NBN Co to spend $70m on Alcatel fibre kit

NBN Co has awarded an initial $70 million contract to Alcatel-Lucent for the supply of gigabit passive optical network (GPON) and Ethernet aggregation kit.

The kit includes optical line terminals to be located at the fibre access node (FAN) sites and the optical network terminal (ONT) attached to each dwelling.

The fixed price purchase contract came with the option "to buy as much equipment as the company needed as the project grew in scale," according to NBN Co's head of corporate services Kevin Brown.

"We plan to spend up to $1.5 billion on this highly-specialised network equipment during the lifetime of this project," Brown said.

"This contract allows NBN Co to purchase what it needs when it needs it, and allows [us] to engage other suppliers at a later date of our choosing.

"Once NBN Co achieves full rollout scale, [we intend] to engage other GPON equipment suppliers who will interoperate with Alcatel-Lucent's GPON equipment."

While the Alcatel-Lucent kit will be manufactured offshore, testing would occur locally.

Installation would involve some 500 Alcatel-Lucent engineers in Australia and 200 engineers from NBN Co.

NBN Co will also spend $15 million buying a year's worth of engineering and testing services from the vendor.