NBN to hit mainland from July

February 9 2010, 9:58am

NBN Co CEO Mike Quigley said yesterday in Senate Estimates that his company was on track to start rolling out the national broadband network to certain homes on the mainland in the second half of this year. To prepare for the volume roll-out across the country, NBN Co has been choosing certain "first-release sites" to validate the network design. The sites tested were to represent the different environments which the network would have to operate across. "We need to understand the different locations and be prepared to use different construction techniques," Quigley said. It involved "getting down and designing exactly where things go". Locations would range from suburban — with semi-detached houses, detached houses and multi-dwelling units — to rural towns. NBN Co could, with these location tests, determine issues such as the actual cost difference between deploying fibre underground and overground and having terminations outside or inside homes. "This testing will provide critical information about the practical applications of our designs," Quigley said. This would follow full testing in integration labs, but there was no substitute for testing in a live environment, Quigley said. The company would soon issue a request for tender for companies to participate in this "detailed design phase" and a further request for tender for the construction phase. The first part of the selected roll-out — the passive components of the network — is expected to start early in the second half of the year, Quigley said. The second stage involves implementing the active sections of the network equipment in fibre access nodes and customers' premises. The third stage of the roll-out involves working with retail service providers to give access to the network. Quigley said the company had already started the procurement process for active network equipment and had formed a shortlist of suppliers. NBN Co is also preparing to release information on facilities central to the network. "We'll soon be announcing the establishment of facilities to house our network operations, integration labs and datacentres," Quigley said. The network operations centre will be built to do the surveillance and management of the operational network. The datacentre is to house business and operational support systems needed to provision, monitor and manage services on the network. The integration labs will validate and prove the technical design of the network as well as provide a test environment where vendors can do network and systems integration and test releases and functions before deploying them to the network. Quigley expected 250 people to be employed in these facilities. The NBN Co has 112 people at this point and would increase to 300 by June. Comments (0) | Email this Share: Google | Facebook | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Slashdot | StumbleUpon

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