NBN Co chief reveals first details of NBN architecture

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 16 September 2009 06:04

IT Industry - Strategy

NBN Co executive chairman, Mike Quigley, has revealed the company's initial views on the NBN architecture: layer 2 bitstream services delivered to a battery-backed-up outdoor unit at the home and accessed by service providers at major capital city points of interconnect with more local PoIs for smaller providers.

{Mosloadposition stuart}Quigley told his inaugural press conference that NBN Co had now "put a stake on the ground" with this proposed architecture and was "sharing this with the industry to get feedback and reaction."

He said: "We would see ourselves providing a layer two bitstream-type service, which has got a fair degree of functionality to carry all sorts of traffic - voice, video and high speed Internet...We would expect to end at the ONT (Optical Network Termination)...that would go...on the outside of the house. We would go back...to points of interconnect [where] we would hand back off to the retail service providers. They would be at least in the capital cities but almost certainly there would a range of points of interconnect deeper into the network for smaller service providers."

GPON is the likely favourite for the passive optical networking technology as this is emerging as the favoured technology around the word. It is asymmetric, delivering greater downstream bandwidth than upstream, which suits residential usage. However the NBN is expected to cater for businesses needing high bandwidth services by providing direct point-to-point fibre connections.

Quigley said that the NBN Co was working towards awarding contracts for network equipment to two vendors and requiring them to ensure that their respective equipment would interoperate.

"We'll probably go through a process where we have expressions of interest to try to assess the capabilities of various equipment vendors. We'd probably aim to come up with a short list then come down to two primary vendors. They may work with other vendors to supply pieces [but] we'll be looking for an overall integrated solution, so that we don't have the issues of capability between boxes."

We would then be looking for those two chosen vendors to work together to resolve some of the interoperability issues and we'd be building an integration lab that would facilitate that."

He added that NBN Co would probably aim for a single supplier of OSS/BSS "who could be working with partners". For the build he said NBN Co would probably engage multiple prime contractors who would likely in turn hire multiple subcontractors.