NBN Co plans to deliver the best, most cost effective infrastructure across Australia using a combination of fibre, wireless and satellite technologies.
NBN Co will design, build and operate a wholesale-only, superfast broadband network that will provide speeds of 100 Megabits per second to 93% of Australian premises and 12 Megabits per second to 7%, subject to final design.
For most premises, NBN Co will use either Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) or Ethernet Point to Point fibre and will link some premises by wireless or satellite, depending on location and geography.
NBN Co plans to offer a wholesale-only Layer 2 bitstream product in order to occupy as small a footprint as possible in the overall value chain. This means leaving retail service providers (RSPs) with significant ability to innovate and develop new services across the higher levels of the value chain.
The location of Point of Interconnection (PoIs) will be optimised to support healthy competition among RSPs and align with contestable backhaul. For more densely populated areas, such as urban and regional centres a “local” Point of Interconnection (PoI) will be established for each Fibre Serving Area (FSA).
For less densely populated areas, a “district” PoI (which aggregates two or more FSAs together), will be established. If competitive backhaul is not available from a PoI, supplementary provision of backhaul may be required for a limited period of time to permit the emergence of competitive backhaul on these routes.
NBN Co plans to offer its standard wholesale Layer 2 bitstream service in product bundles:
- Local Ethernet Bitstream (LEB) will provide our wholesale customers with a Layer-2 access service between the Optical Network Termination (ONT) at an end-user premises and a “local” PoI, located at the Fibre Access Node (FAN) for the relevant FSA. The LEB product is likely to be offered in capital cities and regional centres. It is envisaged that the LEB product will be made available in respect of the significant proportion of FSAs in Australia.
- Aggregated Ethernet Bitstream (AEB) is likely to be offered in rural areas where there are no competitive backhaul services below the PoI. The AEB product enables aggregated access to one or more FSAs via locations where the AEB product is made available.
Both the LEB and AEB products offers will be based on an Ethernet platform, utilising Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) as the physical access technology. The technology will deliver a range of active service features including security and Quality of Service (QoS) as well as IP multicast.
As well as GPON based services NBN Co also plans to provide point to point solutions that will assist RSPs to deliver solutions for the business market.
Our wholesale products will support access by multiple RSPs, a range of customer premises equipment (CPE) and will include an interface for analogue telephony. The detail of how these elements will be presented to our wholesale customers will be discussed in later consultation papers.
For more information see speeches given by Mike Quigley, CEO of NBN Co, NBN Consultation Paper and diagrams of our network infrastructure.
Network Infrastructure Diagrams:
Click here to view larger Logical Reference Architecture.
Building broadband for all Australians
