How does the NBN really work?

The Australian NBN is divided into several elements. Each on designed to service different geographical locations. There is three wired options and two wireless options for providing NBN service.

Fixed line based

Can be divided into three systems which service fixed line based NBN connections.

FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) the first and most simple version is the fibre based network, what happens in this situation is your home contains something called an ONU - Optical Network Unit this is the "modem" which connects to the NBN it's only job is to provide a connect back into the NBN backbone in the local metro network which aggregates customer data into a central location. The NBN fibre network uses a technology called a GPON(Gigabit Passive Optical Network) in this situation a single fibre optic cable is used to carrier both upstream traffic and down. Typically this is done using WDM(Wavelength Division multiplexing) two independent light types are used to carry the traffic on the GPON. One for upstream and one downstream.

FTTN (Fibre To The Node)

Is a combination of technologies under one umbrella this has actually been around for a long time and was commonly found with corporations who had a short run to the local exchange as FTTN suffers significant line performance degradation over distance so it was only used for this purpose. Now it is used as a stop gap in having to replace copper cabling, the key deice central to it's operation is VDSL2(Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line 2) this is actually very similar to ADSL2+, ADSL2 and ADSL1 only difference is VDSL2 uses much higher frequencies which provide higher bandwidth capability beyond those old technologies, and for most home based users there is categories of "signal profiles" which have various distance and power requirements which define the speed for each category, Australian connections typically only use 30a and 17a profiles.

• 30a: 200Mbps down and 100Mbps up

• 17a: 100Mbps down and 50Mbps up

FTTC (Fibre To The Curb) This is a variation on the conventional fibre to the premises in this case the fibre is not run into a conventional ONU it is instead run into a small micro node this micronode is the same technology behind fibre to the node, and retains some of the copper cabling infrastructure found inside houses which is typically the 4 wire RJ-15 based connector and cable which is simply put "telephone wire" people often call it. This allows you to achieve the speeds for FTTN easier than if it was just Fibre to the Node, but again copper cabling is still present.

FTTB (Fibre To the Basement)

Same technology as FTTN in this case the aggregator which is the node is contained in the basement of a building you'll find these in apartment buildings where it might be more economical to use the existing copper cabling in the building than to replace the entire copper run, and the node aggregator at the bottom takes all the VDSL2 modem signals and passing them to the multipoint node sending it down to the optical trunk link (OTL)

HFC (Hybrid Fibre Coaxial) allows for the use of "cable modems" to connect as the NBN connection depending on the burden of the network and the amount of allocated space onn the network HFC has a technology standard called DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) same cabling that delivers your Foxtel or other PayTV is used to connect to the NBN network. DOCSIS standard has a theoretical speed on the newest version reaching 10Gbps bidirectionally.

Wireless based At most there is mainly two technologies in the NBN mix for wireless based systems.

Fixed wireless Comes technically in "two flavors" the first being based on a wireless wide area network WWAN this works like a conventional wireless network commonly found in wireless networks. However the difference here is the raw capacity of the antenna far exceeds that of normal home WiFi device based networks, and is divided among users fixed wireless can experience bandwidth issues when large amounts of clients are connected to the one tower degrading both performance and latency.

The other version is mostly based on the mobile network 4G or 5G where you are connected to the local mobile phone tower via a modem which provides wireless this also is affected by the number of clients connected to the tower at any point in time, there is a way to improve the signal quality of these kinds of connections and that is to use a fixed point signal repeater which amplifies the signal coming from the cell tower on your property, contact your local data-cabling specialist to consider this as an option if you have poor signal strength.

Satellite

For people who are very remote the only option is Satellite on the NBN network this is provided by a satellite device in space where the traffic from client devices is sent up and down from the satellite dish on the roof or some where convenient on a property Satellite internet can be unreliable and have poor speeds due to being affected by the atmosphere, temperature, humidity, and time of day.