Australia's NBN Co. has invited the country's retail service providers to take part in a three-month fiber to the building (FTTB) pilot that it plans to start in January.
The service provider plans to build out FTTB-based services to serve up to ten multi-tenant units (MTUs), including a mix of large office complexes and apartment blocks, which will comprise up to 1,000 individual homes and offices.
Under the proposed plan, the service provider will use a hybrid fiber and copper or coax strategy.
It will bring fiber cable to a node, which would typically be located in the building's wiring closet. From that point, it would connect to the existing wiring to deliver services to each office or living space.
Gary McLaren, NBN Co.'s CTO, said in a release that "The pilot is an essential step along the way to determining the right mix of technologies" to deliver faster broadband service "as cost-effectively and as affordably as possible."
This new development is another sign of how the new Australian government wants to examine the idea of replacing current fiber to the home (FTTH) network strategy with what they say is a lower-cost fiber to the node (FTTN) hybrid fiber/copper architecture.
For more:
- see the release
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