In the NBN world, the buck stops'¦Nowhere

Stuart Corner
Monday, 16 May 2011 11:01

IT Policy - Regulation

A paper in the latest edition of the Telecommunications Journal of Australia argues 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.

The paper, by Mike Rocke and Kit Wignall is one of a number revealing previously un-aired problems with the NBN in an edition of the TJA (Vol 61, No2) devoted in large part to 'NBN policy gaps'.

Rocke and Wignall - both from telecoms consultancy Gibson Quai AAS - warn in their paper 'Gaps in telecommunications public policy: end to end service delivery in the NBN world' (the full text is available only to TJA subscribers) that the lack of end-to-end QoS could cause "the quality of telephone calls to vary significantly and to fall outside the current high standard enjoyed by customers," and "new services that have a high dependency on QoS (such as widely available desk top video conferencing) [to] not be commercially successful due to the risk that the consistency of end to end service quality of these services is not well managed, and therefore does not meet reasonable customer expectations."

They say that, "In December 2010 NBN Co released an updated version of its NBN Co Fibre Access Service Product Technical Specification Version 2.0, which dealt with a number of QoS-related issues. However the specification is silent on QoS performance standards, either for its proposed wholesale product offerings or on an end-to-end network basis."

They suggest that ACMA and Communications Alliance take on responsibility for developing and implementing end-to-end QoS standards for the NBN. "The ACMA and the CA have an inherited national responsibility to lead a process for allocation of end-to-end QoS, along with allocation of network reliability responsibilities, in NGN connections involving multiple supplier networks, both within Australia and internationally that takes due account of the needs and expectations of NBN Co and other network infrastructure and network service providers and, most importantly, of end customers."

Summing up in their editorial, TJA editors Allan Horsley and Peter Gerrand, agree that: "some competent and independent engineering organisation needs to be given this national role. Otherwise we will have created a patchwork of networks whose only duty of care is to their own customers, within the limits of services carried entirely within their own networks."

CONTINUED