NBN: we'll keep it minimal, says Quigley

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 10 December 2009 07:35

Business IT - Networking

NBN Co executive chairman, Mike Quigley, addressing the National Broadband Forum today has provided his most detailed public briefing yet on NBN Co's plans for its FTTP rollout and its plans to deliver increased bandwidths to the remaining 10 percent of the population using satellite as fibre, saying it will aim to deliver a minimal network so as to allow service providers to capture as much as possible of the value.
Importantly, Quigley moved to dispel concerns from some commentators that the NBN might move up the value chain by providing backhaul and layer 3 services. Quigley said "By limiting our scope both in the geographic sense, from premise to point of interconnect, and in the network sense, by not going above the ethernet layer, we are occupying as small a footprint in the overall value chain as possible. This leaves plenty of scope for the users of our network, the access seekers to build facilities, innovate and develop new services."

Points of Interconnect to the NBN's FTTP network would be where retail and wholesale service providers interconnect to the NBN but would, Quigley said, be located only where there was contestable backhaul giving them choices as how they get traffic to and from their servers into the NBN.

Fibre pairs delivering signals to passive optical network nodes will be brought together in fibre access nodes - ethernet switches to which access seekers can connect (in many cased these would be located in Telstra exchanges).

However if there is no availability of contestable backhaul to that node, Quigley said: "In this case NBN Co will aggregate the traffic from several such fibre access nodes and haul it back to a location where there is contestable backhaul...which we call an "Aggregation Node"... [and which] then becomes the PoI for Access seekers. In this case the fibre access nodes are not PoIs."

He added that there would probably be between 100 and 200 PoIs in the NBN. "Their location needs very careful consideration. Where we place these PoIs may have an impact on industry structure so we will be consulting with the industry and holding discussions with the Government and the ACCC to ensure we get this placement correct."