Renewed calls for NBN's FTTH to carry RF channel for TV

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 06 April 2010 14:37

Business IT - Networking

NZ company Optical Network Engineering, in a submission to the Senate NBN enquiry, says the 100Mbps of the NBN's FTTH network won't be enough to satisfy future demand for 3D and HD video, and an RF channel should be added to the fibre.

In its submission, ONE says. "All existing and even future SD, HD, 3D et al transmission can easily be accommodated on this [RF overlay] wavelength, thus totally offloading the very important data channel'¦taking all the present and future free to air and cable and satellite television channels off the data channel equates to a saving of 7 or 8Gbps of bandwidth which will pay huge benefits as the overall demand for bandwidth inevitably increases."

Others, in particular Alcatel-Lucent, have made the same argument. However in its response to industry submissions on its wholesale product consultation paper, NBN Co came out against providing an RF channel and relying instead  on IP multicast to deliver 'broadcast' type video traffic.

With an RF overlay an additional wavelength would be 'lit' on the passive optical network and used to 'broadcast' the same collection of video programmes to all premises on that segment of the network. Its inclusion would not compromise the 100Mbps per home capacity of the network to carry packet data and could, its proponents argue, free up both this capacity of individual services and, in the long term valuable broadcast spectrum to meet an expected explosion of demand for mobile services

While the inclusion or otherwise of RF channel might be a commercial decision for NBN Co, Optical Network Engineering has chosen to make its case not in a response the NBN Co consultation paper but in a submission to the Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network.

This enquiry was initiated in June 2008 to look into plans for NBN mark 1 and three reports later is still going.
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