Federal Labor quizzed NBN Co over whether the company misled the communications minister Paul Fletcher regarding the upgrade path of its 1.5m premises fibre-to-the-curb network.

In the recent Senate Estimates hearing, Labor Senator Louis Pratt questioned NBN Co CEO Stephen Rue on why the company ceased their original plans to use a simple G.fast fit-out to upgrade its FTTC network to gigabit capacity. The original plan dated back to 2016 and was reaffirmed only in September last year.

The senator asked the network CEO: “Did you mislead the minister when he told the National Press Club (last September) that fibre to the curb would be used to offer gigabit speeds? Was that statement accurate and based on advice from NBN Co?”

As a reply, Rue said: “We never mislead anybody, Senator.”

“At the time, Senator, we were considering multiple ways in which we could upgrade the fibre to the curb network, which gives currently a hundred megabits per second to enable it to give up to one-gigabit speed. And that could be done in either using G.fast or it can be done with replacing it with fibre to the premise. We concluded recently that it would be more economical over the long term for us to implement FTTP. And certainly, G.fast could be used across fibre to the curb, but we have chosen to use FTTP. There may still be other uses of G.fast in that network,” Rue further said.

“We believe using a fibre lead-in in the longer term that gives a better return on investment than a G.fast upgrade for fibre to the curb, for those people who wish to have speeds greater than a hundred megabits.”

From there, the senator prompted a follow-up question: “Does that mean that remediation and operation costs for copper exceed the cost of building a fibre lead-in?”

In reply, the CEO stated that: “It means the development of G.fast across the network. It means issues of hotwiring. It means issues of remediation of copper. It means in terms of take-up rates. And potentially, ultimately it means the upgrade of some of the copper wiring over time.” 

Pratt: “So you changed your mind?” 

Rue: “I am not sure we changed our minds but we always planned to use a combination of the two and then we subsequently concluded we would use fibre lead-ins.”

It was also September last year when the minister announced that the network company would spend $100 million to give the 1.5m FTTC premises “access to gigabit speeds through the enablement of G.Fast capability by 2023.”

However, in May this year, the network company decided to offer a direct fibre upgrade from the distribution hub to FTTC customers who wanted higher speeds. Hence, they no longer need to upgrade the FTTC network to G.fast.