NBN built a hut behind the Telstra exchange in Redlands, Queensland after running out of room for equipment inside the main exchange building.
Andrew Sadauskas travelled to Queensland as a guest of NBN.
In a rack inside the hut sits this Alcatel-Lucent 7302 Intelligent Services Access Manager (ISAM) optical line terminal (OLT) switch.
The OLT is used to supply NBN’s fibre-to-the premises brownfield network and some recent fibre-to-the-basement deployments in the area.
NBN chief executive Bill Morrow stands alongside one of NBN’s racks inside the hut at the Redlands exchange.
Pictured: An Alcatel-Lucent 7210 SAS-R access aggregation switch (AAS) with 40 ports.
It is used to supply fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) and micronode services.
The Redland exchange sits on a transit network, with a 10 GB redundant ring.
While fibre links usually have a range of around 10 kms, small form-factor pluggable transceivers (SFP) can extend the range up to 80 kms by throwing more light down a fibre optic cable.
This AAS is connected to this optical distribution frame (ODF), which is used to patch cables into the street.
The yellow fibres are ruggedised and run to cabinets through Telstra ducts. The green fibres run out to the street.
Close-up of the connections inside the optical distribution frame.
Typically, FTTN cabinets are less than 50 metres from the pillars, as is the case in this housing estate. The distance is bridged using new copper.
Inside the FTTN cabinet, which includes four red batteries on the bottom shelf for power back-up.
The estate has around 250 properties, served by a 384-premises capacity cabinet, with each premise within 400 metres of this node.