the country by 2021, with the majority of those homes having access to FTTN by then.
FTTN is an ultra-fast fibre-optic technology, but the technology itself is not new.
A project called “Super-fast” is already being rolled-out in the US and other countries.
NBN Co CEO Bill Morrow said that in his first budget speech in February, he announced a number of initiatives that would support the rollout.
He said: “We have committed to supporting the NBN with more than US$100 billion in infrastructure spending, to ensure it is ready for deployment by 2021.”
The Federal Government’s announcement that it will be rolling out FTTN over the next four years was applauded by those who have been following the NBN rollout closely.
However, the rollout is far from complete, and it is not expected that all Australians will be fully connected by the end of the decade. “
This plan will provide a truly super-fast, high-speed broadband service that can be fully utilised by everyone in Australia, including those living in remote rural communities.”
However, the rollout is far from complete, and it is not expected that all Australians will be fully connected by the end of the decade.
Some experts say that the rollout of FTTN could cost up to $1,500 a year per household.
In a recent report by the Institute of Public Affairs, the Institute says that FTTN is only effective if it is used for all Australians.
“In order for FTTN to be a truly transformative technology, it needs to be deployed for all households and that means that it needs broadband speeds of at least one megabit per second,” the report says.
But in an email to ABC Rural, NBN Co chief executive Andrew Villiers said that the FTTN rollout will only be “slightly less expensive” than what other countries are already doing.
“[The Federal government] will be building a fully-operational FTTN network with a price tag of between US$500,000 and US$1 million a year for the entire nation, with about 70 per cent being covered by the existing national fixed line network,” he said.
However he acknowledged that there is an “overhead” involved in providing the FTT network.
For example, there are no national fixed lines to carry the fibre to all the people, which means there are not as many people on the network as there are on existing fibre to premise networks.
Villas said that if the NBN Co had built a fibre to copper network, it would cost around US$60 billion.
So far, the FTTP rollout is being overseen by a private consortium called Broadband Victoria, which is managed by the NBN.
While the NBN has had its FTTN implementation in Australia for a number a years now, it is only in the last few months that NBN Co has actually started rolling it out nationwide.
One of the biggest challenges of getting FTT to all Australians is the lack of infrastructure to handle the growing number of people on these fibre-to-the-node systems.
With the NBN already having its FTT rollout underway in the states, there is a lot of work that needs to go into the rollout in Queensland.