NBN Co details 1Gbps fibre service offering

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 18 August 2010 10:29

Business IT - Networking

NBN Co has released a paper detailing the wholesale products it will offer over its FTTH network, including the 1Gbps offering, announcement of which caused a great pre-election kerfuffle last week.

Despite the 1Gbps capability being revealed with great fanfare by prime minister Julia Gillard,  communications minister Stephen Conroy and NBN Co CEO Mike Quigley, it seems highly unlikely that the 1Gbps was a surprise to those in the know.

The paper is the third stage in a process that started in December 2009 with release of a product consultation paper, which received 50 submissions. It was followed by an NBN response paper in March and along the way NBN Co says it has completed "approximately 150 hours of direct product deep dives in workshop sessions with over 25 access seekers spread across Australia."

In the paper NBN Co says it will offer: "Fibre based access services with bandwidths of up to 1000Mbps downstream with the flexibility to add committed bandwidth to support just-in-time and real-time applications such as video and telephony for consumers, business and government end-users."

Committed bandwidths of up to 100Mbps will be available initially, but a committed 100Mbps will also be a maximum of 100Mbps (traffic class 1), and a maximum of 1000Mbps will mean a guaranteed bandwidth of zero (traffic class 2).

For a peak downstream bandwidth of 100Mbps a peak upstream bandwidth of 40Mbps will be offered and for a 1000Mbps peak downstream bandwidth, 400Mbps upstream.

NBN Co suggests typical uses of traffic class 1 services will be control, critical and delay sensitive applications; and for traffic class 2 Data download / upload applications. Class 1 traffic will always take priority over class 2. NBN Co says additional traffic classes may be introduced later.

To enable end users to access bandwidths up to 1000Mbps, NBN Co will supply network termination units (NTUs) for installation in customer premises with four 1GigE ethernet ports. Units with optical ethernet ports operating at 1GigE will also be available.

NBN Co is also planning to offer "Specialist fibre based access services with symmetrical bandwidths above 100Mbps to 1000Mbps as a customised order and subject to special pricing."

NBN Co's basic offering over the fibre will be a 12Mbps service downstream with a commited information rate of 150kbps, which will be consistent with services it expects to over satellite and wireless networks.

Product overview papers for these services were also released today by NBN Co, but these are less developed than the fibre product paper: they represent the start of the industry consultation process.