Australian government-backed National Broadband Network (nbn) said it has reached a deployment milestone as there are now 6 million homes and businesses able to connect to broadband service on nbn network from one of its preferred ISP partners.
Nbn is working toward a goal to provide high speed wholesale access and connect 8 million homes and businesses by 2020 using a mix of access technologies, including HFC, fixed wireless, satellite, fiber-to-the-node, and fiber-to-the-premises. Arris is a key player for the HFC portion of nbn’s upgrade plan.
Nbn noted that the FTTN and HFC deployments today serve more than half of the 6 million premises that can connect to retail services on the network.
Regarding pace of deployment, nbn said it’s been making close to 100,000 premises serviceable each week over the past three months. Roughly 2.7 million premises are accessing retail services over the network, with about 40,000 new premises signing up with internet providers each week, nbn said.
Under the current plan, the network, more than half built today, is expected to be three-quarters built by 2018 and complete by 2020.
Nbn, now a card-carrying member of CableLabs, announced in June that lab tests of DOCSIS 3.1 achieved 1-Gig speeds. At the time, it said it would move to field trials in December and eye potential commercial launches of D3.1 on the HFC portion of its network in 2018.
RELATED: Australia’s nbn Joins CableLabs
Under the most current timeframe, nbn expects to DOCSIS 3.1-powered service by the end of 2018, according to ZDNet.
