Nbn Co., the broadband venture backed by the Australian government, said it will add G.fast to its access network toolkit as it looks to deliver faster speeds on fiber-to-the-building and fiber-to-the-curb networks.

G.fast is a new standard that aims to deliver gigabit-class speeds to DSL and other copper-based networks. By way of recent example, Sckipio, a G.fast chipmaker, is demoing 4 Gbps speeds (3.1 Gbps down and 900 Mbps upstream) at this week’s Broadband World Forum in Berlin, Germany.

RELATED: Australia’s nbn Marks Broadband Deployment Progress

Nbn, which announced its G.fast plans at the Berlin event, said it will start to adopt G.fast in 2018, expanding on its use of other access technologies that include fiber-to-the-premises, HFC and satellite-based broadband service delivery. It has tapped three suppliers – Nokia, Adtran and Netcomm Wireless, for the G.fast portion of its initiative.

RELATED: NBN Hits 100 Mbps-Plus with Less Costly Fiber-to-the-Curb Tech

Nbn expects G.fast to help it take speeds beyond 100Mbps delivered today on VDSL technology, and hit up to 1 Gbps using g higher frequencies of either 106 MHz or 212 MHz. G.fast is being used in limited ways by telcos such as AT&T, BT, Swisscom and Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom.

RELATED: AT&T Expands Commitment to G.fast 

Nbn said it tested G.fast technology in October 2015 and achieved speeds of 600Mbps on a 20 year-old stretch of 100-meter copper cabling, and will conduct further testing before launch.

Australian government-backed National Broadband Network (nbn) said it has achieved speeds of 109 Mbps downstream and 44 Mbps upstream using a less pricey fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) platform that uses VDSL technology.

RELATED: Australia’s nbn Marks Broadband Deployment Progress

Nbn, which is building and operating a national wholesale broadband network that uses multiple types of access technologies including fiber-to-the-premises, HFC and fiber-to-the-node, said its first FTTC activation, part of trials in Coburg, a northern suburb of Melbourne, hit those speeds using VDSL over a 70-meter copper line.

In certain circumstances, nbn is looking to a use an FTTC architecture that brings fiber to the property boundary, then connecting that fiber to a Distribution Point Unit that then links to the existing copper lines that serves the premises.

Nbn plans to launch commercial services using FTTC in the first half of next year, and eventually use the technology to serve an initial 1 million premises.

The company likewise estimates that the FTTC approach will cost about $2,900 per premises, compared to $4,400 per premises for FTTP.

“We believe FTTC will become another vital tool in the mix of technologies we’re using to deliver the nbn access network,” Bill Morrow, CEO of nbn, said in a statement.

Earlier this month, nbn said 3 million premises on its network had been activated, with another 3 million that are ready to connect.

"Of course, I understand why some people come out with glib catchphrases like, 'Do it once, do it right, do it with fibre,” Morrow noted in this blog post about nbn’s FTTC-facing work.  “If only it were as simple as that in the real world. Here are the plain facts. This network is not being delivered as a free gift – the government wants taxpayers to get their $49 billion back and expect a small return as well.”

Australian government-backed National Broadband Network (nbn) said 3 million premises on its broadband access network have been activated, with another 3 million that are now ready to connect.

Nbn said about 1 million premises have been activated in the past six months, with 1.4 million premises connected to fiber-to-the-node and HFC networks activated in that past 18 months.

That’s significant, nbn said, because it took nearly five years for it to reach 1 million activated premises using mostly fiber-to-the-premises access network technology.

Nbn currently expects to activate a total of 4.5 million premises from June 2017 to June 2019.

Nbn has been 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.

RELATED: nbn Lowers HFC Goals

“We’re regularly activating more than 40,000 premises every week, which means we’re pretty much activating a city the size of Canberra every single month. This huge increase naturally puts pressure on the customer service experience,” Peter Ryan, nbn’s chief networking engineering officer, said in a statement

Expect more insight on nbn’s progress this week at the SCTE•ISBE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver.

The ISBE International Attendee Breakfast, set for this Friday (Oct. 20) from 7:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. MT (rooms 605/607) at the Colorado Convention Center, will feature a panel with Andrew Baxter, general manager, HFC engineering, nbn; Steve McCaffery, president, international sales, international business operations, Arris; and Chris Bastian, SVP, engineering/CTO, SCTE•ISBE.

Read More: Complete coverage of Cable-Tec Expo 2017

The discussion is expected to cover topics and technologies such as 5G, the Internet of Things, 8K, virtual reality and augmented reality.

Nbn recently became a member of the SCTE•ISBE Corporate Alliance Partner Program, and joined the service provider ranks at CableLabs earlier this year.

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.

RELATED: nbn Lowers HFC Goals

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.

The Australian government-backed National Broadband Network (nbn) said it has launched commercial broadband services on Telstra’s former hybrid fiber/coax network in Ocean Reef, Western Austria.

The launch, which offers services of up to 100 Mbps down by 40 Mbps upstream from what it calls “Retail Service Providers” follows nbn’s first commercial HFC services launch in Redcliffe, Queensland, on June 30 on the former Optus network.

nbn said Optus, TPG and Exetel are offering HFC services at launch, with Telstra likely to be joining that group of sellers soon. 

In addition to 100/40, other speed tiers offered on the nbn HFC network are 50/20, 25/5 and 12/1, an nbn official noted, adding that “most” of the RSPs implement data caps that vary by provider, with many set at either 250 gigabytes, 500 GB or 1 terabyte.

“It is worth remembering that we will actually be one of the first operators in the world to deliver open access wholesale services over an HFC network so we have broken a lot of new ground in these last couple of years and now that hard work will pay off for our customers and end-users,” John Simon, chief customer officer at nbn, said in a statement.

Nbn’s near-term plan is to have about 200,000 HFC “end-user premises” activated by June 2017 as it works on a rollout that will eventually cover a footprint of more than 3 million premises.

Nbn, which isn’t without its critics, expects to launch DOCSIS 3.1 services and target gigabit speeds in the second half of 2017.

The group’s broader plan is to deliver broadband to 12 million premises in Australia via FTTP, FTTN, HFC, fixed wireless and satellite by 2020.

Government broadband buildout efforts in the U.S.--muni broadband buildouts in particular--have gotten pushback from commercial ISPs, who argue that market forces, not government interventions, are a better way to spur price and service competition.

That argument got some support in a case study of a government broadband buildout elsewhere

Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN), a government-backed effort to replace copper with a wholesale fiber network to boost competition for retail fixed broadband and speed buildouts with higher quality and lower prices failed to achieve those goals and could be sold off to private interests.

That is according to a paper from the Technology Policy Institute, which chronicles what it says was the product of "extensive government involvement" in infrastructure buildouts, which includes "low quality services due to low speeds, higher prices relative to other countries and a slowing rate of price decrease for internet services in the past eight years."

The paper's authors concede the evidence is "nuanced" and drawing conclusions is difficult. But clearly not impossible, since they conclude from their analysis that "the NBN has not only failed to achieve its targets but

stagnated fixed broadband adoption."

The takeaway, says the institute: "Government's role and its continuous attempt to 'catch up' in a sector characterized by its dynamism should be re-evaluated," the paper's authors conclude. "The Australian case reveals how state owned broadband might not be the best answer to meet full coverage and competition objectives."