Quigley updates senators on NBN Co progress

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 09 February 2010 13:10

Business IT - Networking

In his opening address to a Senate Estimates Committee hearing yesterday, NBN Co CEO, Mike Quigley provided an update of progress at the company and its plans to deliver the NBN to Australia.

He said that NBN Co now has 112 people located in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra and plans to increase staff numbers ot 300 by the end of June,

"We will soon be announcing the establishment of facilities to house our Network Operations, Integration Labs and Data centre," Quigley said. "We anticipate that up to 250 people will be employed to work in these facilities and this will be another very important step in taking NBN Co towards its full operational mode."

Quigley said the integration lab would provide "a full multi-vendor, end-to-end test environment for network and systems integration where all new releases and capabilities are qualified prior to deployment to the live network; an environment for integration testing with service providers prior to connection to the NBN; a production support environment that enables testing and resolution of field issues; an environment that will allow us to demonstrate current and future functionality of the NBN.

On the industry front, after extensive internal drafting and development, we issued a product consultation paper on 21 December 2009.

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