Quigley sets out timetable for NBN Co's first six months

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 16 September 2009 14:20

IT Industry - Strategy

NBN Co executive chairman Mike Quigley has spelt out an ambitious programme for the company's first six months that, if accomplished, would see many details of the NBN emerging. He has also canvassed the possibility of NBN Co building and launching its own satellite.

Quigley told his first press briefing as NBN executive chairman: "Over the next six months we would expect to have largely completed building up the organisation, designing our wholesale product suite and largely designing the network. We will be negotiating with potential partners and we will have a programme plan in place and a programme management office established.

"We would expect to be well on the way, if not to have completed, an understanding with the ACCC on a wholesale product. We would also expect to be well on the way with pricing architecture discussions with customers and well on the way with tender processes, obtaining a carrier licence and, if we believe it is necessary, negotiating spectrum licences and a satellite slot for the 10 percent of folks not covered by fibre.

"We would also be planning our rollout schedule and designing the BSS [business support system] and OSS [operational support system] stacks to manage all this."

This latter decision is likely to be one of the most difficult and important of the whole NBN design process. Not only will this system have to manage the operation, provisioning of services etc on the NBN it will have to provide automated interfacing to the systems of multiple retail service providers enabling them to manage their customers on the NBN and to be billed for the NBN services those customers use.

It is perhaps surprising that Quigley would contemplate the NBN acquiring its own satellite (a slot is an orbital location for a geostationary satellite and these are a limited resource administered by the International Telecommunication Union).
 
In subsequent questioning Quigley admitted that the NBN Co owning its own satellite was not a decision that would be taken lightly, saying..."There are long lead times and big costs associated with satellite services...Three years lead time and somewhere between half a billion and 800 million [dollars] in terms of putting a platform up."

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