Netflix leaves NBN Co wary about AI network impact

NBN Co has implemented “facets” of an architectural blueprint developed by Cisco that, in part, is intended to help operators scale and monetise their networks for AI-related traffic.

NBN Co's Asif Khan and Cisco's Guru Shenoy.

Executive manager of fixed wireless strategy and architecture Asif Khan told Cisco Live in Melbourne that the national network operator “started with a very simple mandate” back in 2009 that has evolved into playing “a much bigger role”.

“We’re the digital backbone for the country,” he said, adding there is a pressing need to “monetise our investment and lock into the path of AI”.

NBN Co’s planning around AI traffic appears to have been influenced in part by its experiences with Netflix a decade ago.

“When we started, we thought that having a fibre network was going to give us oodles of bandwidth for the next, let's say, 10 years, but [that] myth was burst by Netflix in 2015,” Khan said, adding that the streaming era led to “exponential growth” in traffic volumes, “which we never anticipated."

The company made a belated attempt to find a way to finance the unanticipated traffic increase driven by Netflix, but ultimately abandoned the idea of treating streaming traffic differently from regular traffic after a consultation in 2019.

Still, the saga appears to have changed the company’s approach to future capacity planning – and NBN Co, like carriers globally, is principally concerned with how increasing AI workloads will change the profile of traffic running across its network.

“Right now, there's a lot of talk about AI, and mainly it's in the data centres where a lot of GPU-based modelling is happening,” Khan said.

“We really haven't seen a lot of traffic transfer into the network, but I think [those] days are not far away. It's a matter of time.”

In preparation, NBN Co wants to be able to distinguish between AI and non-AI traffic. It could then offer assurance for the AI traffic, which could cost extra.

This is along the lines of what NBN Co wanted but was unable to do with streaming traffic.

A blueprint for assurance and monetisation

On this, the company has some capability to “make autonomous network decisions” in the transport layer “by looking into two parameters: bandwidth [and] time sensitivity.”

This is possible because, at least for the "fixed wireless component of the National Broadband Network”, Cisco NC540 and NC550 routers and a Cisco Crosswork network controller overlay is used in its architecture, allowing some degree of software-defined networking to be implemented.

But NBN Co is also, to some degree, taking advantage of a more specific solution to the AI traffic problem: in the form of Cisco's ‘agile services networking architecture’, which was released at an event in Amsterdam in early 2025.

According to the vendor, the architecture is intended to “provide the blueprint for service providers as they look to enable AI connectivity and monetise assured services.”

On stage at Cisco Live last week, the vendor’s senior vice president, product management, provider connectivity Guru Shenoy, disclosed that NBN Co has adopted the blueprint.

“One thing I didn't really get a chance to talk about is the ability to … have telemetry to be able to identify how much AI versus non-AI traffic is traversing through the network, [to] be able to do assurance around that and so forth,” Shenoy said, speaking to Khan.

“That's also part of our agile services networking architecture blueprint that we put out. And I know we've partnered together on this particular architecture. You've implemented facets of that architecture.”

“I think it's an interesting space to keep a close eye on that,” Khan responded.

Approaching self-healing 

NBN Co has previously declared an interest in self-healing networking and Khan signalled that these capabilities have also progressed significantly.

“We have got an aspiration to get into self-healing networking,” Khan said.

“We have done some proof-of-concepts. We don't have anything yet into the production network, but that's our plan for a year or two from now.”

He indicated that by 2030, the plan is to have automation handling configuration, self-healing and aspects of security.

“I'm pretty sure that is the industry vision [for networking] as well,” he said.

“We can't drive these things by ourselves. We need to have a strong partnership and industry support for that.”