Plans for NBN released by Axia
Claims were recently made by Axia Netmedia, a relatively unknown Canadian group, that the $15 billion national broadband network from the Rudd Government shouldn’t be built if it doesn’t use fibre cabling all the way to businesses and homes in metropolitan areas.
Calls for the broadband network to have fibre to the node connections deployed to 98 percent of users in Australia have been made for a long time by the Government, claims that running fibre to the networks on premises is too expensive and as such has been widely disregarded by many telcos.
Axia recently revealed, after keeping a low profile throughout this years bidding process for the NBN network, that it believes the only way the funding from the taxpayer will only be effectively spent is if the next generation network is built using the fibre to the premises approach. It confirmed that it would build a fibre “grid” in regional locations with a number of last mile options at competitive prices.
Art Price, the chief executive and chairman of Axia NetMedia said “If you want to leave it to an incumbent-driven approach then you don’t even need to build an NBN. To invest in fibre and to not contemplate fibre to the premise, especially if it involves public money, why would you even bother doing it?”
Metropolitan areas would not require an FTTN build, said Mr Price, as the delivery of high-speed broadband to customers would be too heavily reliant on the incumbent’s copper wire connections, with the incumbent in this case being Telstra. Claims made that it would be too expensive to deploy a fibre to the premises network was also dismissed by Mr Price.
He said “We haven’t seen a market yet where what the end user is already paying wouldn’t fund a whole new fibre to the premise next-generation network.”
The plans made by Axia’s rivals for the NBN build are starkly constrasted with its backing of fibre to the premises. The use of 100 000km of fibre cabling and 75 224 nodes using an FTTN deployment has been proposed by Optus and the outlined proposals from Telstra to also offer FTTN, but one that will only reach 80 to 90 percent of the population through the expansion of the copper based DSL network it already has.
Mr Price said “A network built on DSL technology is not a smart network. It is a dumb network because it is not duplex and it is not future proof. The people around the world that are stepping up their game and building real next-generation networks want duplex speeds and a network that can self-heal and is easily scalable. And this is what fibre to the premise offers.”
When asked for an amount Axia NetMedia would be spending if it won the bid, he refused to offer any further details.
