Is the UK’s push to a full fibre network another indictment of our NBN technology?

The government will spend £1 billion ($1.68 billion) in total with more than £400 million ($672 million) going towards delivering a full fibre network to give homes and businesses access to super fast broadband, capable of achieving speeds of 1GB per second.

Meanwhile more than £740 million ($124 million) will be spent on providing 5G mobile networks to certain local authorities who will be given the chance to bid for a slice of the funds earmarked for the trials.

The money will go towards network providers to help replace the country’s current fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) network which relies on old copper technology to make the final connection with a full fibre network, paving the way for the whole country to have access to super fast broadband.

The British government said the announcement was borne out of an acknowledgment that “the country is falling behind on the roll out of full-fibre.”

The funding has been praised by the British telco industry. Vodafone UK applauded the announcement calling FTTN broadband “much slower and less reliable” and called on Britain’s major telco BT to provide a reliable full fibre rollout for the public.

“We welcome the government’s move to focus on providing full fibre, and we call upon BT to be upfront with the British public about its rollout plans and acknowledge that G.fast will do nothing to help those stranded on archaic and woefully inadequate broadband today,” Vodafone UK director of External Affairs Helen Lamprell said.

The government intends for the money to spur investment in the private sector. Businesses that spend money on full fibre infrastructure will be able to offset their entire investment for tax purposes and small internet firms will be able to borrow from the government’s fund so they can compete with larger internet providers.

The money put forth by the government is just the start, given it has previously estimated a full fibre rollout would cost abour £25 billion.

“Our future transport, business and lifestyle needs will require world class digital infrastructure to underpin them. We have chosen to borrow, to kickstart a transformation in infrastructure and innovation investment,” Chancellor Philip Hammond said in the announcement.

WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE AUSTRALIA?

In the past couple years, the rollout of the National Broadband Network — Australia’s largest ever infrastructure project — has been mired by a bitter debate over the choice of technology used in the rollout.

The more expensive but future-proof fibre-to-the-home has been championed by technologists but the government has pushed for the arguably cheaper use of the existing copper network for a speedier rollout. Ultimately Malcolm Turnbull’s multi technology mix which predominantly relies on copper-based FTTN connections won the day.

In the past the Coalition liked to point to other western nations such as the UK who were using fibre-to-the-node technology as a justification for its position.

But the renewed push towards FTTP in the UK, however token in size, will give further ammunition to those critical of the government’s choice of NBN technology.

Earlier this week the NBN announced a deal with local company NetComm Wireless to be a partner in the deployment of Fibre-to-the-Curb (FTTC) services that deliver fibre to boxes buried out the front of people’s homes.

It’s planned to launch in 2018. It’s not quite full fibre but it’s a lot closer to that end.

Following further trials, 700,000 premises are initially slated to be connected by the FTTC after the company abandoned the use of Optus’ pay TV cables earlier in the year.

NBN chief network engineering officer Peter Ryan said testing over the past year showed FTTC would deliver download speeds of up to 100 megabytes per second and allow even faster speeds in future as new technology becomes available — and NBN Co. has been investing in such technologies.

Internet Australia CEO Laurie Patton who has been an outspoken advocate for a full fibre network in Australia is excited to see NBN Co. include more fibre via FTTC, also called FTTdp, for fibre-to-the-distribution-point.

“Surely it is only a matter of time before the Government agrees to allow NBN to deploy FTTdp right across the fixed line network?” Mr Patton told news.com.au.

“FTTdp was not commercially available when the Government abandoned the original fibre to the home strategy and opted for the technically inferior FTTN. It will be selling us short if it doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity to head back to a fibre-based future-proofed solution”.

In an effort to increase the performance of copper the company has been investing in G. Fast and XG. Fast technologies but such a pathway is viewed by many as a way to simply squeeze the last bit of life out of the copper network.

FTTP is expected to make up about 20 per cent of the final NBN rollout.

Originally published as Where does this leave our NBN?