NBN Co connects Parliament House with FTTB

NBN Co has brought Parliament House in Canberra onto its network with a fibre-to-the-basement installation.

The network builder said today that it had put an FTTB cabinet in the building’s basement that was fed with a “diverse fibre feed comprising multiple fibre feeds from the NBN access network backbone”.

The architecture was intended to keep parliament online in the event one of the fibre links was disconnected or damaged.

“The other fibre feed will still feed the entire site as required and continue to do so until the damaged or disconnected feed is restored to full service,” NBN Co’s regional deployment manager for ACT/NSW, Neill Warby, said in a blog post.

NBN Co said it was “fitting” that Parliament House had been brought onto the NBN, given the network builder’s existence was in part conceived within parliament’s four walls.

Warby said that installation had taken a number of months to complete, and that the company and its delivery partners had been forced to x-ray everything before they could bring it into the complex.

“It took six hours to x-ray all the NBN supplied equipment and contractors’ tools so it could be built,” Warby said.

Planning for the build “took months,” he said, although the physical portion of work was completed within “a few days”.