Some 6,000 premises across the Australian Capital Territory, Sydney, and Melbourne will soon be connected to the NBN through fibre-to-the-basement technology – the company announced on Monday.
Around 2,000 premises are expected to be ready by the last week of March.
Documents that have been issued to retail service providers indicate that apartments to be included in the rollout are located in the suburbs, particularly in the areas of Brunswick, Carlton, and Keysborough; Civic in the ACT; Alexandria, Balmain, Elizabeth Bay, Erskineville, Haymarket, Mascot, Potts Points, Pyrmont, Randwick, Rushcutters Bay, St. Leonards, and Sydney City in NSW.
The news comes a year after NBN Co began its FTTB trials in Melbourne.
According to the company, trial users experienced average download speeds of 89Mbps down and 36Mbps via vectored VDSL.
Since then, NBN Co has been conducting more trials and will be prepared to start connecting customers come March. The 6,000 premises covered by the FTTB rollout are expected to be passed in June.
The process of installing FTTB in high rise buildings is also said to be a lot smoother compared with installing fibre to the premises. New NBN equipment is to be installed in the communications rooms of each building (usually found in the basement), and it becomes ready to access NBN’s fast broadband over the existing in-building wiring.
NBN Co further announced that they have been delighted with the results of the pilot trials of their FTTB services, with users reporting high satisfaction rates with the service.
NBN Co’s overall goal is to get 8 million homes connected to the network by 2020.