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.

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.

Network pricing strategies: tiered vs spot vs flat

This is intended to be a fairly exhaustive overview of the various options available to a next generation telecommunications carrier for pricing its products and services into a market. Managing pricing is increasingly important as telco operators around the world consolidate their multiple (legacy) infrastructure platforms into a single (next-generation network) platform (typically utilising IP/Ethernet/MPLS/D-WDM). I’ll also highlight some of the various strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis) associated with each approach. I intend to keep this analysis at a reasonably high level to make it more easily approachable and digestible. In reality, I could quite easily write an entire textbook on this subject alone (any publishers interested?). Thus I will not be including all the technical proofs or justifications for each condition or approach here (you can pressure me directly for those if you really desire them). So, without further ado, let’s embark upon our quest.

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.

FTTH Worlds best practice: BT Openreach

There is always a temptation to merely follow in someone else’s footsteps, especially when you are unsure of the consequences particular decisions may have. It is always safer to transfer responsibility for a decision onto someone else, rather than to take the risk on yourself. This is especially true in cases where the trailblazers are well recognised, well regarded and hence have substantial market credibility. In fact, in some cases the temptation to blindly follow can be so overwhelming–that we will do so, despite possibly clear indications and warnings to the contrary.

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment

For this reason alone, I feel it is worth taking a critical look at what some of the other early movers in wholesale FTTH access networks are doing; and whether or not it is necessarily right for Australia to follow. Today, I’ll start with British Telecom’s Next Generation Access company, Openreach (BT NGA Openreach). In particular by looking at some of the approaches they are adopting to resolve many of the intricacies involved in wholesaling broadband access.

More than one way for NBN to be trans-sectoral

Wow, what a week so far. Almost every industry player, analyst and even the odd pundit here and there have come out to say something about the Governments release of draft exposure legislation for NBN Co operations. As I detailed in my last post, much of the debate is around elements of the legislation that allows NBN Co some flexibility to offer retail style services to government agencies directly. Amid all the controversy, even Senator Conroy himself has had to come forward to clarify matters in the media. However, it doesn’t end here. I believe this storm in a teacup deserves some closer attention as the experts may be missing something and the spin-doctors are just too busy spinning.

Response to NBN Co consultation paper: proposed wholesale fibre bitstream products #1

This is merely a high-level summary of my formal response to NBN Co’s first industry consultation (warning video stream) as part of their industry briefing sessions. This first open engagement is centered around their “proposed wholesale fibre bitstream products”. This summary and my response follow the same format and section numbering as the original consultation paper. Unsurprisingly, more detail can be found in my actual submitted response. For each section, I’ll provide a summary of the material as documented by NBN Co, followed by a summary of my response to the corresponding section and any questions posed within.

NBN–From problems to solutions

Yesterday I summarised the three primary public concerns, as I saw them, around the planned NBN Co. deployment. Today Andrew Colley summarised pretty much the same key points, so maybe it’s time to look at how NBN Co. may be able to address them. Just to re-iterate, the areas of concern are:

1. Pricing: or more importantly price flexibility,
2. Connectivity: or more importantly connection flexibility and
3. Openness: open interfaces, open databases, open standards.

I’m not going to document a complete architecture here to address everything, rather I intend to simply highlight each of these areas with some specific examples that were discussed at the Realising our Broadband Future Forum and possible solution paths for resolving them. As always, if you disagree with anything I say, please add a comment.

Since this is a large post, I have broken it up into several pages to make it easier to follow.

—Page 1— —Page 2— —Page 3— —Page 4—

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Realising our Broadband Future

Just last week, Thursday and Friday to be more precise, the Australian Government held an open industry forum, “Realising our Broadband Future“, to brainstorm services and applications that the forthcoming NBN (National Broadband Network) may potentially enable. As the forum was heavily over-subscribed, many people, myself included, virtually attended via the live stream broadcasts and participated via the online wiki services and twitter. This is my summary of the event, with a particular focus on the areas that I believe are important strategically for the future of communication services in Australia.

First, what is the Australian NBN?
Before embarking on a more detailed analysis, it may help to highlight some of the key characteristics that make the NBN more than just another FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) network deployment. Chief among these are:

• The NBN will provide broadband services to 100% of the Australian population. This complete elimination of the digital divide alone is fairly key–when broadband penetration is so total,one of the primary blocks to service deployments vanishes. You can always assume access capability and hence business cases become merely a function of utility versus cost.
• 90% of Australians will receive a minimum 100Mbps access capability via G-PON and the remaining 10% a minimum 12Mbps access capability via satellite or other wireless. These are committed minimum’s only–in time they will most likely increase with demand and technology. Whilst some consumers are able to leverage and utilise greater capacity, it is very likely that these minimum capacity limits will offer significant utility for quite some time.
• The NBN will only provide wholesale service capabilities. These wholesale services will be available to any access-seeker at open and fair prices–it is anticipated that this combination will stimulate a vibrant and competitive retail market place for value-added services and solutions.

So, keep in mind that this is a truly ubiquitous broadband network that aims to deliver network access services, in an open fashion, to every Australian citizen. This is regardless of whether they live in the center of the city or out on a rural property, potentially 100’s of kilometers away from their nearest neighbours.