Network managers at Australia’s largest organisations will soon come to a crossroads, with the Australian Government launching enterprise connectivity services that could render many existing enterprise network connections redundant.
NBN Co plans to progressively roll out services for medium-sized businesses from the end of 2013. These services, sold through NBN Co’s ISP partners, will offer a generation of businesses that have relied on ADSL for their connectivity a fibre service that includes QoS (quality of service) control and committed speeds.
From 2014, NBN Co will begin to sell ethernet services direct to large enterprises. These point-to-point fibre connections will attach a company’s network directly to the nearest NBN Co Point of Interconnect and offer the best performance available on the network.
Beyond these improved speeds (up to 1000/400 Gbps for medium business services and in excess of 1 Gbps for enterprise options), adopting NBN services also provides large enterprise an opportunity to standardise on NBN Co’s ethernet interfaces (a single Network Termination Device) and subsequently rip out the switches supporting legacy copper, fibre, SDH, serial, ATM, Frame Relay and ISDN technologies.
Replacing ISDN or ATM services with NBN connections will allow organisations with large branch networks or other geographically-dispersed operations to dramatically reduce the cost of Wide Area Network (WAN) services.
Where an organisation may once have paid a variable cost for ISDN, ATM and other data services, the NBN will offer uniform national pricing across the country.
Complications
While NBN services have the potential to dramatically reduce the price and improve the consistency of telecommunications services across the country, migrating to these services won’t be without its complications.
At a residential level, NBN Co plans to shut down services on the copper network 18 months after fibre is rolled out to a degree that an area is declared “ready for service.”
In the commercial sector, NBN Co will give three years of notice.
This is due to the complexity some organisations face switching copper-reliant services onto the fibre network.
Telcos, for example, will need time to adapt their payphones, transport authorities will need to migrate entire networks of traffic lights, and businesses with dispersed branch offices might need to replace some EFTPOS connections, machine-to-machine communication links or multi-phone-line PABX systems.
Large organisations have for decades relied on Australia’s copper network for a variety of such services, many of which were connected without knowledge of their carrier partner.
Australia has, for example, over one million EFTPOS terminals, 1.25 million security alarms and 33,000 automatic teller machines that all communicate with the outside world via an ‘over-the-top’ connection over the copper network. Typically, messages for these services are sent via a low speed data call or by sending DTMF tones over the network.
Calls on the National Broadband Network will be carried via Voice-over-IP, and while NBN Co expects some services to work flawlessly after migration, there are likely to be some messages that won’t work over this protocol.
