Comms Alliance says NBN industry consensus difficult to achieve

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 10 June 2009 03:35

IT Industry - Strategy

Communications Alliance has issued a second discussion paper on the National Broadband Network that anticipates a number of key definitional aspects of the NBN on which, it says, industry consensus will be difficult to achieve.

The paper envisages Communications Alliance playing a central role in the development by industry of a NBN Reference Model that will specify the key elements of the future NBN. However, it says "there are likely to be a number of key topics in the NBN Reference Model which are going to be difficult to reach consensus agreement on at an early stage...In order to explore and provide a forum for debate about these topics it may be useful to develop a number of options to feed into the industry debate."

In particular, the paper anticipates there will be difficulties around how multiple retail service providers deliver NBN services to one customer using the access supplied by NBN Co. "Will there be a concept of a 'Prime Retail Service Provider' that has the responsibility for the underlying access service and network termination unit (NTU) required to support the multiple services, or will there be a framework that allows each retail service provider to take responsibility for only its service provision with other mechanisms to ensure that the underlying access service is supplied and supported?

"Will each upstream service provider need to connect its own network equipment to the NBN Co network directly, or can an upstream service provider connect to NBN Co services in a 'virtual' sense through third party networks? Will such third party network services be delivered as transmission type 'point-to-point' services or can they be provided using layer 2 or 3 network services?"

The paper describes as 'critical', "The description and definition of the wholesale services to be delivered by an 'open-access wholesale only' NBN that will enable other service providers to plan and manage their respective business plans incorporating the NBN."

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