In a significant milestone – and a timely reminder that all things have to start somewhere – the entirety of the nbn™ broadband access network has now been directed away from temporary to established Points of Interconnect (POI).

One of the crucial links in the nbn™ access network delivery chain, temporary POIs were originally set up in 2011 to allow phone and internet providers to interconnect with our network during the initial stages of network construction.

A temporary solution

NBN Co has been working with the industry since 2014 to commence the migration of services from these temporary POIs to established ones.

The first network migrations commenced in late 2015 with phone and internet providers beginning to transfer services to the established POIs soon after.

Phone and internet providers now have nine months to finalise the transfer of their services to the established POIs, with NBN Co committing to the decommissioning of temporary POIs by the end of 2018.

About 210,000 services covering 108 POIs across Australia were provisioned through the temporary POIs with approximately 65,000 remaining to be transferred.

Executive Manager – Business Service Design at NBN Co, David Lannan, says the milestone is an indication of how far NBN Co has come in rolling out the network since its first tentative steps in the early days.

“As the nbn™ access network moves to maturity, moving away from the temporary POIs gives us greater ability over managing network capacity at the wholesale level, delivering services back to local POIs for interconnect with phone and internet providers.”

The original raft of temporary POIs was located in the five ‘First Release’ sites, Fixed Wireless and Greenfield sites that were built before our established POIs were available in the area.

Temporary POIs were also established in five major capital cities as part of the initial delivery of services over the nbn™ access network, allowing ease of connection for phone and internet providers trialling services over the network along with making the network operational.

They were subsequently used to provide access to services over the nbn™ access network at Greenfield and wireless sites where transit infrastructure and established POIs were not yet available.

“As the first release sites were built, NBN Co focused on building the local network and took advantage of existing infrastructure available from third-party providers to get those services back to phone and internet providers in the capital cities,” says Lannan.

“The temporary POIs ended up delivering over 210,000 services, mainly from new Greenfield developments connecting to the nbn™ access network before established POIs were even built!”

The established solution

Following detailed engagement with the industry, shareholders and regulators, NBN Co commenced constructing 121 established POIs nationwide to provide access to individual Customer Serving Areas (CSAs).

“Today, NBN Co has built a broadband access network across Australia to provide access to services to the established POIs in local areas, and any new service over the nbn™ access network is now delivered through that infrastructure,” says Lannan.

As established POIs are commissioned, they will serve all premises that are connected to the nbn™ access network within their associated CSAs.

As part of the commissioning process, phone and internet providers are required to deliver their own ‘backhaul’ (existing phone and internet provider networks) to each established POI before being able to order products from NBN Co and, in turn, offer their own services to end users.

Consistent with NBN Co’s obligations under the Special Access Undertaking (SAU) and Wholesale Broadband Agreement, NBN Co will migrate services from the temporary to established POIs on an individual CSA basis.

“Under the SAU, NBN Co has committed to close the temporary POIs and work with phone and internet providers to move services to the established POIs when reasonable to do so,” says Lannan.

NBN Co has worked hard with phone and internet providers to ensure there’s minimal disruption to end users as part of the migration.

“There is a minor outage overnight when we physically transfer the network across, but NBN Co performs this work in the dead of night in prearranged outage windows to reduce impact to end users,” explains Lannan.

“Phone and internet providers manage their own migrations, which is a pure software change and should happen seamlessly on the nbn™ access network.

“Providers get nine months to move their services across, so there is plenty of time to plan and get things right.”