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Practice makes perfect: NBN fibre deployments accelerate

Fibre passes more than a million homes, just before it's killed off

Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull has jumped the gun on nbnTM's annual report, trumpeting that the company has exceeded its June 2015 performance targets.

The long-anticipated acceleration of the fibre rollout was evident in February, when nbnTM announced its 2014-15 half-year results. The official full-year results are expected in August.

Turnbull's media statement says the company beat its June 30 “premises serviceable” target by 10 per cent, with a total coverage of 1.143 million; and at 485,000, its active connections was one per cent ahead of target.

Turnbull is also keen to take credit for accelerating activations – around 6,400 brownfields premises per week now, compared to 2,800 per week at the end of FY 2014.

nbnTM has also improved the availability of lead-ins in fibre brownfields areas, so the number of premises able to get a connection has risen from about one-third of those within a fibre serving area to something more like 90 per cent.

The “serviceable brownfields” number is of particular interest. While the minister's missive doesn't mention “fibre”, fixed wireless is broken out. That suggests to Vulture South that the rise to 648,000 (corporate plan target: 590,000) brownfields premises serviceable is pretty much all an acceleration in fibre deployment.

The commercial launch of FTTN services is still on track for Q3 2015, and HFC services will launch sometime in 2016. ®

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