NBN Co details network of spares

NBN Co plans to hold inventories of spare parts at points of interconnect and maintenance depots across its network to cut response times for its technicians to attend and repair geographic failures.

Head of network operations Steve Christian said that maintenance kits could also be deployed at some of the 1,000 planned fibre access node (FAN) sites – the facilities that will house the active equipment for a fibre-serving area.

"Field operations need to have a maintenance strategy that is geographically based for speed of response," Christian said.

"We'll have a suite of contracts go out into the industry to develop these field force functions."

He said that each site would host "spares, tools, test equipment" and technicians to carry out the repair works.

Some locations that ran high-density networking kit would also carry "warm" spares that could be hot-swapped into the NBN in case of an equipment failure.

Christian said that while it was "prudent" to have a network of distributed spares, it was equally so not to create stockpiles of kit that could be superseded by a version change while they sat idle in a maintenance depot.

He said that the repair kits were also "backed into maintenance PoPs for security reasons" - namely the amount of money's worth of equipment in the one place.

"[The stockpiles] start to get into lots of money," he said.