FICON ready to support NBN Unify

After ten years of constructing the NBN network to connect homes and businesses nationally through a mixture of technology delivery, the Federal Government announced in September 2020 an upgrade to the NBN network. The upgrade will see an investment of $3.5 billion to further boost the Government’s commitment to supporting critical communication infrastructure. This will benefit NBN providers and its customers in metropolitan, regional and remote communities.

Millions of people living and working across Australia will now have better access to higher speeds and greater capability on the NBN network with this investment.

The NBN Co was first announced in April 2009, to provide terrestrial fibre network coverage for 93 percent of Australian premises by the end of 2020.

The early NBN rollout experienced significant delays. In 2014, the Federal Government announced that the NBN rollout would change from a primarily fibre-to-the-premises model to a multi-technology-mix model. The technology to be used would be determined on an area-by-area basis.

As it was rolled out, the NBN was widely criticised for being slow, expensive and obsolete. And unfortunately, many suburbs are still using slower copper cable phone lines today. And for some homes and businesses, fibre only reaches as far as a node in their neighbourhood, with copper cables required to be used the rest of the way.

However, with this latest initiative from the Federal Government and the NBN, millions of people across Australia can now expect to meet the accelerated demand for higher speed broadband services, especially in light of changes in the way people live, work, study and communicate as experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supporting Australia’s communication infrastructure with NBN ‘Unify’

Under NBN’s project, named ‘Unify’, a number of telecommunications businesses have started field operations, maintenance and optimisation services throughout Queensland.

NBN’s ‘Unify’ seeks to benefit homes and small businesses across the Fibre-to-the-Node (FTTN), Fibre-to-the-Curb (FTTC) and Hybrid-Fibre-Coaxial (HFC) networks.

As this project takes place, an increasing number of premises connected to NBN by FTTN technology that require higher speeds will be able to access higher wholesale speed tiers via Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology.

In addition to this project, NBN will invest $1.5 billion to connect more than 300,000 new premises, extend some COVID-19 relief measures and invest in IT simplification to reduce costs for NBN and internet retailers and enhance overall customer experience.

This investment will not only benefit those in metro areas, but NBN will also increase its focus on regional areas through targeted investments in fixed wireless and satellite networks, an expansion of fixed-line networks in regional areas and the deepening of community engagement.

FICON is excited to support NBN’s commitment to provide critical communication infrastructure for the benefit of communities. With FICON, customers can find faults and close jobs quickly and reliably with the smartest optical and copper testers utilised by NBN.