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'There will be new entrants. Maybe ASIAL (the Australian Security Industry Association) could become a service provider on the NBN. We are happy to talk to companies about becoming retail service providers over our network,' he said.
He said that security companies should be able to harness the NBN to generate additional revenues by ramping the average revenue per user (ARPU) through additional services such as residential monitoring. 'We are actively promoting this as a use case for the NBN,' he said.
NBN Co remains at pains to explain to the security industry that currently deployed alarm systems will be able to operate over the NBN, and in June ran a workshop for the sector. As a result of feedback from ASIAL the architecture of the NBN had been tweaked he said to incorporate standards for dual tone multi frequency tone transmission which is required for many existing security alarm systems.
There remain some lingering concerns however. One issue is regarding battery backup for the network termination devices which will be located in premises connected to the NBN.
Mr Sykes said that every NTD would have a battery backup able to provide up to eight hours connection in the event of a power failure. He added that the Government was about to begin a consultation with the industry regarding the battery backup.
The other issue that still needs to be wrangled is how service providers which provide the retail NBN service to customers will be alerted to the fact that the premises they are serving has an alarm system which needs to be connected to the NBN.
Mr Sykes raised the notion of creating a national database of addresses which showed where there were alarms. In a masterful display of understatement - given he was addressing a crowd of big burly security blokes - he acknowledged that this could create privacy concerns.
