Australia's NBN Co has revealed plans to add a further 440,000 premises to its new fiber to the curb (FTTC) footprint and has finally set a date for resuming its hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) rollout.
The state-owned company building Australia's national broadband network will use FTTC to connect more premises originally planned to be served using fiber to the node (FTTN) technology.
The expansion will take the NBN's total FTTC footprint closer to 1.5 million premises by 2020. Existing copper lead-ins from the Telstra HFC network will be used to connect the new properties to curbside fiber.
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Meanwhile, NNBN Co will progressively resume the release of wholesale HFC services from April 27, starting with 1,000 premises in Melbourne and Sydney.
A further 38,000 premises will be connected by the end of June, and after this month NBN Co plans to ramp up the release to around 100,000 premises per month.
NBN Co was forced to suspend activations of new HFC services in November while it worked to get the network, which it acquired from incumbent operator Telstra, up to par.
The suspension was implemented in the wake of the large volume of complaints from consumers about activation delays and network faults. NBN Co also missed its deadline for detailing the new HFC rollout timeframe, which the company had been planning to announce in March.