ATUG chairman details the devil in the detail of NBN implementation

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 05 July 2011 16:01

Business IT - Networking

ATUG chairman, David Swift, says there are still many questions unanswered and many details required before Australians, and business in particular, can be assured that they will be able to fully exploit services over the NBN.

"We have had a myriad of documents produced but the devil is in the detail and there is an awful lot of detail still missing," Swift told a forum on 'NBN Policy Gaps' convened by the Telecommunications Society chapter of the Australian Computer Society (ACS-TSA).

Many of the problems, Swift explained, stemmed from the fact that the NBN is not an end-to-end network and to deliver end-to-end services, which at the end of the day are all that matter to users, a number of disparate networks and network services from a number of different providers must be interconnected and work as a seamless whole.

"The customer experience must be consistent across all elements that comprise the NBN, and that is not just NBN Co infrastructure," Swift said. "It does not matter if the NBN is incredibly reliable if the rest does not work. And I have not seen from a policy perspective any concern about that."

He pointed out that, just as today, in the NBN era, retail service providers serving end users will rely on wholesale service providers, including but not limited to NBN Co. "We have the wholesale-retail arrangement today, but they don't work seamlessly and fantastically. We have to learn from the past and make sure that the problems we have with the wholesale-retail model today do not get repeated." He added: "I'm sure it will be worked on, but it has not happened yet.

According to Swift, the transition of services from copper to the NBN will be a huge issue for multisite businesses, and is one that has not to date been addressed. "I have been to so many seminars where they say 'don't worry, when we come to your area we will transition you," but I have clients with hundreds of sites and they cannot easily change over site by site.

"There is an awful lot of work that needs to be done in transition management, and it will be put on to retail service providers. But I don't believe they are configured to handle migration on those sorts of levels."

Swift re-iterated and re-inforced the comments made in a recent edition of the Telecommunications Journal of Australia - that in the NBN world, unlike today, there will be no single entity responsible for the overall end-to-end performance of services delivered over the NBN.

"Managing the infrastructure market really concerns us," he said. "The NBN is really a combination of NBNs and somebody has to manage how it all works together in standards and in costs. We have raised this several times with the ACCC and the ACMA and they say 'the other guy is doing it'. We have even approached NBN Co and they say 'We are not doing it'. So the reality is that this is a big issue."