In his most revealing public discussion yet, NBN Co executive chairman Mike Quigley has dashed HFC network operators’ hopes of vending their assets to the proposed National Broadband Network.

Appearing at an industry consultation session in Sydney alongside key members of his team, Quigley told a packed house that NBN Co was not planning to use existing HFC networks; he also fielded a barrage of questions from all corners of the sector, ranging from enquiries on network resiliency to queries on NBN Co’s choice to stick to Layer 2 services.

The session was led by the firm’s head of industry engagement Christy Boyce; GM of industry consultation and engagement Matthew Lobb; and Jamie Chard, a technical specialist in the CTO’s office.

Intended to explore some of the issues raised in NBN Co’s recent discussion paper on wholesale fibre bitstream products, the opening presentation filled in some additional detail, including the revelation by Lobb that NBN Co intends to develop a multicast capability to reduce the bandwidth requirements for video transmission.

But once the floor was open for questions, a packed house of industry representatives spent over an hour airing a broad range of concerns and questions – including the issue of whether NBN Co would be using or overbuilding existing HFC networks. “We don’t own any HFC networks, and we have no intention of building any... we have no plans at this point in time to make use of any HFC networks,” responded Quigley. “The whole question of overbuild is much more general, but in general we are going to try and build as ubiquitous a network as we possibly can.... the existing HFC networks are not contiguous, not every home passed by an HFC has a lead-in to provide a broadband service...our job is to fibre up right around Australia.”

Another hot topic was the company’s decision to restrict itself to Layer 2 services, rather than expanding into Layer 3 – even though the planned multicast capability would, said Chard, necessarily be Layer 3 aware. “We want to move bits around the place, but we don’t want to get into Layer 3, because I think there will be a number of players who will provide all sorts of innovative services,” said Quigley. “And we also plan to stay out of the internal wiring within homes, because there’re many ways of solving that problem, there are probably are many players who are going to get involved in that, and it’s not an area I think NBN Co should step into. Our aim... is to occupy as small a part of the value chain as we can, and do our very best to enable competition.”

RESILIENCE A PRIORITY: A number of the assembled industry representatives expressed concern that the limited number of points of interconnect NBN Co expects to build – between 100 and 200 – might expose communities to single points of failure. But Quigley remained adamant that resilience was a top priority for the network company.

“The philosophy overall is that we’re going to try and make this network as resilient as we possibly can,” he said. “At every point, we’ll be using rings, we’ll be using redundancy; and the further up into the network we go, we’ll be building failure mechanisms. An absolutely key part of the network we are building is to build what we believe will be a robust statistical model, so we can calculate time to failure and to repair; we’re aiming to get very high reliability. The thing that we can provide is an underlying infrastructure that our retail service providers can trust.”

NBN Co is still seeking input on the bitstream products discussion paper. Submissions close 12 February.

Petroc Wilton