NBN Co reveals details of Multicast offering

Stuart Corner
Saturday, 13 August 2011 11:45

Business IT - Networking

NBN Co has revealed details of its planned multicast service that will enable ISPs to deliver bandwidth intensive content destined for multiple users (typically video) as a single data stream to the NBN rather than replicating that data stream for each individual customer.

They will need only to deliver separate data streams to each NBN Co point of Interconnect through which they want to serve customers.

NBN Co head of product development and sales, Jim Hassell, said: "Multicast will be available as an add-on feature to our fibre offering giving service providers the opportunity to introduce very attractive and competitive triple-play voice, broadband and video content to any of their fibre-based customers. It is designed to assist retail service providers to offer new more specialist content such as non-English speaking channels, high-definition TV, 3DTV, interactive services and social TV - efficiently and cost-effectively."

He added "This should give consumers more choice and freedom to select the content they want, and it should encourage the development and production of new content by creating a more diverse market of service providers who want to purchase content to broadcast.

"We are already starting to see some of our largest electronic retailers marketing 'smart', Internet-connected TVs. Our multicast feature will enable the full potential of these types of devices to emerge and to possibly speed the adoption of the new technology."

The Multicast feature is scheduled to be delivered as part of NBN Co's Product Release 2, which is expected to be available for testing in late 2011 and ready for general release in mid 2012.

NBN Co has released a discussion paper on the product to get feedback from access seekers on the technical and pricing features of the product.

The NBN Co document also goes a long way to answering the question: "why would people need 100Mbps?" It makes clear how customers taking multicast video services could easily chew up significant bandwidth in the access network.

It says: "Video traffic carried as part of the Multicast feature at a high definition or standard definition quality is expected to be of sufficient quality to deliver an end-user experience commensurate with the current free-to-air and pay-TV experience provided that the access seeker dimensions its services in accordance with the recommendations in this document."

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