NBN Co has unveiled plans to expand the circumstances that qualify a premises to be upgraded to fibre, including where copper is storm-damaged or when people move house.
The company is hoping to hasten the retirement of its fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) and fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC) footprints, seeing it as a way to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction.
So far, upgrades are largely carried out “on-demand” – triggered by a customer committing to order a higher tier service and sticking with that service for 12 months.
More recently, NBN Co has also started shifting customers on underperforming copper lines over to fibre unconditionally.
Now, the company is hoping to expand the range of circumstances that would trigger a fibre upgrade.
The intent is to be able to migrate these new sets of customers onto fibre between FY27 and FY29, although it could happen sooner with industry agreement. [pdf]
The first new type of migration trigger is “assurance-led”: essentially where the existing copper in an overbuild area is damaged, and NBN Co doesn’t want to sink money into repairing it.
NBN Co said it has already done this on a handful of occasions – due to storm damage, or cars hitting its FTTN nodes – but it will need better processes and systems to do these kinds of upgrades at volume.
The second trigger would be when people move premises in overbuilt areas and seek reconnection.
NBN Co noted that this currently defaults to copper, but that its preference is for any reconnections to default to fibre instead.
The third trigger would occur in areas where many users have already upgraded to fibre.
The company noted that running parallel street networks was necessary during the transition phase, but that at some point servicing the copper infrastructure for a dwindling number of premises would become cost-prohibitive.
Once that threshold is reached, NBN Co wants to be able to “manage” the remaining premises off copper-based services over to fibre.
While the migration from copper to fibre is still relatively new for NBN Co, the company is tracking its progress against that of international operators such as Chorus in New Zealand.
In particular, it is keen to move past “on-demand” upgrades, and into an era of “mass” migration to fibre. Then, it notes, it can “manage” any remaining premises over, and shut down FTTN and FTTC altogether.
It appears the company is also looking for ways to move customers in multi-dwelling units (MDUs) off legacy technologies sooner as well.
The company noted the current approach requires “co-contributions” from strata towards transition costs.
It’s not immediately clear what the company’s plan is however for this set of premises.