More NBN Co Submissions (Services and PoI)

Just a small update which will be followed up with more in the next week or so. It’s been busy with NBN Co partaking in another round of industry engagement, this time around their wholesale service specification and a joint engagement with the ACCC around their planned PoI implementation. I have submitted a number of responses to these two engagements, all of which are becoming increasingly critical of NBN Co’s growing monopoly footprint and power.

I will write up a number of summary posts for each of these submissions, however in the meantime they can be downloaded using the following links:

• Submission to NBN Product Overview Fibre Access Services Aug-2010
• Submission to NBN Product Tech Spec Fibre Access Services Aug-2010
• Submission to ACCC-NBN PoI Discussion Paper Nov-2010

That’s a fair bit of reading (I know because it was a fair bit of writing too).

Future applications that justify a NBN

I noticed a post just recently by journalist Stilgherrian, asking what future applications and services should be used to sell the NBN (National Broadband Network) benefits. He notes in his post that “the government’s expensive-looking TV adverts are nothing but vague generalities” and asks if anyone can come up with a more interesting list of applications that justifies the call for “more bandwidth”. I felt inclined to respond and did so with the following:

Submission to Senate on NBN Implementation Study

As noted in my earlier post, the Australian Government officially released the much heralded KPMG/MCKinsey NBN Implementation Study to both the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) and the Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network. Pretty much immediately the DBCDE established a public wiki for discussion (no longer available) and the Senate Committee set a deadline of the 27th May 2010, for public feedback regarding the Implementation Study recommendations (found here).

This post is a more approachable highlight of key points and observations from my review of the KPMG/McKinsey Implementation Study submission to the Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network.

Finally, NBN Co agree to talk with me

Today I met with Matthew Lobb (NBN Co Senior Advisor, Industry Engagement) and Jamie Chard (NBN Co Architect) at the NBN Co Sydney office. Fundamentally I wanted to discuss the concerns that I had been raising since February this year around their planned Point of Interconnect (PoI) models and their planned QoS implementation.

Twitter stream summary of NBN Implementation Study

Last Thursday the Australian Government finally released the much heralded McKinsey/KPMG NBN Implementation Study. Costing the Government roughly $25million and taking over 9 months to prepare, the final report weighed in at just over 500 pages and almost 3Mb in size (which brings it close to being worth roughly $1 per bit). This post is just the raw tweets stolen directly from my live twitter stream (#nbnis). A more traditional critique will be forthcoming soon. Stay tuned for more.

ZDNet Twisted Wire – Will the NBN limit competition?

Further to the previous interview, Phil Dobbie interviewed myself (again) along with Geof Heydon (again) and Graeme Dollar for ZDNet’s latest Twisted Wire podcast on “Will the NBN limit competition?“.

Again Phil Dobbie brings his unique style and energy to the podcast format and in process uncovers a few new concerns for our rapidly evolving (or is it devolving, …. maybe just stagnating) telecommunications industry.

Well worth setting another twenty minutes aside to listen to.

Review of NBN Co Wholesale Bitstream Products engagement

In December 2009, NBN Co released a wholesale products consultation paper (NBN001) to the public as part of a planned and ongoing, open industry engagement process. In their own words, they noted that:

NBN Co’s role is to realise the Australian Government’s vision for the development of a next generation national broadband network. To do this successfully, we need to consult widely to ensure our plans for the network meet the current and future needs of our wholesale customers and the wider Australian community.

Interested parties were invited to return submissions back to NBN Co for review by mid February 2010. In the meantime, NBN Co held two open industry briefing sessions, one in Sydney and the other in Melbourne, the latter of which was recorded and published online. In late March 2010, NBN Co released their summary of the collective open industry feedback and published a subset of the responses onto their website. This post is my review and summary of those submissions, or at least the subset that engaged in an open fashion and allowed their submissions to be made available to the public, for open review, against NBN Co’s own summary review.

ZDNet Twisted Wire – What will the NBN look like?

I was recently interviewed by Phil Dobbie, along with Geof Heydon and Paul Brooks, for ZDNet’s Twisted Wire podcast on “What will the NBN look like?“. Apart from providing a very approachable summary of the terminology used when discussing the Australian NBN; Phil also highlights some of the areas of current debate, namely retail versus wholesale discussions and the confusion around local versus aggregated PoI locations.

Well worth setting twenty minutes aside to listen to.

Telstra stalling on NBN migration deal

This is all to be expected, yet it’s still tiring to watch. Telstra, NBN Co and the Government have stalled in their negotiations over ‘just compensation’ for Telstra’s copper access infrastructure. I use the term ‘just’ quite deliberately and this is my value-add to the media reporting.

What we are witnessing here, as passive bystanders, are commercial game theorists at their best. In the red corner we have Telstra and in the blue corner we have NBN Co. In the middle we have a market place of knowns and unknowns (influenced very heavily by end-users and the Government). Now the two main players are trying to position themselves optimally based on second-guessing the position the other player will adopt. And each party makes assumptions about just how capable, how smart and how much the other party may (or may not) know. Unfortunately, it is not enough for NBN Co to simply represent itself as a purely independent competitive player, as they are not!

FTTH Worlds best practice: SG Nucleus Connect

As I stated in yesterday’s critical examination of BT’s Openreach FTTH, we should always be mindful of the strong temptation to merely follow in someone else’s footsteps; especially when the trailblazers are well recognised, well regarded and hence have substantial market credibility. It is also crucially important that we are vigilant to recognise and quickly deflect arguments based on ‘fear, uncertainty and doubt‘, that may be put forward as justifications for why we should ‘just do it‘ some particular way. Today I’ll delve into the details (or as much as I can based on the very limited publicly available information) of Singapore’s Nucleus Connect FTTH network. In particular by looking at some of the approaches they are adopting to resolve the aforementioned intricacies involved in effectively wholesaling broadband access.