Aussie Broadband building to all nbn® POIs

Aussie Broadband has started building backhaul to all 121 nbn® POIs (Points of Interconnection, or hubs) in Australia.

Presently we serve regional Victoria, South Australia and Northern Territory via our own dedicated backhaul to 14 POIs, with the rest of Australia currently being served through a resale agreement with Optus.

We have entered an agreement with Telstra Wholesale to provide backhaul services from our capital city points of presence to all nbn® POIs, which will give us full control over the bandwidth available and the contention ratios.

It will also mean that we expand our direct relationship with nbn® and don’t need to work through a third party (like Optus) for installation and faults on nbn® tails.

Why are we doing this?

Ultimately we want to be in control of our own destiny, and not rely on third parties to interact with nbn®. Our current “on net” customers rave about our service and we want all of Australia to have the on net experience.

There’s also a gap in the market with a most of the known brands being controlled by four parent companies. The product offerings from those four and their subsidiary brands are all very much the same and are generally “me too” offerings.

Aussie is different – we pride ourselves on having a solid network that provides great service for a reasonable price, products that are unique, and 100% Australian-based staff. We tell it like it is, and our customers appreciate that.

What’s the difference between this and your current Optus agreement?

Currently we use a shared Optus network where they aggregate a number of wholesale customers and haul the traffic back from the 121 POIs to Sydney. They then hand it to us over a couple of links. This method only lets us control the bandwidth into the Optus nbn® network, not to each individual POI. If they are running congestion within their network, we have no way of knowing this or controlling the bandwidth to each POI.

Optus manage the individual customer connections via their nbn® agreement, which means when we need to log a fault, we have to go to Optus and they do it on our behalf.

The services we are buying from Telstra Wholesale are dedicated wavelengths in 1 and 10 Gbit increments which are not shared with any other provider. We then control the bandwidth into nbn®’s network (otherwise known as CVC) and can turn it up and down with a few minutes’ notice. Provided we have the backhaul link in place, we can move the CVC very quickly.

In this model, the individual customer services are on our nbn® agreement, meaning we deal directly with nbn® for provisioning and faults.

This gives us very granular control over all of the links and what capacities we supply.

When’s it happening?

The rollout has been progressing for some time now but is not moving quite as quickly as we would like. Currently we expect to have most areas live between March and July 2017.

I’m on your current off net system, when will I be migrated?

Once we are active in a POI, we will migrate our existing off net customers across. There will be a small amount of down time (around 15 minutes) which we will advise you of closer to the date. There’s no cost to you for the migration. Your IP address will most likely change during the transfer as you’ll be moving to our new purpose built nbn® backhaul network.

Should I delay signing up?

We believe that it’s worth coming to Aussie now as our off net product is still excellent and you’ll get our fantastic Australian-based support team. Once your POI goes live on our on net network, you’ll be the first to move across.

A truly national network

We currently have points of presence in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Darwin and are presently building Perth, Brisbane & Hobart. We peer with all major peering exchanges in each state and are adding domestic and international transit bandwidth into Sydney and Perth to complement our major Melbourne gateways.

This means that once complete, you’ll have the best experience on the nbn® with local routing and optimal paths.

So what’s next?

We’ll shortly be releasing a tool which will allow you to check when your area will become on net and will allow you to register for updates. We also have a couple of other useful tools in the pipeline for customers still waiting for the nbn® to arrive at their premises. The number of available premises on the nbn® network is going to double in size over the next 12 months so it’s going to be huge! We’re really excited to be part of that!