Tibit Communications, a startup with technology that’s focused on telcos and cable operator access networks, said it has landed a $13.8 million “A” round led by a mix of strategic investors and network operators.

Tibit didn’t reveal those investors, but Liberty Global praised the Petaluma, Calif.-based company and identified itself as one of the vendor’s partners in Tuesday’s funding announcement.

Founded in 2014, Tibit’s initial focus is on pluggable devices that are focused on helping telcos and cable operators virtualize their networks.

Tibit’s initial products are the MicroPlug OLT and ONT, claiming they provide FTTx PON fiber access from Ethernet switches and other devices equipped with an Ethernet port, including fiber nodes, and that those modules work with some of the market’s leading Software Defined Networking orchestrators.

“PON is not a box anymore,” Edward Boyd, Tibit’s chief technology officer and co-founder, said, noting that the vendor’s pluggable form factor packs in the MAC and PHY layer components.

He said the technology will fit into cable’s strategy as MSOs shift away from centralized access network architectures to those that distribute those components.

Part of the pitch is that operators can plug in Tibit’s components without altering the fiber plant, and that operators can move to generic Ethernet switching hardware and take advantage of those economics without being locked into a specific vendor’s chassis. It also allows operators to put in PON where they want on a port-to-port, selectable basis, Boyd said.

Cable operators are interested, he said, because they can drop a fiber into a neighborhood in a  greenfield scenario without having to add a hub site or headend.

“Partnering with Tibit fits our strategic GIGAWorld ambition of bringing high-speed gigabit connectivity to homes and businesses as early as possible,” Colin Buechner, managing director or access networks as Liberty Global, said in a statement. “The Tibit MicroPlug provides significant flexibility in the systems that we can use to provide FTTx. We can purchase FTTx solutions from a much wider supplier base and get one that best fits the deployment need.”

Tibit is currently enabling partners to evaluate its products with a programmable FPGA version of the product, and expects to reach production on the actual modules, which will run on custom silicon, later this year, Boyd said.

Tibit, which has about 20 employees, all in engineering, is led by a team that hails from the telecom world. Boyd previsuly was CTO and co-founder of Teknovus (now part of Broadcom). Tibi president and CEO and co-founder Richard Stanfield was once CEO of Imagine Communications, and led the sale of the company to Harris Broadcast Corp. in January 2014.

In 2015, Boyd, along with Kevin Noll, then with Time Warner Cable, and Fernando Villarruel of Cisco Systems, and Saifur Rahman & Nagesh Nandiraju of Comcast co-authored a white paper that compared and contrasted several solutions for implementing a PON in a node-based architecture.

“Remote PONs can be very beneficial to MSOs. They allow the operator to run fiber with very high efficiency or connect customers at very long distances. An operator can reach customers without adding hubsites and could potentially consolidate hubsites,” they concluded. 

Though Tibit is announcing the funding today, the company filed an SEC document on Oct. 14, 2016, showing the $13.84 million raise, with a total remaining to be sold of approximately $805,218.

Australian government-backed National Broadband Network (nbn) said it remains “on track” to complete its stated plan to complete its network build by 2020 and connect 8 million premises, but it will be reducing the amount of hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) required to reach that goal.

In a revised corporate plan released this week, nbn outlined a shift in mix of technology types it will use to connect 8 million premises by 2020. 

It originally planned to reach that in part with HFC to 4 million premises that are considered “ready for service” (RFS), but knocked that forecast down to 2.5 million to 3.2 million premises. Anticipated use of fiber-to-the-node/-to-the-basement/and distribution point, meanwhile, rose from 5.1 million premises that are RFS to 6.5 million.

Nbn’s planned use of FTTP (2 million to 2.5 million RFS) and fixed wireless and satellite technologies (900,000 to 1.1 million RFS) remain relatively steady.

According to IT News, nbn CEO Bill Morrow said the change in that deployment mix came after it was able to glean more data from the state of HFC networks it acquired from Telstra and Optus.

"[Last year] we didn't have contracts in place with equipment suppliers and delivery partners… and we lacked a lot of the data associated with exchange information from Telstra and Optus,” he said, according to the publication. We've been able to close all of that out through the year…The data that is available today changed the type of technology we should choose."

In the newly updated plan, nbn now anticipates annual revenue for fiscal year 2020 to be about $5 billion, with ARPU of $52.  As for the current state,  nbn has 2.9 million premises ready for service, and 1.1 million activated end users. Revenues were $421 million.

Once everything is in place, nbn expects to have 1-Gig available to 40% of Australians, 100 Mbps to 70%, and 100% getting 25 Mbps or more.

nbn noted that the projected top end of the peak funding range is now $46 million to $54 million, down from $46 million to $56 million, as it was able to minimize many of the uncertainties and cost assumptions in the business.

The government-backed group also noted that it’s fully funded for fiscal year 2017, but that it’s also exploring sources of external debt. Per IT News, nbn will still need to raise another $10 billion to meet its anticipated FY2018 requirement of $39.5 billion.

"We are confident we'll be able to obtain the necessary funds," Morrow said, noting that the process is already underway, according to the report.

nbn recently launched commercial broadband service on Telstra's  former HFC network in Ocean Reef, Western Australia, offering up to 100 Mbps down and 40 Mbps for its “retail service providers.”

nbn’s first commercial HFC services occurred in June in Redcliffe, Queensland, via the former Optus network.

Nbn, which uses an open access wholesale model and has tapped Arris as a partner for the HFC portion of its plan, said then that Optus, TPG and Exetel are offering HFC services at launch, with Telstra likely to be joining that group of sellers soon.

Nbn also has plans to launch DOCSIS 3.1 services and target gigabit speeds in the second half of 2017.

Cable operators aren’t tossing out good HFC networks, but they are deploying fiber-only networks at in increasing rates in greenfields and other certain situations.

To get a fix on this trend, the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) and its global arm, the International Society of Broadband Experts (ISBE), have expanded their boot camp training program with one targeted to fiber networks deployment.

That new program, called the Fiber To The x (FTTx) Boot Camp, adds fiber passive optical network (PON) training, including installation, architecture, deployment and troubleshooting for GPON, EPON as well as RF over Glass (RFoG), a standard that enables MSOs to deliver their traditional services via RF on fiber while preserving their traditional backoffice and provisioning systems.

SCTE/ISBE, which recently launched a Boot Camp focused on DOCSIS 3.1, said the new FTTx-focused program will focus on PON architectures and offer comparisons to HFC, the disadvantages and advantages of various designs, and best practices for deploying and supporting FTTx.

“Time Warner Cable approached SCTE/ISBE to develop a program that could provide the industry with efficient training on FTTx technology, the advanced tools used to install and troubleshoot FTTx, and the creative approaches to problem-solving that the industry needs to realize the benefits of fiber deployments,” said Steve Harris, senior director, advanced technologies and instruction, learning and development, SCTE/ISBE. “We worked with Kevin Noll and the Time Warner Cable team to create an FTTx Boot Camp that combines industry technical expertise and SCTE/ISBE’s learning systems.  Our goal is to foster seamless fiber deployments for cable system operators as well as new opportunities for career advancement for the industry’s technical workforce.”

“Bringing fiber all the way to the customer premises increasingly is gaining traction as an option to expedite advanced services and to increase reliability of the network,” added Chris Bastian, senior vice president and CTO of SCTE/ISBE.  “SCTE/ISBE is working closely with our partners to make sure that current and next-generation workforces have the tools and talents that will allow operators to capture the ROI benefits that can accompany FTTx.”

SCTE/ISBE said cable organizations can contact Steve Harris at sharris@scte.org to schedule the two-day FTTx Boot Camp at a location of their choice. SCTE/ISBE also will host the FTTx Boot Camp Sunday through Monday, Sept. 25–26 in Philadelphia, immediately prior to the start of Cable-Tec Expo 2016.