Signs indicating that NBN work is underway have started popping up around Bellingen, but don’t get too excited about the imminent arrival of fibre-to-the-curb as that is still several months off.
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What is happening at the moment is preliminary work that involves remediating Telstra pits needed to house some of the FTTC equipment.
As NBN noted on its blog in June, this is a labour-intensive process:
“ … we are finding that we need to perform substantial civil works on many of these pits before we can install the Distribution Point Units (DPUs) and connect into the existing copper … To give an example of the complexity involved, the town of Nhill in regional Victoria [population 2184] … has around 250 pits that need to be remediated in order for us to activate our FTTC access network in the town.
“A standard operating crew conducting pit remediation work will typically complete one to two pits per day and a maximum of three depending on how difficult the work is. This gives an idea of the amount of work that is required and the resources it takes to complete it.”
Once the pits are fixed up, the cable hauling will begin, and for most of us (sorry Sunset Ridge and Hospital Hill) the era of 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds with ADSL will soon be over.
According to the address check function at https://www.nbnco.com.au/residential.html NBN Co is still working towards a (revised) availability date of January to March 2019.
Related: Walking out with NBN
Janene Carey
Janene Carey is the senior journalist for the Bellingen Shire Courier-Sun
Janene Carey is the senior journalist for the Bellingen Shire Courier-Sun
