NBN prepares to migrate Telstra special business services

NBN is readying itself to migrate Telstra's special business services off copper and onto its fibre infrastructure, offering a proposed roadmap to the telco for migration.

The roadmap illustrates how business customers on existing symmetric high-speed digital subscriber line (SHDSL) copper broadband connections - used for things like ATM services and ISDN lines - can be migrated.

Telstra's 20 SDHSL services have until now - unlike consumer services - not been allocated a date for switchover to fibre. Telstra and NBN had been working on an appropriate migration strategy.

NBN published the roadmap [pdf] this week, and Telstra has three months to consider the plan.

The network builder has proposed migrating Telstra's Ethernet-Lite and Wholesale Business DSL products first. The services are used for point to point wide area networking products between business sites.

If the roadmap is approved by the telco, Ethernet-Lite and Wholesale BDSL customer connections will be cut over to the NBN Ethernet Bitstream Services (NEBS) equivalents within 36 months.

NBN claims its symmetric NEBS can enable the industry to develop business packages and bundles the same as, or better, than current copper-based equivalents.

The network builder expects installations for NEBS would take between nine and 19 days once a premise has been declared serviceable.

NBN claims to have a 99.0 percent network availability target for NEBS.

Delivered over fibre to the node or basement, NEBS offers 25ms or lower latency, 16ms jitter and a maximum packet loss of 0.04 percent, NBN said.

End users can request migration from their service providers, or the RSP can instigate it.

NBN will provide quarterly roadmap updates with forecast deliveries for other business services, with three further white papers to follow the current one, it said.