NBN Co, the company building Australia's national broadband network, has released “broad principles” it says “will determine which access technology will be deployed to connect communities to the National Broadband Network (NBN).”

For each service area NBN Co will consider whether:

Existing infrastructure can be leveraged to deliver the required bandwidth and reliability to premises; Delivery partners have available construction capacity; Sequencing needs to be matched to construction capacity in particular areas with a preference for a contiguous work front. Network complexity can be reduced by consistent use of technologies within a particular area; Advances in technology may mean an alternative approach may be preferable;

Once that checklist has been ticked off, NBN Co will then consider:

Opportunities to prioritise underserved areas; Opportunities to achieve early / high revenue (e.g. from areas with a large number of business customers).

The upshot of it all is that if your neighbourhood isn't already one of those where fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) is being built, you won't get it by default. But NBN Co has left the door open for paid FTTP offerings.

“Work is underway to develop guidelines so that individuals or businesses with specific speed requirements can purchase fibre up to their premises,” the company says. NBN Co will also “... work with small communities that choose to co-fund FTTP if they are in an alternative technology area.”

The principles also mean that homes and businesses served by hybrid fibre coax – aka pay TV cables – “will receive fast broadband over an upgraded HFC network”. The rest of Australia gets either fibre-to-the-node or fibre-to-the-basement.

The statement about the new principles is laden with caveats, the main one being whether it can strike a deal with Telstra for its networks and filch Optus' unloved and all-but-abandoned HFC network. There's also a pledge to regularly review the principles and point four, above, gives room to change technology. That may come in handy once G.Fast kit becomes available, which looks likely given the recent debut of chipsets for the standard. ®