iiNet CEO warns of telco-centric NBN

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 06:08

Opinion and Analysis

"Who is to say that a retail service provider in the future won't be a home insurance provider packaging home monitoring? Who is to say that your health insurance provider won't want to provide some sort of health monitoring service over the NBN? The reality is that we will see these services and others evolve and develop over the next five to 10 years The utilities are already talking about intelligent grids and smart grids: will they connect to the NBN directly of will they go through an ISP?"

On today's equivalent of the NBN, broadband over Telstra copper, Malligeorgos pointed out that there is only one 'access seeker' - an ISP. "But the NBN is not just the Internet, it is about access to a whole range of services from a whole range of service providers. So in the future you will have a range of access seekers who want direct connection [to the customer]. They will want a direct relationship with the NBN."

However, he said there would be plenty who would be happy to access the customer through an intermediary, the NBN equivalent of an ISP. "So we believe a hybrid model is the most likely outcome, and the NBN will be able to promote that through its ability to create a range of services from bitstream services to wholesale models."

However, as Alcatel-Lucent has pointed out in a white paper on the NBN, this open access model raises a number of issues of network configuration, control, monitoring and responsibility for faults and service restoration.

Service delivery into the home will be via an ONT - optical network terminal that converts the incoming optical signal into electrical and vice versa - and a residential gateway, or gateways (RG) that provide access to the various end user services.

According to Alcatel-Lucent: " Some aspects of the ONT's operation need to be centrally managed to ensure that network performance is maintained and that customers and access seekers are assured the bandwidth they have contracted for. The wholesale provider (NBN Co) will therefore be responsible for configuring and managing the ONT in accordance with the services they provide to the access seeking NSPs [network service providers]. A key question is: could or should the ONT support an integrated RG or should the RG be separated from the ONT?" It says that both these scenarios raise significant questions.


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