Martin Kovacs

“We’ve been able to achieve significantly greater coverage both in terms of distance and depth, compared to those offered by existing 2G, 3G and 4G technology,” Vodafone chief technology officer Benoit Hanssen commented.

“Based on our testing in the Melbourne CBD, NB-IoT would be able to penetrate two to three double-brick walls, enabling connectivity of objects in underground carparks and basements.”

Hanssen noted that extended coverage was also achieved during tests in suburban Melbourne, with distances of up to 30 kilometres.

“The benefits of NB-IoT include deeper and further coverage, up to 10 years battery life, increased scalability with up to 100,000 devices per cell and low cost of modem chipsets forecasted at less than $5,” he commented.

Amid the development of 5G tech, Hanssen stated that “there is still plenty of mileage left in 4G”, including NB-IoT.

Vodafone executive general manager of enterprise business Stuart Kelly noted that “the opportunities NB-IoT will bring are endless”, with industries such as the automotive, agricultural, health and utilities industries in line to take advantage of its potential.

“The types of products we could see utilising this technology are gas and water metering, smart bins, alarms and detectors, and parking monitoring,” Kelly commented.

“Optus Cloud-N is a white-label solution and allows partners to rebrand the SDN service as their own and resell it using their retail rates,” John Castro, Optus Wholesale head of marketing and strategy, commented. “The portal can be accessed from any device via the internet.

“The service combines our 100 Gbps network capability together with the investments Optus has made in data centre infrastructure and is in response to customers asking for pay-as-you-go services.”

Optus states that Cloud-N provides flexibility through different grades of service in hourly increments, such as the ability to ramp up services during peak periods, then scaling back during off-peak periods.

“This flexibility and security is all about supporting private, public and hybrid cloud service connectivity and enablement, delivering improved economics because customers are only using what they need, when they need it,” Castro stated.

Employing SDN architecture, Castro stated Cloud-N “provides service agility to launch and turn down services more rapidly and efficiently than supported on traditional networks”.

“Optus Cloud-N users can now turn the service up and down as required,” he commented.

“NBN is also working to deliver high-speed broadband to Australia up to eight years sooner and for $20 billion less of taxpayers’ money than if we had continued down the path of a predominantly all-fibre network,” Brown wrote.

“And yet in some circles there remains scepticism about the ability of fibre-to-the node (FTTN) in particular to deliver on that promise.”

Yesterday, Shadow Minister for Communications Jason Clare told attendees at the CommsDay Melbourne congress that the NBN’s FTTN technology “will be gone”, with it being a question of when not if it will happen.

“Decades from now I am sure we will look back and wonder what this debate about fibre and copper was all about,” Clare commented.

“And that’s because the network we will be using will be essentially a fibre network. Fibre-to-the-node will be gone. It’s not a question of if this will happen. It’s when it will happen and how it will be done.”

While Labor had envisaged 93 per cent of Australian premises being connected via fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), the current version of the NBN has 20 per cent of premises connected via FTTP, 38 per cent via FTTN or fibre-to-the-basement, and 34 per cent via hybrid-fibre coaxial.

“I have been talking to some contractors in the field recently to get a feel for how good the copper network is, and how much of it needs work or needs to be replaced,” Clare stated. “They have told me that NBN’s working assumption is that 10 per cent of copper pairs in fibre-to-the-node areas will need remediation.

“But in places like Newcastle and the Central Coast, closer to 90 per cent of the copper pairs have needed work. In some places the copper is so bad it has to be replaced. Replacing old copper … with new copper.

“One contractor told me in Newcastle and the Central Coast 10 to 15 per cent of the copper lines are having lengths replaced. And this is not just happening in Newcastle or the Central Coast – another contractor told me in Campbelltown in Sydney that NBN has had to recently replace almost 3 kilometres of old copper with new copper.”

Brown, however, wrote that arguments about the performance of FTTN often boil down to “anecdotal evidence about the state of the existing copper lines in the street”, with much of this evidence “misleading or just plain wrong”.

“The reality is that even in our FTTN deployment we are already replacing the majority of copper running from the exchange to end-user premises,” he wrote. “Yet the copper that runs from the street cabinet to the home is being left in place.

“So far, in our FTTN deployment we have not had to replace any copper – or perform any substantial remediation work – to the copper running from our street cabinets to end-user premises with new fibre.

“All we have had to do so far is very basic work in removing bridge-taps – basically redundant copper lines – in order to optimise network performance.”

Brown added that having to carry out very little remediation work “is the beauty of the technology”.

“To date, we have not had to replace substantial lengths of existing copper with new copper, what we have been doing is necessary work compressing copper at the street pillars (located next to our street cabinets) in order to enhance network performance,” he wrote, adding that “conducting this type of work does not constitute ‘replacing the copper'”.

“We know that customers love data, with around 14,000 terabytes used on the Vodafone mobile network each month, and their appetite for fast data is continuing to grow,” Berroeta stated. “The NBN will allow us to deliver more data to our customers.

“Not only are Australians consuming more and more data, they are increasingly using mobile and fixed broadband interchangeably.

“Consumers are converged, but the telco market isn’t and we want to change this. Customers want seamless connection, easy-to-understand plans and reliable service – and that’s the proposition we’ll be bringing to Australia.”

Berroeta described the move as “a natural progression” for Vodafone’s business, noting that with the NBN rollout gaining momentum “there is strong consumer demand for continuous connectivity”.

He also noted customer demand for “Vodafone to offer home and office fixed broadband as well as mobile”.

“Just as we have done for mobile, we see a real opportunity to make a difference in the fixed broadband market by delivering great service and value for customers,” he stated.