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The Bill will apply whether the real estate development project is intended to 

establish building lots, or building units, or both, for either sale or lease.  The fibre 

connection requirement will not apply to lines that are not intended to provide a 

carriage service to the public (e.g. it will not apply to private networks) or that are not 

wholly or primarily for use by an end-user at the end user's premises (e.g. it will not 

apply to a line connecting to a mobile phone tower).

To ensure that carriers are able to gain access to the fibre-ready facilities installed in 

accordance with the fibre-ready infrastructure requirement, the Bill provides for the 

establishment in later regulations of an access regime that would require third party 

access to those facilities to be given. 

.....the Minister could determine that for a duct to be a "

fibre-ready facility", it must have a minimum internal diameter (with a view to e

nabling the quick and efficient installation of fibre at a later date).

Installation in developments that are specified by the Minister of lines that are not o

ptical fibre or of facilities that are not fibre-ready would be subject to civil penalty p

rovisions under the Act. The enforcement regime will apply to both carriers and 

on-carriers, consistent with application of the Act. 

The Bill also amends Part 6 of the Act, which deals with industry codes and 

standards, to more readily enable the development of industry codes and standards 

relating to fibre optic lines and related facilities, and to give further examples of the 

types of topics which industry codes or standards might cover. In addition to 

providing necessary guidance on relevant technical matters, these measures respond 

to calls from stakeholders for such guidance to promote nationally consistent network 

and service outcomes. 

Each FTTH technology has an upgrade path to support higher capacity for the next five years. However, the fact that TDM GPON solutions require customer premises equipment to operate at a much higher bandwidth than that required for each individual customer, may limit how far it can be upgraded in the medium to long term, especially as the customer premises environment can be challenging. For example the temperature at the customer premises can fluctuate, whereas premises designed to host long-haul network equipment are air conditioned, thereby minimising temperature fluctuation.

The first observation is that more evolution of enabling technologies is required for PON generations than for PTP architecture, which in a way, makes PTP a less risky technology to invest in. In addition, due to the greater bandwidth scalability of PTP systems, the expected life cycle of each generation of PTP is likely to be longer than that associated with TDM PON. This is an important result, as it indicates that operators will have a longer time to get return on their investment with a PTP architecture compared to a TDM PON architecture, despite a slightly more expensive initial deployment costs (PTP are currently 19% more expensive to deploy than TDM PON systems, mainly due to the additional fibre, and therefore duct infrastructure required).

So from this analysis, we do not believe that there will be any significant barriers in the evolution of FTTH systems capacity. However, we believe the bottlenecks maybe in the upgrade of one generation of FTTH systems to the next, especially if an operator decide to depart from a TDM PON infrastructure to a WDM PON infrastructure. In the UK for example, if, in the medium term, Openreach was to upgrade its GPON network to a WDM PON network, it would need to prepare for it today by allowing for extra space in the splitter site to be accommodate extra equipment (wavelength demultiplexers for WDM PON).