Broadband rollout well underway

NBN Co recently announced that 100,000 Lower Hunter Homes are set to receive high-speed broadband soon. The company, responsible for the network roll out, announced the next 62 suburbs in Newcastle and Lake Macquarie to receive the FTTN (fibre-to-the-node) technology.

Undoubtedly, the new high-speed broadband will potentially transform the way residents and business owners do business, learn, and interact. But the news was received with mixed reactions as companies like Auscoal Super have announced its intention to leave Warner Bay due to poor broadband speeds. The company’s plans to move to Parry Street, Newcastle was a result of the estimated speeds in Warner’s Bay reportedly only being a 10^th of those in Newcastle.

This new form of broadband, while not as fast as former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s promised FTTN network in 2007, is less expensive. The coalition government tweaked the NBN’s FTTN plans in order to save money and to help the roll outs move along faster.

Fibre-to-the-node in essence, makes use of street per street cabinets as optic fibre hubs before Testra’s copper wires connect those hubs to properties. The NBN Fixed wireless network is designed to deliver services to a fixed number of premises within each coverage district.

The inclusion of Lake Macquarie in the trial to test the planning, design, and construction of the FTTN network was announced by NBN Co earlier this month.

In the next 12 months, 62 suburbs in Lower Hunter are set to receive high-speed broadband as the roll out acceleration gets underway.

Past research by the Regional Development Australia revealed that Hunter loses a total of nine months of business productivity daily due to slow Internet speeds, while the Australian Bureau of Statistics also reported that a quarter of homes in Hunter do not have a broadband connection at all.

This research compares to only ten percent of homes in Sydney’s more well-heeled suburbs that have no high-speed Internet access.

Ultimately, home and business owners in Hunter will be grateful to have been named recipients of this new technology soon, but the question still remains: Until when will the speeds of the fibre-to-the-node network satisfy the needs of its users?

The consumption of broadband data continues to grow as more and more users download and stream movies, and manage businesses from their homes and offices.

 In the end, questions of the network’s sustainability are set aside as residents are pleased to be among the first to receive the service.

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