NBN - Laying the Fibre gets up to speed

NBN contractors such as Silcar/Thiess, SPATIALinfo and Service Stream are now so efficient at rolling out fibre down streets - from the exchange to people's houses - that stopping to add tens of thousands of large-fridge sized node cabinets – as proposed by the anti-NBN lobby – represents an expensive, time-consuming hindrance. The hindrance comes with a practical nightmare of powering the node and intense bureaucracy born from the requirement of dealing with power companies, associated regulations and the necessity of using power companies' own engineers to hook each one up. One contractor said, "I don't know how you'd power them."

The contractors also pointed out that it could still be cheaper if the scope of an alternative rollout was reduced. Nonetheless, they did mention that the state of the copper would be an issue. Other infrastructure leaders subsequently concurred and pointed out that maintenance to Australia's copper networks (both PSTN and HFC) has practically collapsed over the past three years because there has been little reason for commercial companies to spend money on maintaining networks that are scheduled to be ripped out of the ground. There's now a very real question of whether it would be feasible to rely on any infrastructure, which relies upon existing copper, even if we wanted to.

The contractors foresee no problem hitting 6000 connections per day from early next year which would mean NBNco's plans are running on schedule. Stephen Ellich, Director of Service Stream, explained how the rollout process required passing through various phases, "The first phase is design. When everybody started everybody was probably thinking, 'Well we'll never design that many jobs at once!' Now, you know, we're simultaneously designing jobs in the order of...
30,000 to 40,000 premises per month."

Dan Birmingham from Silcar chipped in, "We're hitting 50,000 a month at the moment."

Ellich went on, "So you add those numbers together and the puzzle starts to come together.

"We're ramping up each phase of this project to build it. It's not like it's a 'day one' requirement - we see it truly as a journey. And it's that investment in the resources, training, and the infrastructure which includes our own plant out in the field, our own splicing equipment, our own CAD stations, spatial access and training, that gives us the ability to build an industry that is capable of building 6000 at every phase."

Tony Cotter, MD and CTO for SPATIALinfo pointed out that the rollout was not unprecedented and that when Telstra and Optus rolled out their HFC networks, they were hitting 5000 per day while in the US the 'Verizon - FiOS' roll-out was hitting 5000 to 6000 connections per day

"It's not unachievable" he said.